Thanks for Your Service

But, the NYTimes editorial board suggests to just-resigned Interior Secretary Gale Norton, don't let the door hit your keister on the way out:

In public Ms. Norton spoke winningly of what she called her four C's: "cooperation, communication and consultation, all in the service of conservation." But this was little more than comfy language diverting attention from her main agenda, which was to open up Western lands, some of them fragile, to the extractive industries. Perhaps her signature moment was a secret deal in 2003 with Mike Leavitt, then governor of Utah, in which she not only exposed 2.6 million acres of previously protected lands to commercial development but also renounced her statutory authority to recommend additional lands for wilderness protection. There will be no new wilderness under my watch, she seemed to say, but there will be oil and gas.

[...]

Ms. Norton has been an extraordinarily faithful steward of the Bush agenda — but not, we are sad to say, of the lands she was obliged to protect.