the dharma blog

This man is in charge of setting the direction of our public lands for the next three years.

Kempthorne, a former U.S. Senator who decided to run for governor instead a second term in the Senate, has consistently received a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters—except once, when he soared up to a 6 percent rating, getting one vote correct, something about funding a rocket for the space program that nobody remembers. But he has always received a 100 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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Recently, Kempthorne created quite a stir with Idaho’s contentious wolf-killing plan, and he opposed the Roadless Rule, even sued in an attempt to stop its implementation. He considers the rule a “federal edict,” forgetting that these are public lands belonging to all people in all states, not some people in Idaho.

Kempthorne prides himself as a consensus builder, but a few years ago, an amazing committee of timber companies and environmentalists reached a consensus and hatched a plan to restore grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, but Kempthorne was primarily responsible for influencing Norton to kill it, even though her own scientists in her own agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, favored it.

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As I write this, we have a monstrous “public involvement” effort underway on the proposed removal of the Yellowstone grizzlies from the threatened species list or as it’s called, “delisting.” It’s too early for an exact count, but it looks like more than 150,000 comments, mostly opposing delisting, have poured into the offices of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As I recently predicted in (The Absurdity of “Public Involvement”), the FWS won’t pay much attention to public comments—even those coming from the scientific community—and go ahead and recommend delisting. Now, this already-greased eventuality probably will happen even faster because Kempthorne, soon-to-be the official boss of the FWS, strongly favors delisting, regardless of whether or not the public agrees.

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…[A]s governor, Kempthorne opposed the Roadless Rule [Clinton's parting shot which forbade creating any new roads in National Forests]. Fortunately, perhaps, the Department of the Interior does not include management of the national forests. That’s up to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its sub-agency, the Forest Service, so the Interior Secretary does not directly make decisions governing our national forests. It’s nice to be good, but it’s okay to be lucky.

As governor, Kempthorne has not joined the chorus made up of other governors opposed to the sale of public lands to fund rural schools. The land sale proposal includes both national forests and Bureau of Land Management lands, which will be under Kempthorne’s thumb, so we can expect an even bigger battle to prevent the Bush administration from “conveying” our public lands into private property.