ryan zinke

When reports surfaced in June that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) might shift the language of its mission statement away from climate and conservation and towards security and the economy, acting head Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet rushed to reassure reporters that the agency’s mission would remain unchanged. But a copy of the presentation […]

By Jillian Mackenzie If you’ve visited the wilderness recently, you may have noticed something: people. People with walking sticks, people with selfie sticks, people with more people in tow. Surging numbers of visitors are hiking, camping, and all-around loving the outdoors. A whopping 330,882,751 of them spent 1.44 billion hours in our national parks in […]

A new Trump administration protocol requires U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists to run interview requests with the Department of the Interior, its parent agency, before speaking to journalists, the Los Angeles Times reported. The move is a departure from past media practices that allowed government scientists to quickly respond to journalists’ inquiries, according to unnamed […]

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has spent his first 15 months opening public lands to oil and gas drilling, has been linked to a development project with Halliburton chairman David Lesar, POLITICO reported Tuesday. Lesar is backing a real estate development in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana and receiving help from a foundation started by […]

By Jonathan Buonocore New plans to build two commercial offshore wind farms near the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts have sparked a lot of discussion about the vast potential of this previously untapped source of electricity. But as an environmental health and climate researcher, I’m intrigued by how this gust of offshore wind power may […]

The National Parks Service (NPS) quietly released a long-delayed report that mentions humanity’s role in climate change, which officials had removed in earlier drafts. The report, published Friday without a press release or any social media activity from the parks department or Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, shows estimates of sea level change for 118 coastal […]

The Trump administration has proposed new regulations to overturn an Obama-era rule that protects iconic predators in Alaska’s national preserves. Wildlife protection organizations condemned the move, as it would allow hunters to go to den sites to shoot wolf pups and bear cubs, lure and kill bears over bait, hunt bears with dogs and use […]

By Derrick Z. Jackson If fish could wail, they would scream over the lethal powers granted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in part of the draft farm bill recently rolled out by the House Agriculture Committee. The bill, passed out of committee by Chairman Mike Conaway (R-TX) on a party-line vote last month, […]