Ron DeSantis, a candidate for president, on eradicating "woke" policies and suppressing educational curricula that acknowledge America's complicated racial history. His approach finds an echo in the fixation by right-wing Republicans such as Florida Gov. Now he's attacking the Endangered Species ActĪs he acknowledged in his 1985 memoir, "The Courage of a Conservative," his concern was that musical acts such as the Beach Boys, who had appeared at previous Mall events, attracted drug and alcohol use - the "wrong element," he said at the time of the ban. Read more: Column: This Trump official used to be a farm industry lobbyist. He ordered the National Parks Service to see that future Fourth of July celebrations "point to the glories of America in a patriotic and inspirational way that will attract the family." Nor was he shy about promoting a narrow view of American culture and history, as in 1982, when he banned musical acts from Fourth of July celebrations on the National Mall in Washington, which came under Interior's jurisdiction. ![]() Asked at a House committee hearing in 1981 to give his view of his agency's statutory responsibility to act as a steward of natural resources for future generations, he replied, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Watt came to office flaunting a born-again religious persona that he often exploited to justify treating political and environmental opponents with contempt, prefiguring the rise of the evangelical right wing in American politics. (Reagan, remember, was governor of California at the time of the oil spill.)Įven the oil and gas industry was displeased, since expanding production on the scale Watt envisioned would drive prices down. The sheer audacity of the proposal stunned environmental organizations and coastal state governors, coming as it did when the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill was still very fresh in the public memory Congress had responded to the disaster by mandating that Interior "take more account of environmental factors in granting leases," according to a 1990 legal analysis of Watt's tenure. In 1982, he proposed to lease the entire outer continental shelf of 1 billion acres to oil and gas drillers. Watt also should be remembered for his malign approach to California's environmental concerns, particularly those related to offshore oil drilling. His approach to congressional oversight, moreover, presaged the arrogance of successors such as Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, Trump's Interior secretaries. That's important, because much of what he attempted to do under Reagan became orthodoxy under subsequent Republican presidents. What they missed, however, is his legacy as a Republican ideologue on environmental policy. They focused on his actions while in office from 1981 to 1983. ![]() Do we have to buy enough land so that you can go backpacking and never see anyone else? My concept of stewardship is to invest in it.
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