Climate: Trump’s Forest Service pick has battled with the agency
Trump's pick to run the Forest Service has a history with the agencyThe Forest Service is an agency with a big purview: It manages almost 200 million acres of public lands across the United States, including maintaining trails, coordinating wildfire response and overseeing the sale of timber and other resources. For an article published Tuesday, I looked into the background of Michael Boren, President Trump's nominee to head the service, who is the founder of a billion-dollar tech company. He is an unusual choice. He was accused of flying a helicopter dangerously close to a crew building a Forest Service trail, prompting officials to seek a restraining order. He got a caution from the Forest Service, and criticism from his neighbors, when he built a private airstrip on his Hell Roaring Ranch in a national recreation area in Idaho. And in the fall, the Forest Service sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing a company that Boren controlled of building an unauthorized cabin on National Forest land. Now, Boren is in line to oversee the very agency he has tussled with repeatedly, and at a tumultuous time. In April, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, issued an order removing environmental protections from almost 60 percent of national forests, or more than 112 million acres, mostly in the West. That came after Trump issued an executive order to increase logging on those lands by 25 percent. The Forest Service has also fired thousands of workers as part of Trump's drive to shrink the federal government. "There's a pattern of behavior here of conflict with the Forest Service," Josh Johnson, Central Idaho director of the Idaho Conservation League, told me. "It's very concerning." Boren's confirmation hearing is set to start at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Read more of my article about Boren and his run-ins with the agency he is nominated to lead.
Q&A What the climate movement can learn from the music businessNineteen years after the release of "An Inconvenient Truth" thrust the issue of global warming to the center of the American cultural conversation, efforts to address climate change have yet to secure lasting mainstream attention. A recent poll from the Pew Research Center found that just 41 percent of Americans regarded climate change as a very big problem, placing it 17th among major issues facing the country. Adam Met, a member of the pop band AJR, wants to change that by making climate action more like music fandom. He has used his tour to raise awareness about climate change, encourage fans to take action at the local level and promote Planet Reimagined, his nonprofit organization that is working on climate policy issues. (Met and I spoke last year about his unusual route to climate activism.) In his new book, "Amplify," which was released this week, Met is trying to apply the lessons he's learned about building community and engaging fans in the music business to social causes like the climate movement. I spoke with Met about his new book and what needs to happen for climate action to go mainstream. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Why is it that the climate movement has had such a hard time breaking through and sustaining momentum? The phrase climate change has so much attached to it. It's too big, too existential. What does 1.5 degrees mean? How does it impact us personally? When I was volunteering for the Harris campaign and I was out there talking about climate change, people's eyes glazed over. But when I talked about jobs and the economy, they were engaged. We need to be moving away from using the phrase climate change. But you can only dance around it for so long. At the end of the day, what you're talking about is reducing emissions, right? You just have to take it step-by-step through the argument and show how it impacts people's daily lives, and how they can benefit from a solution. Take the methane in natural gas, which is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and contributing to extreme warming. There's a really high potential for a solution by plugging methane leaks in natural gas pipelines, and that can help reduce the impact of these massive weather-related events. That's the kind of specificity that I think it takes. The climate movement has been having a hard couple months since Trump was re-elected. The climate movement is an absolute mess right now. Leaderless and rudderless. What should the climate movement learn from the music business? In the climate movement many people are either angry or frustrated or upset, and they're marching in a protest or sitting at a gala eating pretty terrible food. Those are the two spaces where the climate movement tends to convene. But what about the kinds of spaces that the music industry is great at building? The places where people have fun where they can build energy and build community. What we've done on our tour and what I'm doing on this book tour is building spaces where people can get together, kind of relax, but also take part in the kind of advocacy that requires this collective effervescence that I talk about in the book. This energy of people coming together with the same purpose and the same goals in order to build a more effective climate movement. So the live space is one that I think we can learn a lot from the music industry. The idea of a fan base is something that we can't let go of. What does that look like in practice? In the book, I talk about the difference between the ladder approach and the hurricane approach. In the climate movement, we try and move people up this ladder of engagement. This worked 20 years ago. It doesn't work anymore. We need a new model. And this model looks like a hurricane, where you bring people in really close to the center of the movement, educate them, give them the tools, inspire them, and then send them out into the world to become evangelizers for other people to get engaged. It's not asking people to measure their carbon footprint. It's giving people the tools to get other people excited. And that's what we did with our touring. We started playing in venues for three people, and then 20 people, and then 500 people. Then last year we sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden. — David Gelles CLIMATE SCIENCE The White House gutted science funding. Now it wants to 'correct' research.Who could argue with setting a "gold standard" for science? Actually, thousands of scientists from around the country. President Trump has ordered what he called a restoration of a "gold standard science" across federal agencies and national laboratories. But the May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to "correct scientific information," control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to "discipline" anyone who violates the way the administration views science. It has prompted an open letter, signed by more than 6,000 scientists, academics, physicians, researchers and others, saying the order would destroy scientific independence. — Somini Sengupta More climate news from around the web:
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