Zinke's World View

It’s at this moment that I decide to ask Zinke about his Teddy Roosevelt hero worship. Zinke recounts Roosevelt’s conservation vision and the political brinkmanship required to bring 165 million acres of land under federal management at the beginning of the last century. Then he cites Roosevelt’s celebrated visit to the godfather of American conservation, John Muir, out in California’s Yosemite Valley, years before it was designated as a national park. Historians have called this meeting “the camping trip that changed America,” because Roosevelt came away with a blueprint for preserving America’s most remarkable landscapes as national parks and monuments. Zinke tells me that the mule-pack trip that Roosevelt and Muir shared, to Yosemite’s Glacier Point promontory, couldn’t be replicated today “because of all the dead and dying trees in the way.” [Fact check: you can still follow much of their trail to Glacier Point and Bridalveil Falls.]Then Zinke says that the thing he admires most about Roosevelt was his appointment of Gifford Pinchot to be the first chief forester of the United States.“I’m a staunch supporter of Gifford Pinchot,” Zinke says. “He understood that motto [which is engraved on the entrance arch of our first national park: Yellowstone]: For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People. He believed in active management of our public lands, lands that weren’t to be locked up or reserved just for viewing. These were lands that were intended to be used.”It occurs to me that Zinke is defining himself as much as he is describing Pinchot. Nearly everything we discuss over the course of our day together—Department of Interior reorganization, Zinke’s recommendations on reducing the scope of certain national monuments, his eagerness to upend collaborative conservation planning, even his enthusiasm for energy development as the foremost of the many multiple uses of federal land—comes back to this view of his role as that of an activist manager, that our public lands are to be used as economic engines to produce tangible resources, and not, as he puts it, “to be looked at as museum pieces.”“The worst thing that we can do,” Zinke told me three times over the course of the day, “is to do nothing.”When I ask Zinke about all the hunting, fishing, camping, and hiking that takes place on federal lands, including national monuments, and whether he considers these to be “do-nothing” activities, he says they share equal footing with other uses, including industrial development. “I’m a multiple-use guy, and that means trying to balance all activities on federal land equally when we can.”

A wide-ranging interview which can be read here.