Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke seems to be developing a habit for infusing politics into his job. Should that be ignored?/ © Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The other day on Traveler's Facebook page a reader took me to task for posting a story about Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's claim that roughly one-third of all Interior Department employees are against him and President Trump.
"The politicization of so many of your posts has become tiresome," he wrote.
As an editorially independent media outlet, I replied, we cover issues pertinent to the Park Service and the National Park System. As such, Secretary Zinke's claim was certainly pertinent to our coverage, in part because of the overall ramifications to the National Park System, and because we have a high readership of National Park Service employees.
Indeed, just about anything this Interior secretary -- or any Interior secretary -- does or says is pertinent to the management and future of the national parks.
Unfortunately, politics do seem to be appearing more and more in the news of the day. They were never absent, but after the presidential campaign -- not just its outcome, but the actual campaign -- the appearance, and interference, of politics shouldn't be surprising.
What should media do? Sit back and ignore the machinations of Washington when they have impact on the country?
The political and policy swing from Secretary Sally Jewell to Secretary Ryan Zinke has been broad and deep and can't be ignored.
Secretary Zinke placed a National Rifle Association official on the National Park Foundation's board of directors, is pushing federal land managers to issue more energy exploration permits more quickly, has called for a downsizing of some national monuments and the opening of others to resource extraction, and supports a significant reduction in both the Interior Department's budget and workforce. Interior also reversed course on previous rulings and took steps to approve a dangerous groundwater mining proposal that threatens Mojave National Preserve, the third-largest national park site in the lower 48 states.
While Secretary Jewell opposed a transmission line running through the James River near Historic Jamestowne and Colonial National Historical Park, Secretary Zinke wanted construction to begin as quickly as possible.
"That said," I continued in my Facebook reply, "we cover many other issues, such as the recent series on bison in the West, the strain of visitors on resources and park staff, the hurricane relief and recovery efforts, the comeback of eastern Hemlocks, photography columns, book reviews, as well as stories on how to enjoy the parks."
The reader came around to see my point of view.
"I jumped too quickly when I saw the post earlier today," he said. "Agreed, it is relevant, but in today's political climate due to this insane NFL issue (both sides are acting like children and fanning the flames), when I read the post about Zinke I thought, 'Oh no, not something else for people to blow up over!' I guess my thought was, yes, it's relevant, but couldn't we just let this one go? But, that would be wrong; it does impact the morale of the NPS employees, which in turn impacts the parks."
Employee morale also might take a hit from Secretary Zinke's travel decisions. Late last week, after news broke that Mr. Zinke charted a plane to fly from Las Vegas to Montana at a cost of $12,375, the Interior secretary referred to the flap as "a little BS over travel." Compared to Tom Price's fancy for government-paid-for flights, said to cost taxpayers north of $400,000, yes, $12,375 is miniscule.
But here's the kicker: Mr. Zinke didn't need to charter the flight. He did, though, rather than fly commercial for roughly $300 so he could stick around Las Vegas to speak at a private professional hockey team affair unrelated to his role overseeing the country's public lands and resources. The team is owned, according to the Center for Western Priorities, by Bill Foley, chairman of Fidelity National Financial, the largest contributor to Mr. Zinke's political career.
At a time when the Trump administration wants to cut the federal government's budget and remove roughly 1,200 Park Service staff, at a time when there's already not enough staff in the parks to protect resources or see that visitors have a great experience, the Interior secretary thinks spending more than $12,000 of taxpayer dollars so he can give a talk to benefit his largest political benefactor passes the smell test. It doesn't, and it isn't likely to help build the morale of Park Service employees.
No Data?
The Trump administration apparently has no response to the curious title page they attached to the water bottle report showing how successful a National Park Service ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in just 23 of the more than 400 units of the park system has been.
The report, obtained by The Washington Post via a Freedom of Information Act request, said the ban prevented upwards of 2 million 16-ounce bottles from entering the waste stream on an annual basis, cut between 73,624-111,743 pounds of PET from landfills, resulted in energy savings of 2,209-3,353 million British thermal units per year, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 93-141 metric tons. It also claimed the data "is presented at a 95 percent confidence."
Last Monday we asked Park Service officials in Washington how there can be a 95 percent confidence level if “the bureau lacked the data necessary to ensure the report’s findings”?
