Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is returning to Idaho for the fourth time since President Barack Obama picked her to be the nation’s public landlord in March 2013.
The former REI CEO will talk about wildfires, the same issue she came to talk about the last three times. That’s not surprising since Boise is the home of the National Interagency Fire Center, the nerve center for fighting fires.
But Jewell’s last trip and this trip will focus on fire and sage grouse. The 2-foot-tall bird has become a major chore for the former oil and gas drilling engineer, who had been an active member of the environmental community before she went to Washington, D.C. But the potential listing of the grouse as a threatened species — the symbol of the health of the West’s sagebrush ecosystem — has forced Jewell to spend a lot more time on the issue than she expected when she was appointed..
The sagebrush sea, once 290 million acres, has been cut in half over the past century, and in the Great Basin that includes Idaho, Oregon, Nevada and Utah, fire has been the final destroyer of much of that desert land. Jewell heard it from her biologists, ecologists and range managers, and from governors such as Idaho’s Butch Otter. Getting an entire bureaucracy of firefighting agencies, land managers
and wildlife biologists all moving the same direction is not easy.
Climate change has increased fire intensity and spread for at least the
past 20 years. But only now is the fire threat to the sagebrush sea
rising to a place of prominence in the national discussion. It had been
largely ignored, as were the birds by some of these same agencies only a
decade ago...more
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