A couple of weeks ago we all took a breath as Donald “Bannon’s puppet” Trump announced that former governor of Georgia Sonny Perdue was the regime’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture. The fact that Trump hadn’t nominated a gas tank with a lit match made us all feel like there was an outside (very far outside) chance that this guy wasn’t “as bad” as the rest of the Trump administration’s picks.
Perdue comes from Georgia, one of the country's biggest timber states, at the heart of a region that cuts and sells more wood than any other on the planet—the "wood basket" of the world. A woodland owner himself, Perdue has questioned the link between extreme weather and climate change, has taken campaign funding from the timber industry and has been a booster of converting wood to ethanol, with potential climate consequences.
That, conservationists say, could spell a worsening situation for the 193 million acres under the control of the U.S. Forest Service, which is within the Department of Agriculture. Those woodlands provide habitat for wildlife, purify drinking water for millions of people and absorb carbon dioxide, keeping it from warming the atmosphere. That gives the forests a critical role in addressing climate change.
As Inside Climate News points out, if Perdue were to become the Agricultural secretary, one of his first important jobs would be to choose a deputy undersecretary for natural resources and environment. The undersecretary is the point on the top of the Forest Services oversight pyramid. Considering that Perdue’s tenure as Georgia’s governor was topped off with a scandal involving dubious land-dealings, we shouldn’t be surprised if the next deputy undersecretary walks into the job with one mission in mind—make taxpayers give money to corporations for land that we already own.