Interior

Thursday, December 04, 2008

By Brooke Williams

Nearly everyday, we’ve been hearing on the news about a new appointee to President-elect Barack Obama’s staff or cabinet.  It wouldn’t surprise me if by the time you read this, we know who has been selected as the Secretary of Interior. I’ve heard rumors, but as they say, “those who don’t know are talking, and those who do know, aren’t.”  (Today, Raul Grijalva, the Congressman from Arizona, seems to be the leading contender.) This selection has huge implications in the West, and as with those selected to deal with the economy, the new Secretary of the Interior will begin by sifting through the rubble left by the last administration.

I realized that during the past eight years, I’d come to assume that the Department of the Interior’s was so-named because it was responsible for bringing out and selling off all that’s interior to the earth –oil, natural gas, coal. In fact, it was created in 1849 to deal with all issues specific to geographic America—everything and anything occurring within our borders. The Department of Everything Else is the title of the 1989 book written on the Department’s history.

We were living in Moab, Utah in January 2000 when George W. Bush took over as president. Immediately, we sensed change at the local Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Department of Interior. Good people who thought they had been hired there to manage a broad menu of activities occurring on the 22-million-acre chunk of Utah, over which this agency had control, had the option to either quit or become servants to the oil and gas industry that had suddenly become the BLM’s primary ‘customer.’

For eight years, conservation groups have battled the agency over public process, control of wilderness study areas, and illegal exploration and drilling. I heard yesterday that the agency is backpedaling from their belligerent Election Day announcement to lease 400,000 acres for oil and gas development — much of it along the borders of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

Wouldn’t it be great if the new Secretary of Interior was ‘vetted’ not only through the last five years of tax returns, FBI record, or if social security taxes were paid for his or her domestic help, but also on if he or she could identify a dozen species of birds and know five mammals by their tracks and at least six constellations?

What if they were judged by the quality of their stories from the wild, of climbing, skiing, running, or kayaking? Or whether or not they kept track of his/her dreams? What if they were asked to name at least six volumes of a favorite poet or writer that they owned? Or the difference between ‘horns’ and ‘antlers’, ‘pines’ and ‘firs?”  If they knew that they would be required to take a yearly hike into the center of one of America’s last wild places and spend a week, alone, would they still take the job?

More than a test for how familiar and connected our future Secretary of Interior was to the landscapes over which they would have jurisdiction, these questions would measure the depth of access this person would have to that same knowledge that has sustained our species since the beginning, the information we’ve suppressed and ignored, believing that it no longer applied to a culture as sophisticated as ours.  Perhaps a new description of Department of Interior would be to rediscover, protect and disseminate this deep knowledge, knowing that our survival depends on it, as it always has. PJH
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Interior | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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