Environmentalists on Friday accused the Trump administration of political interference and retaliation in the ouster of Yellowstone National Park’s chief after his disputes with U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke over the park’s celebrated bison.

Dan Wenk, who has led one of the nation’s premier parks since 2011, on Friday described as “punitive” the decision by Zinke that he should retire early or be reassigned to a post in Washington, D.C.

Wenk said in an interview he was not given specific reasons for the ultimatum, which came after he had announced his intention to retire in 2019. He said he had had disagreements with Zinke about the number of bison at the park but had believed those to be resolved.

Environmentalists were quick to accuse Zinke of selling out parks, public lands and wildlife in the West to oil and gas developers, sportsmen and ranchers, among others.

“His decision to force out the superintendent of the world’s first national park should be seen for what it is: political interference and retaliation for a Park Service leader standing up for parks and wildlife rather than special interests,” the Sierra Club’s Bonnie Rice said in a statement on Friday.

The fracas over Wenk’s ouster is the latest controversy surrounding an Interior secretary who has been reviled by conservationists but hailed by industry and conservatives in Western states, where local governments have chafed against restrictions imposed on federally protected areas.

Review of Monuments

Zinke, a former Montana congressman, sparked controversy last year after reviewing more than two dozen national parks and protected areas, indicating some could be scaled back to allow for more hunting and fishing, as economic development.

The review has cheered energy, mining, ranching and timber advocates but has drawn widespread criticism and threats of lawsuits from conservation groups and the outdoor recreation industry.

The National Parks Conservation Association said diverse sides should be represented when it comes to places like Yellowstone.

“Dan Wenk stood up for wildlife and united voices around solutions and we need to ensure that same approach will continue,” Bart Melton, a regional director for the group, said on Friday.

Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift did not respond to a request for comment about criticism leveled at the secretary and declined to directly respond to Wenk’s belief his removal from the park was a form of punishment.

Wenk said Yellowstone bison should be managed like wildlife rather than livestock and the herd’s size should not be solely determined by ranchers who live outside the park in Montana. He added there was no basis to assertions that a segment of Yellowstone’s rangelands had been adversely affected by grazing bison rather than natural processes.

A ranchers association said it was “steadfast” about keeping the bison population at 3,000. The bison population is now around 4,000.

“We feel that number is realistic and sustainable and not only meets the needs of the park in reducing migration of bison outside its boundaries but also reduces the threat of the possible transfer of disease to domestic cattle,” said Jay Bodner, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association.

Bring Science to Issue

If Zinke was concerned about overgrazing in the park, Wenk said he sought to answer it by suggesting science should be brought to the issue.

“It’s okay to have differences of opinion and I thought we were working through those,” he said.

Environmental groups and tribes have been critical of the park’s years-long practice of sending bison to slaughter for wandering from Yellowstone into neighboring Montana in search of food in the winter as a method of controlling the population of the nation’s last herd of wild, purebred bison.

The policy is a concession to ranchers who worry bison exposed to brucellosis, a disease that can cause cows to miscarry, might infect cattle that graze outside the park, though such a case has never been documented in the wild.

Millions of American and international visitors crowd the park each year to view wildlife like bison and natural wonders like the Old Faithful geyser.
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U.S. B-52 bombers sent over the disputed South China Sea this week will, for lack of a broader foreign policy, fall short of empowering smaller countries to resist China’s maritime sovereignty claims, analysts say.

The U.S. Air Force flew two bombers Tuesday from a base in the Indian Ocean to near the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands, the Air Force Times online reported. That movement followed seven passages of U.S. naval vessels through the same sea since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Washington wants to discourage Beijing from militarizing the Spratly archipelago and other islands in the contested, resource-rich South China Sea, said Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

China calls the entire 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea its own despite rival claims by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

The U.S. military movement will pester China without emboldening other countries, all with smaller armed forces than the People’s Liberation Army, unless Washington offers the others more naval cooperation or diplomatic and economic support, scholars believe.

“We should certainly expect an increase in U.S. operations meant to show that (Washington) doesn’t recognize China’s unilateral restrictions on waters and airspace around the South China Sea,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the American think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“But that will only help the regional claimants if it’s part of a larger U.S. strategy, which so far it hasn’t been,” Poling said.

​Ramping up military pressure

The U.S. B-52 flyover followed years of reports that China had built military installations on three Spratly islets and at least one in the sea’s Paracel chain. China has landed military aircraft and deployed missiles, according to some media reports.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Wednesday her country was not afraid of the bombers. China cites historical records to back its claim to about 90 percent of the sea that stretches from Hong Kong to Borneo.

Other countries have not publicly leveraged the U.S. moves to advance their own maritime claims, though they resent China’s increased activity from military buildup to increased coast guard presence and annual fishing moratoriums.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry noted this week a strengthening of its relations with the United States in 2018 to date but did not indicate whether the B-52s or U.S. naval movement in the sea would play in its favor.

Taiwan holds the largest Spratly feature, Taiping Island.

“The government’s sovereignty claim hasn’t changed,” ministry spokesman Andrew Lee said Thursday. “But for now, toward either the American or China’s military situation, we will pay close attention to it, but we don’t have a further comment.”

In the Philippines, the armed forces and some lawmakers want more U.S. military support, said Maria Ela Atienza, political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.

But President Rodrigo Duterte opposes reliance on the Philippines’ former colonizer, the United States. He set aside the maritime sovereignty issue in 2016 to push for economic ties with China.

