More than three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service have quit out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

The resignation of 10 out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration. In May 2017, Zinke suspended all outside committees while his staff reviewed their composition and work.

In a letter to the secretary on Monday, departing board chairman Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor, wrote that he and eight other members "have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law." All of the signatories, who serve as unpaid volunteers, had terms set to expire in May.,

"We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda," Knowles wrote. "I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success."

On Wednesday, Carolyn "Carrie" Hessler Radelet, the chief executive of Project Concern International, submitted a separate resignation letter. "[F]rom all of the events of this past year I have a profound concern that the mission of stewardship, protection, and advancement of our National Parks has been set aside," wrote Radelet, whose term was not set to expire until 2021. "I hope that future actions of the Department of Interior demonstrate that this is not the case."

In an email earlier this month inquiring about the status of the more than 200 boards that had come under review, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said, "Boards have restarted." She did not provide any further details and did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday.

Some advisory bodies apparently are operating. But others are still frozen because the department has yet to approve their updated charters, as is legally required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Other panels, such as the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, have been reinstated but are still awaiting department approval for their agendas.

Two of the Bureau of Land Management's 38 resource advisory councils (RACs) — Rocky Mountain and Southwest Colorado — had to postpone meetings scheduled for Thursday because their charters were out of date.

"It's concerning that our advisory council has been unable to meet for over a year," said Scott Braden, a member of the Rocky Mountain RAC who is a wilderness and public lands advocate at Conservation Colorado. "Secretary Zinke has said that local input is important for BLM to consider, and yet these councils, which provide just such input, have been sidelined."

Braden added that the council planned to discuss a new management plan for BLM land in eastern Colorado, how to implement fee increases in the region and the problem of homelessness on public lands.

In at least two instances, Zinke has disbanded existing advisory bodies — the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council and the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science. He replaced the first one with the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, which just started soliciting nominations Jan. 9. It will place a heavier emphasis on sport shooting while promoting hunters' and fishermen's access to public lands.

The National Park System Advisory Board, which was established in 1935, has typically included social and natural science academics as well as former elected officials from both parties. In recent years, it has advised Interior on how to address climate change, among other issues, and how to encourage younger visitors to frequent the parks.

The board is required to meet twice a year but has not convened since Trump took office last January, Knowles said Tuesday. Members, most of whom have worked together for seven years, were surprised to not be consulted on Interior's recent decisions to increase visitor fees and reverse a ban on plastic water bottles in the park system. The decision to reverse climate change directives and other policies drove the decision to resign, he said.

"We were frozen out," said Knowles, who emphasized that the group recognized Zinke would select new members this year but wanted "the momentum to continue" from what the board accomplished in 2016 during the park system's centennial year.

Gretchen Long, a board member from Wilson, Wyo., said in an email that the nine board members resigned given the administration's seeming attitude that the group's work "could be so summarily dismissed. . . . And we worry greatly that the new initiatives incorporated in the [National Park System] are now being rescinded."

The two remaining board members are Harvard University public finance professor Linda Bilmes and University of Maryland marine science professor Rita Colwell, whose terms end in May. In an email, Bilmes said she did not resign her post because she is conducting research with other colleagues that is funded by the National Park Foundation and wants to complete her project.

Since the Interior secretary cannot establish new historical and natural landmarks without the board's approval, none has been declared since Jan. 11, 2016, when then-Secretary Sally Jewell designated 24 such landmarks.

The board members' action comes as one of Zinke's top deputies, Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas, plans to move into the Washington offices that the National Park Service has occupied for half a century. NPS will be relocated elsewhere in the building, according to individuals briefed on the plans.

Zinke has identified repairing the park system's aging infrastructure as one of his top priorities, though he has yet to nominate a National Park Service director.

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Commitee, questioned why Zinke has yet to nominate a director and urged him to solicit more outside opinion on how he manages national parks. "I call on Secretary Zinke to personally reach out to each member of the National Park Service Advisory Board and tell them their counsel is valued and that this administration respects local voices," she said in a statement late Tuesday.

The Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, which is made up of current, former and retired Park Service staff, sharply criticized the secretary's treatment of the long-standing board.

"This discourteous and disrespectful treatment of the board is inexcusable and, unfortunately, consistent with a decidedly anti-park pattern demonstrated by Secretary Zinke's department," coalition chair Phil Francis said. "We keep waiting for a pro-park agenda to emerge, but we are now convinced we are waiting in vain."

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Interior plans to move thousands of workers in the biggest reorganization in its history

EPA dismisses half of key board’s scientific advisers; Interior suspends more than 200 advisory panels</s>Majority Of National Park Service Board Resigns, Citing Administration Indifference

Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP

Updated at 4 p.m. ET

Nearly all of the seats on the U.S. National Park Service advisory board are vacant following a mass resignation Monday night, with ex-members citing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's unwillingness to meet with them.

