A top researcher into the politics of climate change is calling out President Trump and his MAGA base for abandoning the Republican Party’s past commitment to hunting, fishing and camping. In the process, he claims, he is endangering the natural environment itself.
“Since the rise of the MAGA movement, many Republican elites no longer seem interested in riding horses in the Rockies or fly fishing in the Adirondacks,” writes Dr. Stephen Lezak in The New York Times. Lezak is a researcher into the intersection between climate change and politics at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley.
“Jackson Hole is out. Palm Beach is in,” Lezak writes.
The scholar explains that, prior to President Trump's administration, Democratic and Republican environmentalists agreed on the need to conserve outdoor spaces for recreational purposes like hunting, fishing and camping, forging common ground on an issue where they otherwise disagree (such as on issues like man-made climate change). Lezak specifically cites President Theodore Roosevelt as an example, since Roosevelt was a Republican and is widely regarded as the first president to be an aggressive environmentalist.
“Leaders of several nonpartisan and right-of-center nature conservation groups — the de facto representatives of the nation’s hunters and recreationists — told me they have spent decades building rapport with federal officials who admired the conservation groups in the same way Roosevelt admired Muir,” Lezak writes. “In the past year, those partnerships have mostly eroded.”
Lezak added that many of these same officials are disappointed that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who as North Dakota governor had sympathized with conservationist goals, instead has proved to be a "yes man."
"The few conservative elites who are still fighting to protect cherished trout creeks and bird habitats are outnumbered and outgunned," Lezak concludes. "If this momentum continues and resistance fails for three more years, some of our nation’s unique and sensitive landscapes, from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Bears Ears National Monument, will be even more endangered than they are today."
Since assuming office in his second term, Trump’s anti-environmental policies cost America $35 billion in clean energy projects over a one-year period and ordered an unneeded Michigan coal-fired plant to stay open despite it costing taxpayers more than $100 million.
Speaking with this reporter for Salon last year, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman — who served under a Republican president, George W. Bush — discussed how Trump’s environmental policies are deterring career public servants with whom she worked from doing their jobs.
“Should they trust they will actually be paid or risk getting fired?” Whitman said when explaining their plight. “People who have given their careers to serve the American people are now between a rock and a hard place because an unelected, unappointed, unconfirmed rich man [Tesla CEO Elon Musk] with no security clearance is dismantling the federal government.”