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Senator Ken Salazar, the Colorado Democrat who is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of the interior, will inherit a department riddled with incompetence and corruption, captive to industries it is supposed to regulate and far more interested in exploiting public resources than conserving them. No cabinet post is as critical to the integrity of the nation’s parks, its open spaces and its animal species. Mr. Obama, and his environmental adviser in chief, Carol Browner, must be prepared to offer Mr. Salazar full support, especially in fending off the ranchers and the oil, gas, mining and other special interests who have always found the Interior Department to be a soft target, never more so than in the Bush administration. Mr. Salazar’s most urgent task will be to remove the influence of politics and ideology from decisions that are best left to science. Mr. Salazar’s second big task will be to achieve a rational balance between the department’s oil and gas leasing program and its obligation to protect environmentally sensitive lands and the wildlife that depend on them. Reconciling energy and environmental demands has never been easy, but some interior secretaries — notably Bruce Babbitt, who served under President Bill Clinton — have proceeded with greater care than others. The third big task will be to deal with departmental corruption, some of it extending back many years....
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