While we were told on Monday that staff was working to answer that question, by Friday night they were unable to provide one.
Hurricane Recovery Funds
Here's a look at some of the funds that have been set up to help National Park Service personnel impacted by this year's hurricanes:
* The National Park Service Employees & Alumni Trust Fund performs disaster relief at the request of the National Park Service to support NPS and partner organization employees with immediate assistance for temporary shelter, food, damage to homes, and essential personal property. It is managed by Eastern National Park, a Park Service cooperating association.
"The National Park Service Employee & Alumni Trust Fund has collected $36,000 and received 65 requests for immediate assistance, mostly from NPS and partner organization employees in Florida and Texas," Eastern National President and CEO Kevin Kissling said Friday via email. "Communications with staff in the Caribbean remain sporadic, thus only a few requests have been submitted from employees in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. As infrastructure repairs progress, we anticipate additional requests will be submitted."
* Friends of Virgin Islands National Park has launched a recovery fund for the island of St. John, home to the national park.
On September 6, 2017 Hurricane Irma passed over St. John as a Category 5 hurricane. The results were devastating. Virgin Islands National Park, along with most of the homes and buildings on the island, were seriously damaged. The flora and the fauna of the island were decimated. It is not the St. John we know and love. We will recover, but it will be a long-haul.
Your support will be critical to the recovery process. Although nature is resilient, as humans we need to eliminate all barriers and obstacles in its way. On St. John, that now means a tremendous amount of clean-up, re-building and re-designing of our habitat. From clearing debris to rebuilding roads, trails and beach access ways.
Donations are being taken here.
* The South Florida National Park Trust is raising funds for Biscayne,Dry Tortugas, and Everglades national parks as well as Big Cypress National Preserve.
Although damage assessments are underway in each of the parks, we still don’t know where our help – and your support – is needed most. We will be working with our partner parks in coming weeks to identify the most urgent needs moving forward.
You can donate at this page.
Comments
tomp2 - Thank you for your reasoned reply. It is beyond me how anyone would give credence to a PEER release after its blatantly bogus report on parks eliminating plastic.
With so many sources of information and "information" available via literally hundreds of electronic media outlets, one might think it would be easier to obtain current knowledge about the world around us. Instead, it is probably more difficult than ever to sort truth from fiction because some of those sources are either careless or deliberately falsify what they publish for one reason or other.
That's why it's vitally important that everyone who seriously cares about any issue that affects the welfare of all of us makes a sincere effort to verify anything they might find in any media. It's sometimes nearly impossible to differentiate between information and "information."
In my experience, sources like CNN and FOX deserve no consideration whatsoever, while others like PEER generally are reasonably accurate -- although the political nature of what they produce will almost always set off a politically partisan windstorm.
It's becoming harder and harder to try to make careful study of almost any subject. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to be a reporter for any news outlet that sincerely tries to report accurately on almost any subject. Fact checking has become a necessary part of trying to understand virtually any issue today no matter the source.
Yet with all that said, it's even more important that we have organizations like PEER that at least make an attempt to keep us informed. Once an issue has been brought to public attention -- instead of swept under someone's rug or hidden in a congressional closet -- we will have at least an opportunity to examine what really or didn't happen. Can you imagine where the entire world would be if there were no reporters out there trying to keep an eye on trump?
Bob Scheiffer (spelling?), a very well respected journalist has a new book out that addresses that subject. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but our librarian pointed it out to me yesterday. Looks interesting and informative.
But, oh Boy! it's probably never been more difficult to try to remain well informed.
Meanwhile, here's an item from a news source I respect, the Salt Lake Tribune: http://www.sltrib.com/news/2017/10/05/interior-chief-dismisses-criticism...
Agreed.
I was just trying to give Kurt an excuse for fleeing the office once in a while!
(This should be under Mike Painter's reply to my earlier post. Don't know why it's hanging out down here...)
ec--
Sorry, I guess I'm beyond you then, because I fundamentally disagree with you about PEER. I sometimes disagree with PEER about interpretation and emphasis, but they both tend to get the core facts right, and usually provide copies of the documents to back up what they write. I find them worth reading and thinking about.
