BANGOR DAILY NEWS • December 18, 2020
President-elect Joe Biden made history this week by nominating Rep. Deb Haaland, a Native American from New Mexico, to head the Department of the Interior. She will preside over a sprawling agency that manages one-fifth of America’s land mass, leases public lands and waters for oil and gas and mining, oversees our national parks and Wildlife refuges, and houses the scientific expertise at the U.S. Geological Survey. She’ll have a lot to clean up at Interior. Her predecessors, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, have done their best to hand the keys of our public lands over to oil, gas, and mining interests. They marginalized scientists and experts, cut the American public out of decision making, and presided over the largest reduction in public lands protection in U.S. history. ~ Joel Clement, Wayne, former DOI climate policy expert, senior fellow at Union of Concerned Scientists