Scott Pruitt. Snow Geese, Berkeley Pit Montana.

Chapter I
Scott Pruitt Becomes an Okie

Originally a Kentuckian, Scott Pruitt moved to Tulsa to pursue a career in the law. It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late, soon be liv-in in a brand-new state! He earned his Juris Doctor in 1993, and in 1998 was elected to the Oklahoma State Senate. “Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom! Plen’y of air and plen’y of room!”

Subsequently, he ran failed campaigns for various government posts including a run for US Congress, and Lt. Governor. In 2010, Scott Pruitt became Oklahoma’s Attorney General, and found his true calling in suing the US Government on behalf of Oil and Gas company interests. “Yeow! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY We’re only sayin’ “You’re doing fine Oklahoma! Oklahoma, OK!”

After his election, Pruitt established a “Federalism Unit” in the Attorney General’s office dedicated to fighting President Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda. He sued the administration over its immigration policy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, among others.

But his main target has been Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change through a collection of EPA regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions. Pruitt has sued the EPA on behalf of Oklahoma utilities unwilling to accept additional regulation of their coal-fired power plants. To date, all of Pruitt’s anti-EPA suits have failed, however. “Gonna give you barley, carrots and per-taters, pasture for the cattle, spinach and ter-may-ters!”

Chapter II
Oklahoma, Where the Emissions Come Sweeping Down the Plain!

As Jane Mayer has written in the New Yorker, until his appointment as EPA Chief on Dec. 7th 2016, Scott Pruitt’s greatest claim to fame was his starring role in a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation by the New York Times in 2014. There it was revealed that letters of complaint written by Pruitt to Federal agencies, including EPA, were actually penned by oil and gas company executives. In seeking to block EPA regulations in Oklahoma, Pruitt has aligned himself with Charles and David Koch, taking major campaign donations from Koch Industries and KochPac. Commenting on his many lawsuits against the Federal Government, climate campaigner Bill McKibben has labeled Pruitt as “a stenographer for the fossil fuel industry” that has funded him over the years. “We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand! Yippi-i, Yippi-i, Yippi-i, Yippi-i, Yippi-i, Yippi-i!”

Scott Pruitt likes to make a states’ rights argument about environmental regulation. Disregarding the founding documents for the EPA under the Nixon administration, that asserted that the environment must be regarded as “a single interrelated system,” Pruitt has written, “…the EPA was never intended to be our nation’s frontline environmental regulator. The states were to have regulatory primacy.” “Were only say-in “you’re doing fine Oklahoma, Oklahoma OK!”

Chapter III
Snow Goose “Blacque and White Jacques” & the Fateful Swirl

Migrating south across Canada from Siberian breeding grounds, snow goose “Blaque and White Jacques” moved into position and took his turn in the front of the skein, the distinctive V-formation of many migratory birds. Looking down upon the upper Midwestern terrain, Jacques was surprised to note that despite many maps to the contrary, there was in fact no visible line separating Canada from the United States.

As the great honking flock flew over Montana on November 28th 2016, Jacques also confirmed that there were no visible lines separating the states either. Jacques found this surprising, since Oklahoma Attorney General and Oil Company Stenographer Scott Pruitt had been arguing for some time that states should be allowed to have their own environmental regulations in lieu of Federal ones. Surely, Jacques mused, even if the lines are not visible, each state must somehow have its own unique air column and water table.

Jacques musings stopped, however, when he noticed a nice little pond off his left wingtip. Figuring that the lake would make a nice way station on the journey down to Midwestern agricultural fields where the flock would feed on the abundant waste of contemporary mechanized American agriculture (now that their wetland feeding grounds were in steep decline) Jacques began to initiate The Swirl, the amazing downward tornado of geese that Jacques thought was only out shined by the murmurations of starlings.

Unfortunately for Jacques and his friends, this was no ordinary pond. It was the 700 acre Berkeley Pit, a former copper mine that was now an immense crevasse filled with water, 900 feet deep and marked by extremely high concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, copper, iron, and zinc. As the birds (as many as ten thousand) settled onto the surface of the water, acidic enough to melt the steel of a boat’s propeller, the lake became white with the dying birds.

Investigators on the scene said that they could not give an exact measure of how high the death toll would go. But a preliminary estimate, via drone and flyover counts, found thousands of dead birds. In the week following the event, Butte residents found dead birds in a Walmart parking lot, on roadsides, and outside the city, according to the Montana Standard.

“Oklahoma ev’ry night my honey lamb and I (Every night!) we sit alone and talk and watch a hawk, Makin lazy circles in the sky.”

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by Tedd Siegel