Merger Erases ‘Environment’ From Name Of State Agency Created To Protect It - Watch it on YouTube
Gov. Kristi Noem has been clear about her motivation for merging the state’s environmental and agricultural departments.
She wants to help agriculture.
In her State of the State address earlier this month, she said the merger will “help reinvigorate our number one industry – and all the families it serves – for many years to come.”
The offices that are merging are the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture. Noem’s recent executive order mandating the merger takes effect in 90 days, unless the Legislature rejects it. Because she’s a Republican and the party has a super-majority, she’s unlikely to face significant opposition.
An environmentally minded nonprofit, Dakota Rural Action, worries that the merger signals a shift away from environmental regulation and toward the promotion of factory farming.
In a news release, the nonprofit said, “One ominous indication of this focus shift is the removal of the word ‘environment’ from the name of the proposed new department.”
Indeed, Noem is calling the merged entity the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources. By removing the word “environment” from the department’s name, she’s erasing part of the founding identity of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Kneip’s creation
The department’s roots are in the environmental movement that swept the nation during the 1960s and ’70s. Pollution was so bad by 1969 that Ohio’s Cuyahoga River famously caught fire. It was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who responded by creating the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
In his 1970 State of the Union speech, Nixon said, “The great question of the Seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?”
South Dakota Gov. Dick Kneip, a Democrat, responded to that call by creating South Dakota’s Department of Environmental Protection in 1973.
Before that, the state’s environmental regulation was scattered among various departments, said Ted Muenster, who was chief of staff to the late Gov. Kneip.
“Most of our environmental activity was aimed toward the conservation of soil and erosion, wind and water erosion,” Muenster said. “In the Health Department there was some regulation of drinking water for public health purposes, and that's about all I can recall.”
Muenster said some South Dakotans – especially farmers and ranchers – resented the new environmental department’s existence.
“The agricultural people thought that this was an unworkable and unjustified intrusion into their business,” Muenster said.
Kneip's creation lasted only six years. But the department took on important projects, like cleaning up cyanide pollution in Whitewood Creek from Black Hills gold mining.
Janklow’s merger
Then came Republican Gov. Bill Janklow. He merged the agency with the Department of Natural Resource Development, and the new organization became the Department of Water and Natural Resources.
Steve Pirner worked for the department and later ran it. He’s now retired. He said Janklow didn’t want an environmental department working against other departments that promoted the development of natural resources.
“It’s my understanding that was one of the driving forces for Janklow to merge the two,” Pirner said. “His philosophy was that state government should speak with one voice on a project like that.”
Some Democrats, conservationists and environmentalists objected to Janklow’s merger. They said the environment would lose out to development interests. But the critics couldn’t muster enough opposition to stop it.
Fourteen years later, some of the fears about the merger came to fruition. Several water systems in the state came under fire from the EPA for contaminants in their water. There were other environmental challenges in the 1980s, too. Other states were talking about dumping their garbage here. And a new form of gold-mining called “heap-leach” was booming in the Black Hills, raising concerns about South Dakota’s out-of-date mining regulations.
Mickelson’s vision
In 1989, South Dakota’s centennial year, Republican Governor George S. Mickelson took action. Surprising some in his own party, he pushed a comprehensive Centennial Environmental Protection Bill into law.
Mickelson address the topic in a rousing portion of his 1989 State of the State speech, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen of this Legislature, one hundred years from today, I want whatever governor is the governor of our state to stand here and shout back through time to you and me and say, ‘Thank you for how you preserved our precious prairie state.’”
For a while longer, the office enforcing Mickelson’s new laws still carried the old name Janklow gave it: the Department of Water and Natural Resources. Mickelson then changed the name to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, a couple of years before he died in a 1993 plane crash.
Now Gov. Noem’s proposal would strip the word “environment” from the agency’s name. Muenster, who helped Gov. Kneip create the department back in the ’70s, said that’s not a trivial matter.
“I think it tends to lower the profile of the environment as a matter of public policy,” Muenster said, “and I'm sorry that it's not in the new name.”
-Contact reporter Seth Tupper by email.
