Last week Representative Dave Reichert announced that he will be retiring from the House at the end of his current term. His announcement sent me looking through the “photographs” folder on my computer and appreciating Rep. Reichert’s long standing commitment to public lands. Reichert represents Washington’s 8th Congressional District that covers some stunning landscape in the Cascades. He has championed new Wilderness for portions of his district, and in 2014 he cosponsored legislation which expanded the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and added sections of the Middle Fork Snoqualmie and Pratt River’s to the Wild and Scenic Rivers system. I know a Congressman from the Evergreen State supporting Wilderness doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but here is the thing, Representative Reichert is a Republican and in this day and age of divisiveness a member of congress who is willing to work across the aisle to protect places that are important to all Americans is a rare breed. Not only has Reichert promoted Wilderness in his district, he has been a leader on efforts to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other conservation issues.
Protecting our treasured landscapes has not always been such a partisan idea. We all know that our greatest conservation president was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. And another Republican, President Eisenhower, was the first to set aside the northeast corner of Alaska that we know now as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As we watch President Trump, and his accomplice Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, unleash one attack after another on our public lands, its easy think of these issues along party lines, which is why leadership from Republicans like Representative Reichert is so important. I hope that more of Representative Reichert’s colleagues follow his lead and work across the aisle to protect our environment.
And I finally did find that picture I was looking for. In 2005 the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge came scarily close to being opened to oil and gas development as Republican leaders in Congress tried to sneak drilling approval through the federal budget process. Representative Reichert was a leader in the moderate Republican caucus, standing up to House Leadership and demanding that the Arctic drilling provisions be removed from the budget. Against high odds they were successful. This is a picture of me, on the left-- clearly suffering from early-onset midlife crises, giving Reichert, who has some well-kept hair, an award from the Alaska Coalition for his leadership. Now over a decade later we are counting on Rep. Reichert’s leadership again to save the Refuge. He has joined with current moderate Republicans to speak out against the same sneaky efforts to open the Arctic Refuge. I trust that with Rep. Reichert’s help we will once again prevail and I hope that he will inspire more bipartisan leadership to protect our public lands.