#Interior Department

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 21, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 22, 2024

During her confirmation hearings in 2021, Interior Department secretary Deb Haaland promised “to responsibly manage our natural resources to protect them for future generations—so that we can continue to work, live, hunt, fish, and pray among them.” Noting her Indigenous heritage, Haaland tweeted, “A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior…. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

Her approach was a shift from the practice the Interior Department had established at the beginning of the twentieth century when it began to prioritize mineral, oil, and gas development, as well as livestock grazing, on U.S. public lands. But the devastating effects of climate change have brought those old priorities into question. 

Republicans, especially those from states like Wyoming, which collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, opposed Haaland’s focus on responsible management of natural resources for the future  and warned that the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”

On Thursday, April 18, the Interior Department finalized a new rule for a balanced management of America’s public lands. Put together after a public hearing period that saw more than 200,000 comments from states, individuals, Tribal and local governments, industry groups, and advocacy organizations, the new rule prioritizes the health of the lands and waters the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management oversees. Those consist of about 245 million acres, primarily in 12 western states.

The new rule calls for protection of the land, restoration of the places that have been harmed in the past, and a promise to make informed decisions about future use based on “science, data, and Indigenous knowledge.” It “recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands.” The Bureau of Land Management will now auction off leases not only for drilling, but also for conservation and restoration. 

Western state leaders oppose the Biden administration’s efforts to change the Interior Department’s past practices, calling them “colonial forces of national environmental groups who are pushing an agenda” onto states like Wyoming. 

The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.

The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries. 

Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."  

As scientists organized the Environmental Defense Fund, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial events. First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color photograph of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live. 

Then, over 10 days in January and February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.” 

And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.

In February 1970, President Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War toward efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.

In July 1970, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created that December. 

In honor of Earth Day 2024, Democratic president Joe Biden has called for carrying on the legacy of our predecessors “by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous nation.” 

In a statement, Biden noted that no one can any longer deny the impacts and staggering costs of climate change as the nation confronts historic floods, droughts, and hurricanes. 

“Deforestation, nature loss, toxic chemicals, and plastic pollution also continue to threaten our air, lands, and waters, endangering our health, other species, and ecosystems,” he said. He noted the administration’s efforts to build a clean energy economy, providing well-paid union jobs as workers install solar panels, service wind turbines, cap old oil wells, manufacture electric vehicles, and so on, while also curbing air pollution from power plants and lead poisoning from old pipes, the burden of which historically has fallen on marginalized communities.

Biden noted that he brought the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Accord Trump pulled out of, is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any president before him, and has worked with the international community to slash methane emissions and restore lost forests.

And yet there is much more to be done, he said. He encouraged “all Americans to reflect on the need to protect our precious planet; to heed the call to combat our climate and biodiversity crises while growing the economy; and to keep working for a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all.”

Happy Earth Day 2024.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #earth day #history #Letters From An American #Conservation #natural resources #Interior Department #Silent Spring #Rachel Carson

[savedfromsalvation]

Been waiting for a report on this, ever since the Canadian boarding schools were exposed. The article keeps talking about “Federal Boarding Schools” but doesn’t mention any religious affiliated boarding schools tho. Laz

#deb haaland #interior department #american indian #native children #boarding schools

[arthropooda]

ANCHORAGE, AK — The Biden administration today announced its approval of ConocoPhillips’s Willow project, ignoring pleas from millions who called for the Alaska oil-drilling plan to be halted due to concerns about climate change. The Interior Department released a record of decision (ROD) that largely reflects ConocoPhillips’s desired project blueprint and ignores its dire climate and biodiversity impacts. Approval of the Willow project stands in stark contrast to President Biden’s climate goals and commitment to the Paris agreement.

Interior’s decision approves three drilling pads, which combined will produce 92% of the oil ConocoPhillips initially sought to develop, a staggering climate impact amounting to more than 260 million metric tons of greenhouse gases (GHG). The GHG emissions from Willow will equal that of 56 million cars driven for one year, or nearly 70 coal fired power plants operating for one year. This project is also intended to be a stepping-stone for future development.