The shape of a larger policy

“There could be a greater assertiveness on the part of some of the claimants like Vietnam for the U.S. to play a greater role and for some groups in the Philippines to actually maybe pressure the government to at least be more assertive diplomatically,” Atienza said.

China and the Philippines faced off for four years over Scarborough Shoal, which lies within Manila’s exclusive economic zone but was occupied by Beijing’s ships in 2012.

More confidence in the United States as a defender against China would come from tighter military and even trade cooperation in Southeast Asia, analysts say. Washington needs a “robust diplomatic strategy to isolate China” including economic measures, according to Poling.

Military cooperation such as naval training and use of American weaponry would also inspire the smaller claimant states, scholars say.

But Vietnam is already wary of the United States because it withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement last year, Sun said. Vietnam would have gained as an exporter to the United States.

“I think there’s a question about the credibility and also the sustainability (of Washington),” Sun said. “I think the more U.S. interest being paid to the South China Sea will strengthen other claimant countries’ position, but whether they will base their policy on the current administration flying a B-52 bomber remains to be seen.”
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Just less than $6 billion worth of U.S. waste was sent to China last year to be converted into packaging and products, and then shipped back to the United States and other markets. Scrap recyclers had taken advantage of low shipping costs for empty containers returning to China after the ships had unloaded their goods on the U.S. West Coast.

Today, that flow of trash is just a trickle, the result of a Chinese ban that went into effect Jan. 1 on many types of foreign garbage, from mixed papers to waste textiles.

The result of the ban is seen at a recycling facility in Anaheim, California, owned by Republic Services, a national company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The parking lot of the materials recovery facility (MRF) is brimming with 2,400 bales of mixed paper that once would have been bound for China.

The surplus is a result of an unprecedented 12-day backlog, said James Castro, the facility’s general manager.

And it’s not clear where it’s all going.

China has banned imports of mixed paper, as well as low-grade plastics, certain metals and other types of waste. In April, it expanded the ban, to go into effect later this year, to include more metals and chemical waste. A ban on additional kinds of scrap, including waste timber, is being targeted for the end of 2019.

WATCH: China Trash Ban Creates Crisis for US Recyclers

Less-contaminated scrap

It has also imposed stricter contamination standards on the scrap it does accept, allowing only 0.5 percent contaminants, down for most materials from 1.5 percent.

That has slowed the sorting process, said Richard Coupland, Republic’s vice president of municipal sales.

Further complicating matters, the ban has led to a huge reduction in worldwide prices on recyclable goods, such as mixed paper.

One year ago, bales of unsorted paper, like those now stacked in the parking lot, would have been worth $100 a ton. Today, each ton is worth “less than $5, or negative in some markets,” including shipping costs, Coupland said. He added that much of the industry’s backlog may end up in landfills.

To the north in the city of Azusa, Waste Management’s MRF is also dealing with tightened standards for the workers and sorting machines that use magnets, optical sensors and other means to separate the waste. Executives say they are tweaking a costly system that was designed to meet China’s insatiable craving for scrap.

Asia-based journalist Adam Minter, author of the book Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, sums up the dilemma facing these companies.

“Recycling is about manufacturing,” Minter said, “and if somebody doesn’t want to use those raw materials, then putting stuff in your recycling bin is doing nothing more than playing with your garbage.”

He says China’s trash ban is spurred partly by a desire to clean up the environment, but even more by nationalism and a desire for political control.

“When you see China pushing against the recycling industry,” Minter said, “it’s really pushing against private industry and in favor of state-owned enterprises, and that is very much in line with the way that Chinese economic policy has been going for the last five years.”

​‘Shockwaves around the world’

Some environmentalists have welcomed the trash ban.

Greenpeace East Asia plastic campaigner Liu Hua said it will send “shockwaves around the world” and force countries to confront their attitudes toward waste, especially environmental contaminants like plastics.

China expert Joshua Goldstein of the University of Southern California said the ban will have social repercussions in China.

Goldstein has studied the informal sector of 3-5 million small-scale recyclers, entrepreneurs whom he says are “picking through (trash) and making their lives slightly better every day through the money that they made.”

“It had environmental repercussions,” he said, “but it also raised 3 to 5 million households out of poverty.”

Goldstein said China faces hurdles to create an operation as efficient.

Companies are also searching for new markets. More recyclable scrap from the United States will now go to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia, but industry experts say shipping costs are high and demand in those countries is limited.

As commodity prices drop, there is hope for increased use for scrap such as mixed paper in the United States.

​Cleaning up waste

Brent Bell, vice president of recycling operations for Waste Management, said his company is also cleaning up its waste to meet the higher standards that China and other countries are demanding.

“I think as an industry, we’re all at fault to some degree,” Bell said, noting the company is working to educate consumers about better recycling. “Something we all missed as an industry,” he added. “Whether we’re shipping material to China, to India, or even to Louisiana, our customers all want to make sure the material is as clean as possible.”

Republic’s Coupland said the waste and recycling industry needs to work with local communities to find a new business model to replace one that has become unsustainable. It could mean, he said, an increase in the rate that consumers pay for hauling away their trash.

China may yet make adjustments to its policies, USC’s Goldstein added.

Paper fiber is hard to replace, he notes, and China may loosen its bans to bring in the raw materials that its manufacturers require.

“What parts of this reform, this ban, are going to be long term and what parts are going to be short term is still quite unclear,” Goldstein said. But he noted that the economics of the recycling industry are changing.
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