I don't know what "parks eliminatng plastic" issue you are referring to. PEER put out a press release April 5 2016 about bans on sales of disposable water bottles in 22 parks, with numbers for decreases in the parks' waste flows. Is that what you think made PEER unbeleivable? I haven't seen anything from PEER on the recent FOIA release of the NPS study on the effectiveness of the disposable bottle sales ban. I haven't bothered to check PEER's numbers from 18 months ago against those in the recently released NPS report. Are you claiming their numbers were wrong last year? Or are you referring to something else entirely as "blatently bogus"?
In this case, PEER provided copies of Zinke's itinerary, email chains with the Superintendent of CHIS discussing the boat trip and costs, and the Superintendent's after action message to park staff noting Zinke's idea of a working demonstration ranch. I disagree with "commandeered" as too strong of a word summarizing what happened, but clearly the boat trip was adjusted for Zinke's visit: he didn't just hop on the regularly scheduled trip. The documents show roughly $4K of additional costs for fuel & overtime just as PEER stated (I suspect from the email that the funding came from DOI or at least PWR, and didn't come out of the CHIS travel ceiling). $4K is $4K, and would cover a month or 2 of fieldwork in parks for someone like me, who too often has to work with parks remotely on stuff I've never seen. But I don't see $4K as excessive for a party of ~10 plus 2 senior NPS folks*. Management trips out of their offices cost money: management and accountability and oversight are all overhead, but often necessary overhead. [Science to inform management is overhead, too, in terms of not being direct management, but I certainly think it is valuable overhead to support management.] This is a case where I think the money might have been well spent, and the potential benefits were worth the investment. Bringing relatives along on the trip (albeit at no real additional cost) suggests he wasn't quite as hard-core about _learning_ as much as he could about the park and park issues as I would want. If he left CHIS still thinking that a demonstration of grazing & ranching was a great idea, I think he missed a core lesson of CHIS (not everywhere can sustain grazing). [Kate Faulkner would have given Zinke a polite earful explaining the effects of both ranching and introduced mammals on the islands, but she's retired from CHIS chief of natural resources now.] If this trip just lets Zinke see the impact of travel ceilings on park operations, so that if that issue percolates up to his level he'll be fine with keeping budget limits but freeing parks to spend as needed, that will be a huge improvement worth 100 times the $4K. PEER asserts that in the face of belt-tightening for parks and everything else, the belt should have been tightened on Zinke's trip to CHIS, too. I disagree, but PEER may be right, or it may be that PEER's publicity keeps Zinke's future travels from becoming another Fran Mainella fiasco.
* I know two of the NPS staff listed on the boat manifest. They're solid scientists, but not folks you would trot out as spokespeople or science communicators (sorry, guys, but I don't consider myself to be a good spokesmodel, either!). I'd bet they and at least 4 other NPS folks on the boat manifest were simply taking the boat out to do their work on the island for a few days. I'm not going to ask them about the trip, because I don't want to even appear to compromise them.
Yes, and while they said that is what had actually happened in reality those were estimates made prior to the bans being put in place with some extra padding and made up numbers.
"Yes, and while they said that is what had actually happened in reality those were estimates made prior to the bans being put in place with some extra padding and made up numbers. "
Opinion? Or fact?
Some documentation, please.
Fact - It has already been documented on this site in a previous discussion of plastic water bottles. Perhaps Kurt has a search feature that can help locate the thread.
This is part of that thread:
Submitted by SJ on May 24, 2017 - 9:45am.
What do you know about that document, which seems more like PEER's characterization, rather than what NPS actually said? https://www.peer.org/assets/docs/nps/4_5_16_Waste_Reductions_from_%20Bot..., you should look at what was actually in that report to Congress.
And more from that thread:
Submitted by SJ on May 30, 2017 - 11:10am.
https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/foia/upload/NPS-Response-to-Congressional-In...
reply
Submitted by SJ on May 30, 2017 - 1:58pm.
Last post is the link to the NPS report to Congress that ebuck asked for a link to. A read shows that it doesn't say what some (PEER and others) have claimed it does about actual reductions.
Submitted by ecbuck on May 30, 2017 - 2:15pm.
So Kurt, it looks like the NPS didn't lie to Congress, PEER lied to us.