#Earthjustice #Biden administration #Conocophillips #Willow oil #Alaska #Climate change #Project #Willow oil project #Willow #@abbiedillen #Climate #Anchorage #Interior department #Rod #President biden #Paris agreement #Ghg #Development

[litdigitalart]

#department of the interior #interior department

[zegalba]

Tom Dale: Department of the Interior (2014)

#Tom Dale #Department of the Interior #art #sculpture #inflatable #black #2014

[sustainableprosperity2]

#deb haaland #interior department

[reportwire]

Watchdog Finds Trump Interior Boss Ryan Zinke Lied To Investigators — Again

Watchdog Finds Trump Interior Boss Ryan Zinke Lied To Investigators — Again

Former Interior Secretary and current GOP congressional candidate Ryan Zinke and his then-chief of staff lied repeatedly to investigators about their attempt to quash a tribal casino in Connecticut, the Interior Department’s internal watchdog concluded in a report released Wednesday. The report from the Office of Inspector General offers the most damning evidence in long-running allegations that…

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#2022 Elections #gaming #interior department #Ryan Zinke

[kp777]

#native americans #deb haaland #interior department #united states senate committee on indian affairs #indian boarding schools

[manila-automat]

Stores of the Year 6 (1991) Martin M. Pegler Lerner New York Space Design International, Cincinnati, OH

#Stores of the Year 6 #Martin M. Pegler #1991 #store interior #interior design #mall #retail design #department store #90s interior #90s design #retro #vintage #90s store

[penginlord]

Concept: the Mystery Flesh Pit existing in the SCP universe, yet it doesn't fall under SCP jurisdiction because it was originally sold to the National Parks Service, and despite the Mystery Flesh Pit since being shut down due to the incidents, the National Parks Service refuses to hand over jurisdiction to SCP because it's their mess to deal with and contain.

They allow SCP scientists to visit and share information, of course.

#SCP #scp foundation #mystery flesh pit #like #there are a select few government agencies that SCP fucks with #the department of interior #national parks service #IRS #department of energy #i Just like the idea that SCP is lowkey afraid of the National Parks Service

[savedfromsalvation]

This is all well and good, but when will they start investigating the wrongful deaths of Native children at these prison schools?

#native americans #deb haaland #interior department #united states senate committee on indian affairs #indian boarding schools

[wdr2-rlbmut]

Back in 1980, legendary actor Vincent Price recorded several 30-second television announcements in a bid by the Albuquerque Museum to gain more visitors and members. In an interview with the Albuquerque Journal at the time, Price said, “I am crazy about New Mexico. If I had lots of money, I would like to have a house like Georgia O'Keeffe's here.” Price served on the Arts and Crafts Board of the Interior Department and had a doctorate from the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Digging through our archives, we uncovered this fabulous promo video promoting the Albuquerque Museum Foundation—a non-profit that raises funds for the Albuquerque Museum. You can learn more about us, and as the King of Horror suggests, support us!

#1980 #new mexico #vincent price #television #Albuquerque Museum #Albuquerque Journal #Arts and Crafts Board #the Interior Department #Albuquerque Museum Foundation #non-profit #promo video #archives #King of Horror #Youtube

[lifeinpoetry]

I wish

I told you the truth more.

— Mikko Harvey, from "Department of the Interior," Let the World Have You

#quote #mikko harvey #poetry #let the world have you #out of my collection #department of the interior

[leroibobo]

ezekiel's tomb in al kifl, iraq is believed by jews and muslims to house the body of the biblical prophet ezekiel, with shi'ites specifically believing the site has its roots on a shrine built by the prophet abraham. the tomb itself was built in the 7th century. today, it's a part of the al-nukhailah mosque complex, built by ilkhanate ruler abu sa'id bahadur khan in the 14th century.

until the mid-20th century, thousands of iraqi jews used to make pilgrimage to the tomb on passover. the rule of saddam hussein saw many of the jewish inscriptions covered in white paint or removed, but they've since been restored.

#iraq #architecture #interior #worship #jewish #mizrahi #muslim #shared space #my posts #there was recently a scammer in iraq who ''found'' a fake jewish text of some sort (which was found to be fake later) #and the iraqi government called the very obvious hebrew letters ''aramaic inscriptions'' #aramaic can be written in hebrew letters (especially judeo-aramaic) but thats very much not what they were implying lmao #especially considering the jewish community in that area wasn't one of the ones using judeo-aramaic #i mean the alternative to this was the iraqi kurdish govt faking having a jewish guy in a fake ''department of jewish affairs''

[scavengedluxury]

Mágnes department store electrical department, Eger, 1982. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

#eger #hungary #department store #interiors #1980s

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Shades of Blue by Isaac Borrego Via Flickr: Desert View, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona United States of America

#Desert View #Grand Canyon National Park #Arizona #grand canyon #national park #canyon #desert #united states #america #usa #national parks #national park system #nps #find your park #department of interior #public lands #geology #field work #geosciences #layers #layering #national park service #flickr