Mother Jones gives an update on the state of the Republican-led, Ryan Zinke-implemented assault on the American wilderness, and specifically on the obsession with making sure a certain brand of thrill-seekers can go around murdering bears and wolves with impunity because screw it, that's why.
“Some component of the population here derives great ego gratification out of killing wolves and bears,” says Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska professor and board member at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group. “There is this strong undercurrent of an anti-predator cult—almost a pathology—here in Alaska.”
I'll leave the extended discussion as to how shooting predators from helicopters or killing bear sows in their dens could be considered either (cough) masculine or pitting oneself against nature for others, but regardless of that, Zinke is fairly obsessed with making sure America's "nature lovers" get to kill nature's most wall-worthy predators.
This may or may not have to do with Zinke's own taste in interior decorating—a stuffed grizzly in his office menaces threateningly, when in fact the bear was almost certainly killed before it even laid eyes on its rifle-sporting killer—or with Uday and Qusay Trump's own fascination with killing elephants and anything else that they can cut trophies from. In any event, Zinke is very invested in the trophy hunting racket, and willing to turn his department into an extended comedy sketch if that's what it takes to roll back past government restrictions on such things. The Republican approach appears to be "well, we're pretty sure we're going to be the last American generation anyway, so might as well do all the killing and mining and looting now."
After he refused to engage in a single meeting with the scientists and ex-lawmakers on his National Park System Advisory Board, 10 of 12 members resigned. As Mother Jones reported in March, in their absence, Zinke convened an “International Wildlife Conservation Council,” composed of gun industry representatives, a former beauty queen, and a safari hunting enthusiast who hosts a reality-TV show. “It’s really embarrassing,” Masha Kalinina, the international trade policy specialist for the wildlife department at the Humane Society International, told Mother Jones. “I just question the qualifications of each and every one of these people.”
That's the thing about deciding what your policies will be in advance and based on nothing. You don't need experts anymore, once it comes to that; the reality TV safari dude’s camouflaged behind can fill a chair just as well as anyone else’s.
Anyhoo, Zinke's Park Service is expected to formalize the rollback of Obama-era hunting restrictions on another 20 million acres of federal lands next month as Trump's band of avid Republican ideologues do their level best to support the animal extraction industry as robustly as they support the timber and fossil fuel extraction industries. Again, Republicans seem quite certain that they, personally, are going to be the last American generation that needs or wants these things; do they know something we don't?