For anyone who cares deeply about America’s wildlife, wild places and the future of our climate, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has been a disappointment.
Despite a quickly warming climate, she’s opening vast tracts of public lands and ocean to dirty fossil fuel development—places like Utah’s iconic canyon country, Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, and the Atlantic Coast, which has been off-limits for three decades. She’s also promised to open millions more acres of public lands for drilling and mining and just released new rules for fracking that are riddled with loopholes for polluting companies.
Jewell’s Department of the Interior has also proposed to end Endangered Species Act protection from nearly all wolves in the lower 48, abandoning the recovery effort long before scientists recommend. Thus far, Interior has also blessed inadequate management plans to save the greater sage grouse, despite the recommendations of its own scientists. When push comes to shove, our public lands – and the endangered wildlife they’re home to – lose out, time and time again. All to curry favor with big oil, mining, livestock, timber and multinational corporations.
It’s hardly the record of an Interior secretary who should want to be remembered for protecting America’s most iconic places and species. Much less of a civic leader trying to keep us from climate disaster.
Jewell’s final chapter at Interior, though, has yet to be written. She can begin righting her legacy and our public lands future with four crucial steps...
Spivak is public lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
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