Deb Haaland was sworn in today as Secretary of the Interior. This is the best choice Biden could have made for this position.

In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben said:

[M]uch of the pressure will fall on Haaland, because the territory she’s responsible for is so vast, and the political terrain so charged. She’s a brilliant choice because, with luck, she’ll be able to summon the rest of the country to appreciate the legacy that she now protects: the amazing landscape of the American West, the ancestral home of her own people and of many of our ideas about American identity. If she can leverage those powerful sentiments to get the resources she needs to underwrite a fair transition away from fossil fuels for the Western states, she will have played an outsized role in protecting that land, and the whole world, for the next thirty-five generations.

And here’s wonderful endorsement.

Deb Haaland’s confirmation as Interior Secretary means so much to Native women. We are born with targets on our back & spend our lives being attacked, fetishized, hunted—forever climbing uphill.

But we are the daughters of Mother Earth. We are the 1st to stand & last to fall.

— Ruth H. Hopkins (Red Road Woman) (@Ruth_HHopkins) March 18, 2021

I hope she does find her path among all the forces she’ll have to deal with. Her position here raises a lot of hope in my heart.