Former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles said that he and eight other members of the panel handed in their resignations. In a separate letter Wednesday, another board member, Carolyn Hessler Radelet, also quit.

The advisory board, which normally has up to 12 members and describes itself as comprising "citizen advisors chartered by Congress to help the National Park Service," has been an institution since 1935. Members of the current bipartisan iteration were appointed by President Obama and represented the geographical breadth of the U.S. and a range of research disciplines, from social science to natural resource conservation.

The terms of most of the members who quit were set to expire in May. Radelet's term would not have expired until 2021.

Knowles, in a letter of resignation to Zinke, said the board had "worked closely and productively through 2016 with dedicated National Park Service employees, an inspiring Director and a fully supportive Department."

Since then, as explained in the letter, the board had repeatedly tried and failed to secure a meeting with the new interior secretary.

"[Our] requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of the agenda," the letter reads.

Alaska Public Radio quoted Knowles as saying that the Department of the Interior "showed no interest in learning about or continuing to use the forward-thinking agenda of science, the effect of climate change, protections of the ecosystems, education."

"And it has rescinded NPS regulations of resource stewardship concerning those very things: biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change," he added.

According to The Washington Post:

"The three board members who did not resign include Harvard University public finance professor Linda Bilmes, University of Maryland marine science professor Rita Colwell and Carolyn Hessler Radelet, the chief executive of Project Concern International. Terms for the first two end in May, while Radelet's term does not expire until 2021. "In an email, Bilmes said she did not resign her post because she is conducting research with other colleagues funded by the National Park Foundation, and wanted to complete her project."

In a statement Wednesday, Department of Interior spokesperson Heather Swift said the department welcomes the resignations. She called the board members' claim of neglect "patently false," saying the department had been working with the board as recently as earlier this month.

"The appointment of two of the individuals who claim to be resigning had already expired in July and November, and they did not seek reappointment," Swift added in her statement. "Their hollow and dishonest political stunt should be a clear indicator of the intention of this group."

E&E; News points to another area of contention between the Department of the Interior and the NPS advisory board:

"At the heart of the dispute is the Trump administration's move in August to scrap a 2016 order by the Obama administration that called for a focus on climate change in managing natural resources in U.S. parks. ... "Among other things, the order called for park managers to make decisions based 'on science, law and long-term public interest.' And it said park superintendents and other NPS leaders had to 'possess scientific literacy appropriate to their positions and resource management decision-making responsibilities.' "

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat who is the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, issued a statement of support for the resigning board members.

"The President still hasn't nominated a director for the National Park Service and Secretary Zinke has proposed tripling entrance fees at our most popular national parks," she said. "His disregard of the advisory board is just another example of why he has earned an 'F' in stewardship."

"To not have any meetings, to not have their phone calls returned, to not have any opportunity to have an audience with the officials at the interior department is really a slap in the face and I think sometimes you have to make a statement," Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior during President Obama's second term, told NPR's Here and Now on Wednesday.

"They were being ignored, and I have to believe that's consistent with what this administration has done with other advisory boards and councils in other agencies, as well," she said.

Since taking office, President Trump has sought to roll back protections of national parks and public lands under the auspices of the Department of the Interior. The administration has ordered a dramatic downsizing of two massive national monuments in Utah and has announced plans to open up oil drilling in protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic.

"If we lose the people with the knowledge and the ability to educate the next generation of young people, to appreciate our history, our culture, our natural world," Jewell said, "then we lose the value of the national parks."

Swift has vowed to "fast-track filling these new vacancies with people who are actually dedicated to working with the Department to better our national parks."

The department has also moved to renew the board's charter.

"The advice and recommendations provided by the Board and its subcommittees fulfill an important need within the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service," Zinke said in a document dated Jan. 4 and published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, "and it is necessary to re-establish the Board to ensure its work is not disrupted."</s>Three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service abruptly quit Monday night out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

The resignation of nine out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration. In May 2017, Zinke suspended all outside committees while his staff reviewed their composition and work.

In a letter to the secretary, departing board Chairman Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor, wrote that he and eight other members “have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law.” All of the signatories had terms set to expire in May.

“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles wrote. “I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success.”

In an email earlier this month inquiring about the status of the more than 200 boards that had come under review, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said, “Boards have restarted.” She did not provide any further details and did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday.

Some advisory bodies apparently are operating. But others are still frozen because the department has yet to approve their updated charters, as is legally required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

Two of the Bureau of Land Management’s 38 resource advisory councils (RAC) – Rocky Mountain and Southwest Colorado – had to postpone meetings scheduled for Thursday because their charters were out of date.

