Our Public Lands, Our Right to Know

As part of our ongoing effort to ensure transparency, defend democracy, and protect the climate from President Trump, we’re persistently exercising our rights under the Freedom of Information Act.
Lately, we’ve been focusing on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s efforts to completely rollback any and all climate protection within the U.S. Department of the Interior, the nation’s largest land and resource management agency.
With the help of the Western Environmental Law Center, yesterday we filed two key Freedom of Information Act requests for reports related to Zinke’s rollback of Interior Department climate policies.
These filings come on the heels of an information request filed by WildEarth Guardians for all records related to Zinke’s lifting the moratorium on the sale of publicly owned coal and the elimination of a number of climate safeguards.
Increasingly, because of the Trump Administration’s broad resistance to transparency, we’re having to head to the courtroom.  Together with the Western Environmental Law Center, yesterday we filed our first lawsuit against the Trump Administration over their failure to respond a Freedom of Information Act request.

WildEarth Guardians’ Transparency Squad is already in gear, but we’re preparing to kick it into overdrive.
With President Trump and Secretary Zinke seemingly bent on eliminating even our National Monuments to order to appease the fossil fuel industry, it’s more important than ever for us to be vigilant and aggressive in holding them accountable to 100% transparency.  These are our public lands and this is our future.  We can’t afford to be asleep at the wheel.