In that role, Watt oversaw the filing of numerous lawsuits challenging federal regulations that, as Interior secretary, he inherited the responsibility to defend. Prior to joining the Cabinet, he had been the original president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which was founded in 1976 by the reactionary beer brewer Joseph Coors to fight the environmental movement. He proclaimed himself a partisan of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a political movement that had backed Reagan's presidential campaign. Watt, a Wyoming native, consistently took the side of ranchers and growers who resented federal regulation of their access to public lands in the West. 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. (Reagan, remember, was governor of California at the time of the oil spill.) 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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