“It’s concerning that our advisory council has been unable to meet for over a year,” said Scott Braden, a member of the Rocky Mountain RAC who is a wilderness and public lands advocate at Conservation Colorado. “Secretary Zinke has said that local input is important for BLM to consider, and yet these councils, which provide just such input, have been sidelined.”

Braden added that the council planned to discuss a new management plan for BLM land in eastern Colorado, how to implement fee increases in the region and the problem of homelessness on public lands.

In at least two instances, Zinke has disbanded an existing advisory body – the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council and the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science. He replaced the first one with the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, which just started soliciting nominations Jan. 9. It will place a heavier emphasis on sport shooting while promoting the hunting and fishing community’s access to public lands.

The National Park System Advisory Board, which was established in 1935, has typically included social and natural science academics as well as former elected officials from both parties. In recent years, it has advised Interior on how to address climate change, among other issues, and how to encourage younger visitors to frequent the parks.

The board is required to meet twice a year but has not convened since Trump took office last January, Knowles said Tuesday. Members, most of whom have worked together for seven years, were surprised to not be consulted on Interior’s recent decisions to increase visitor fees and to reverse a ban on plastic water bottles in the park system.

“We were frozen out,” said Knowles, who emphasized that the group recognized Zinke would select new members this year but wanted “the momentum to continue” from what the board accomplished in 2016 during the park system’s centennial year.

Gretchen Long, a board member from Wilson, Wyoming, said in an email that the nine board members resigned given the administration’s seeming attitude that the group’s work “could be so summarily dismissed. . . . And we worry greatly that the new initiatives incorporated in the [National Park System] are now being rescinded.”

The three board members who did not resign include Harvard University public finance professor Linda Bilmes, University of Maryland marine science professor Rita Colwell and Carolyn Hessler Radelet, the chief executive of Project Concern International. Terms for the first two end in May, while Radelet’s term does not expire until 2021.

The board members’ action comes as one of Zinke’s top deputies, Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas, plans to move into the Washington offices that the National Park Service has occupied for half a century. NPS will be relocated elsewhere in the building, according to individuals briefed on the plans.

Zinke has identified repairing the park system’s aging infrastructure as one of his top priorities, though he has yet to nominate a National Park Service director.

The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which is made up of current, former and retired Park Service staff, sharply criticized the secretary’s treatment of the long-standing board.

“This discourteous and disrespectful treatment of the board is inexcusable and, unfortunately, consistent with a decidedly anti-park pattern demonstrated by Secretary Zinke’s department,” coalition chair Phil Francis said. “We keep waiting for a pro-park agenda to emerge, but we are now convinced we are waiting in vain.”</s>Most of the members of the National Park Service Advisory Board have tendered their resignation over frustrations with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, The Washington Post reports.

Nine of the 12 board members quit Monday night, citing Zinke’s refusal to convene the citizen advisory panel or discuss matters with it since he came into office last March. Zinke has drawn criticism for a number of his actions in the Interior Department, including silencing scientists about climate change.

Zinke has rejected numerous requests to meet with the advisory panel, which is required to meet twice a year, despite his efforts to review restructuring national parks. Departing board Chairman Tony Knowles told the Post that the panel has waited to work with Zinke but has been “frozen out.”

“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles wrote in a letter to Zinke, which was obtained by the Post.

All nine panel members, who are not employees of the Interior Department but are citizens who have shown a commitment to the National Park Service, have terms set to expire in May. Their early departure leaves the government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks, according to the Post.

Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said in a news release that he understood the members’ frustration at the “complete lack of response” from the Interior secretary.

“This discourteous and disrespectful treatment of the Board is inexcusable and, unfortunately, consistent with a decidedly anti-park pattern demonstrated by Secretary Zinke’s department,” Francis said in the release sent to HuffPost.

“It’s profoundly offensive because it portrays a lack of understanding about the civil service and the mission of the agency,” Clement told HuffPost. “It made it clear that what he’s trying to do is not work with the career staff and advance the mission ― he’s trying to undercut the agency and its mission. And it became very clear that his interests were aligned with special interests, like the oil and gas industry.”</s>On his first day as Secretary of the Interior, last March, Ryan Zinke rode through downtown Washington, D.C., on a roan named Tonto. When the Secretary is working at the department’s main office, on C Street, a staff member climbs up to the roof of the building and hoists a special flag, which comes down when Zinke goes home for the day. To provide entertainment for his employees, the Secretary had an arcade game called Big Buck Hunter installed in the cafeteria. The game comes with plastic rifles, which players aim at animated deer. The point of the installation, Zinke has said, is to highlight sportsmen’s contribution to conservation. “Get excited for #hunting season!” he tweeted, along with a photo of himself standing next to the game, which looks like a slot machine sporting antlers.

