Ryan Zinke Is Trump's Attack Dog on the Environment

Elliot D. Woods

Early in his political career, the interior secretary irked fellow Republicans with his willingness to stand up for conservation. Things have changed, and whether you love or hate his ideas, know this: he’s one of the few Trump-era cabinet secretaries with the juice to make things happen, and he’s got the boss’s back.

...The National Rifle Association loves Zinke. Chris Cox, the executive director of the group’s Institute for Legislative Action, has said that Zinke’s nomination marked “the end of a hostile era towards hunters and sportsmen.” But it wasn’t always so. As a state senator, freshly retired from the Navy, Zinke said that .50-caliber rifles were too dangerous for ordinary citizens to own. “He felt very strongly about that then,” Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, wrote on his blog. “Then, about the time he announced his candidacy for the U.S. House, he sent me a card saying he’d changed his position on .50-caliber rifles. Yes, a sudden election season conversion.” Zinke’s moderate-by-Montana-­standards position on guns and a handful of other issues, including climate change, annoyed the right wing of the state’s Republican Party. That Zinke was a fifth-generation native son, had been a starter on the University of Oregon’s football team, and had served two tours in Iraq with the SEALs somehow made things worse: here was a Republican who didn’t need to swagger around Helena behind the wheel of a lifted dualie. Zinke drove a Toyota Prius, which, outside liberal havens like Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena, is the vehicular way of saying “I’m from California, I’m a communist, and I love wolves.” It was this Ryan Zinke who won a seat in the Montana state senate in 2008 and was later elected twice by wide margins to fill Montana’s at-large seat in Congress. And it’s the memory of a more moderate Zinke that has many Montanans, along with conservationists across the West, feeling baffled. Right out of the gate, Zinke signaled not only that he would support the Trump administration’s plan to expand the oil and gas industry’s access to federal public lands, but that he would lead from the front—even when that meant attacking the Antiquities Act, the formidable land-preservation law signed in 1906 by Zinke’s hero, Theodore Roosevelt. At the helm of Interior, Zinke has also been a magnet for controversy in ways that have distracted from his goals as secretary...Zinke’s election to the Montana senate in 2008 was bolstered by a coveted endorsement from Montana Conservation Voters, a nonprofit that surveys candidates on their positions regarding environmental issues. Steve Thompson, a former MCV chairman who worked for the National Parks Conservation Association at the time, was driving near Whitefish in early 2008 when he got a call from Zinke, who introduced himself and said that he was interested in securing MCV’s endorsement. “I said, ‘I’ve seen green Republicans go to Helena before and they get eaten up and spit out, and the next thing you know they’re not green anymore,’ ” Thompson recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a Navy SEAL, nobody pushes me around. I’m a man of my word. I’m not scared of anybody.’ ” Thompson decided that it would be more valuable to have a green-leaning, pro-science senator in the overwhelmingly conservative Republican caucus than yet another green Democrat. “He did get the co­endorsement of MCV, which I advocated for,” Thompson said. “There was a lot of controversy about that.” Once in office, Zinke earned a rating of 54 percent from MCV in his first term, a record-breaking mark for a Republican...more