President Donald Trump and Interior secretary Doug Burgum are visiting Medora, North Dakota today for the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
The Dakota Resource Council hosted a press conference Tuesday with conservation advocates who described Trump and Burgum’s actions on public lands as a dishonoring of Roosevelt’s legacy. “A painfully stark contrast exists between why Teddy envisioned the need for and created a public lands legacy for our country and how Secretary Burgum has publicly stated multiple times that he views these national treasures as America’s balance sheet to exploit and sell,” said Dave Brandt, a representative of the North Dakota Wildlife Federation.
Valerie Naylor, a former superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park also joined the call and pointed out that during her tenure the park usually had 31 permanent employees. Now there are 23. “Theodore Roosevelt said there can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” said Naylor.
Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss said during the call, “Donald Trump and Doug Burgum are going to cut the ribbon on a library honoring America’s first true conservation president, but Doug Burgum’s own record reads like a checklist assault on everything that Teddy Roosevelt built.”
In protest of the event, the North Dakota Public Lands Coalition plans to circle the new library with a mobile billboard that says, “Teddy Roosevelt built it. Secretary Burgum sold it.”
The Wilderness Society president Tracy Stone-Manning on the future of public lands
On the latest episode of The Landscape podcast, Aaron talks with Tracy Stone-Manning, president of The Wilderness Society, former director of the Bureau of Land Management, and three-time guest on The Landscape, about how to rebuild federal land agencies after years of political disruption and why the current moment may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink public lands law from the ground up. They discuss the Forest Service reorganization, the lessons Tracy learned rebuilding BLM after the first Trump administration’s failed relocation, the new Ground Shift initiative, and why aging laws like the 1872 Mining Act are long overdue for an overhaul.
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Quote of the day
Teddy Roosevelt is the one who ended the Gilded Age, using his power to protect public lands and stop the exploitation of America’s natural resources. Donald Trump and Doug Burgum are using their power to do the opposite. They have taken every step imaginable to hand our public lands over to the industrialists who want to exploit America’s natural resources for private profit.”
—Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, North Dakota Monitor
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