Ken Salazar arrived as the new head of the Interior Department with the promise to clean up the scandal-riddled agency. After eight years of deliberate neglect and by the Bush administration, which did its very best to give away as many of the nation's natural resources as it could, and which worked overtime to undermine the department's mandate for environmental stewardship, he has his work cut out for him.
Senator Ken Salazar is going to need more than luck in his new job as Secretary of the Interior. Under the Bush administration, the department has been given over to commercial interests to an unprecedented extent. Worse, the administration is burning the midnight oil before they leave office, eviscerating environmental and regulatory barriers to further wholesale development of precious Western lands, with little or no regard for the interests of wildlife, water, air, fragile ecosystems, and nearby communities. Secretary Salazar will take over a demoralized, scandal-ridden agency that for eight long years has been the playground for lobbyists for the mining, logging, oil and gas industries, and a badly weakened regulatory structure. Good luck, indeed.