Nowadays, it is, in a manner of speaking, always hunting season at the Department of the Interior. The department, which comprises agencies ranging from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, oversees some five hundred million acres of federal land, and more than one and a half billion acres offshore. Usually, there’s a tension between the department’s mandates—to protect the nation’s natural resources and to manage them for commercial use. Under Zinke, the only question, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, is how fast these resources can be auctioned off.

One of Zinke’s first acts, after dismounting from Tonto, was to overturn a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public land. He subsequently recommended slashing the size of several national monuments, including Bears Ears, in Utah, and Gold Butte, in Nevada, and lifting restrictions at others to allow more development. (In December, acting on these recommendations, President Donald Trump announced that he was cutting the area of the Bears Ears monument by more than three-quarters and shrinking the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, also in Utah, by almost half.) Zinke has also proposed gutting a plan, years in the making, to save the endangered sage grouse; instead of protecting ten million acres in the West that had been set aside for the bird’s preservation, he’d like to see them given over to mining. And he’s moved to scrap Obama-era regulations that would have set more stringent standards for fracking on federal property.

All these changes have been applauded by the oil and gas industries, and many have also been praised by congressional Republicans. (Before Zinke became Interior Secretary, he was a one-term congressman from Montana.) But, to some members of the G.O.P., Zinke’s recent decision to open up great swaths of both coasts to offshore oil and gas drilling represents a rig too far.

Last week, Zinke backtracked. Following a brief meeting with the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, at the Tallahassee airport, the Secretary said that he was removing that state’s coastal waters “from consideration for any new oil and gas platforms.” The move was manifestly political. In the past, Scott has supported drilling for oil just about everywhere, including in the Everglades, but, with Trump’s encouragement, he is now expected to challenge Florida’s senior senator, Bill Nelson, a Democrat, in November.

“Local voices count” is how Zinke explained the Florida decision to reporters, a remark that was greeted with jeers from elected officials in other states, who noted that some “local voices” were more equal than others. “Virginia’s governor (and governor-elect) have made this same request, but we have not received the same commitment,” Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, tweeted. “Wonder why.” Walter Shaub, the former head of the Office of Government Ethics, noted that the Florida coast happens to be home to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s winter White House cum dues-collecting club. He suggested that the Secretary “look up ‘banana republic’ ” and then “go fly a Zinke flag to celebrate making us one.”

Two days after his trip to Tallahassee, Zinke proposed a complete reorganization of the Interior Department, which currently has some seventy thousand employees. (In September, he told attendees of an oil-industry meeting that thirty per cent of the employees were “not loyal to the flag,” by which he seemed to mean himself.) “Now is the time to be transformative,” the Secretary said in a video message that showed him sitting next to a blazing fire. The plan would require congressional approval, but it seems to have been put together without consulting lawmakers. “Neither Zinke nor his assistants have opened the specifics of their proposed reorganization to public or congressional input,” Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, wrote recently in an op-ed in the Durango Herald , which ran under the headline “ RYAN ZINKE IS DESTROYING THE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT .”

Zinke is, in many ways, a typical Trump appointee. A lack of interest in the public interest is, these days, pretty much a precondition for running a federal agency. Consider Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, or Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, or Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy. Nearly all Trump’s Cabinet members have shown disdain for the regulatory processes they’re charged with supervising. And, when it comes to conflicts of interest, they seem, well, unconflicted. In October, the Interior Department’s inspector general opened an investigation into Zinke’s travel expenses, which include twelve thousand dollars for a charter flight from Las Vegas to Kalispell, Montana, on a plane owned by executives of a Wyoming oil-and-gas company.

Still, Zinke manages to stand out for the damage he is doing. Essential to protecting wilderness is that there be places wild enough to merit protection. Once a sage-grouse habitat has been crisscrossed with roads, or a national monument riddled with mines, the rationale for preserving it is gone. Why try to save something that’s already ruined? “They’re determined to lease and develop every acre they possibly can, which will minimize the potential for conserving these landscapes in the future,” Jim Lyons, who was a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Interior Department during the Obama Administration, told the Washington Post . “They’re quite efficient, and they know exactly what they want to do.”

In the decades to come, one can hope that many of the Trump Administration’s mistakes—on tax policy, say, or trade—will be rectified. But the destruction of the country’s last unspoiled places is a loss that can never be reversed. ♦
Nine out of the twelve members of the U.S. National Park Service's advisory board resign out of protest over their treatment by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.