President-elect Donald trump has recently nominated Cathy McMorris Rodgers as the next Secretary of the Interior. In this position she would be managing most of our federal land and natural resources. This position requires someone who is sensitive to conservation and environmentally friendly agendas. Rodgers has shown through past action that she is completely unwilling to fairly administrate such a department.

Over Rodgers’ 10 years tenure as a US Representative, she has seen 245 bills of environmental significance come before the House; she has only voted positively on 10. She has shown little sympathy for climate change agendas, saying “scientific reports are inconclusive at best on human culpability for global warming.” She supports expanding oil and gas development and eliminating restrictions on CO2 emissions. This is in addition to concerns about her ethics that arose after an the Office of Congressional Ethics showed that it was very likely that she intentionally misused taxpayer funds for her campaign.  

When it comes to the sovereignty of public land, Rodgers is entirely flippant. In 2012, she stated to the Society of American Foresters National Convention “It is no coincidence that many counties with the highest unemployment rates in the country are those surrounded by federal forests.” Considering one of Rodgers' top donors is the forestry industry, this rhetoric is unsurprising. Her solution to this is to sell the public lands that belong to the people of this country to the highest bidder. She cosponsored a bill that would sell of 3 million acres  of public land for profit. As residents of the beautiful state of Colorado, this terrifies us. We cannot allow the protected spaces that we enjoy to here and across the US to be jeopardized by someone who is opposed to the very mission of their department.  

If you agree that our lands and resources should not be governed by someone so obviously eager to profit by rather than conserve our environment, please join our fight and sign this petition. We also encourage you to write your Senators directly, as we are for the senators in Colorado, urging them to oppose the appointment of Rodgers in favor of someone who actually supports the goals of the agency that he or she is assigned to lead. If we destroy our land now, we may forever jeopardize our greatest inheritance.