The names on Trump’s shortlist for interior secretary were downright frightening to those in the conservation community: former Alaska governor Sara Palin, Texas oil tycoon Forrest Lucas, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, and two of Congress’s leading anti-public-lands zealots, Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho). But this week’s surprise announcement that Rep. Ryan Zinke, a first-term Montana Republican, has been tapped for the position is reason for many in the conservation community to break out the champagne.

Before Zinke’s pick, many Westerners were holding their breath for word about who would lead the Interior Department, arguably the most important Cabinet-level position for the region. The federal government owns massive swaths of the American West, including more than half of the land in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon, with California and Wyoming falling just short of that threshold. Of America’s public lands, 75 percent fall under the purview of key Interior agencies: the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and theFish and Wildlife Service. Overall, the department manages more than 500 million acres for recreation and energy development.

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Palin, Bishop, Labrador and others who were being floated for the top job are more in tune with populist-style conservatives over how to manage these lands. A national movement to transfer federal public land ownership to the states has effectively become the default position for the GOP and was endorsed in the party platform this summer. A more extreme version, but by no means beyond mainstream discourse, calls for selling off and privatizing public lands, with possible exceptions carved out for Yellowstone, Yosemite and other treasured national parks and wilderness areas.

During a campaign stop in Boise ahead of last spring’s Idaho primary, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) captured the animating sentiment: “Too much land in this country, particularly in the West, is owned by the federal government. It’s not right; it doesn’t make sense. And we need to transfer that land back to the states or, even better, back to the people . . . In my home state of Texas, 2 percent of the state is owned by the federal government, and I gotta tell you, in Texas, we think that’s 2 percent too much.”

In many ways, Zinke is an unlikely pick for Interior. In his short political career, the former Navy SEAL has been much more devoted to foreign affairs and national security than to domestic issues. And he has often seemed less interested in mastering the details of policy than in his cable TV appearances or in moving up the Washington pecking order. (After just 10 months in Congress, he talked about mounting a bid for House speaker and, later, possibly joining the race to become Trump’s running mate.)

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These deviations from conservative orthodoxy haven’t gone unnoticed. Scott Christensen of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition expressed optimism over Zinke’s nomination: “While we haven’t seen eye to eye with him on everything, we have seen some areas where he’s able to work with us and support us. That’s one area where we’d like to see him stand strong in the future and continue pushing back against schemes to sell off and transfer public lands in the West.”

Still, some environmentalists will undoubtedly oppose Zinke’s confirmation, at least publicly. He has drawn criticism for his work to fast-track logging projects and bypass litigation from environmental groups. He also supported allowing states to manage small portions of federal land as a pilot project that some conservationists see as nearly indistinguishable from formal transfer to the states.

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But the bigger concern for environmentalists is that as a pro-coal, pro-gas enthusiast, Zinke is bad for climate change. Yet even here, it’s hard to imagine that some other Trump appointee would be preferable. Regardless of what may be expressed in news releases, behind the scenes, many environmentalists recognize that Zinke — as a supporter of public land and a mainstream Republican on fossil fuels — is the best they could reasonably hope for under the incoming administration.

In the aftermath of the election and some of Trump’s early personnel moves, one risk for liberals is to fall into a lazy rut of assuming that every action taken by the president-elect is an atrocity. It’s important to distinguish between those Trump actions that really do risk taking public policy in a radical direction or that threaten democratic norms and institutions, and those that could be considered “normal politics,” or what we’d expect if a more conventional Republican — say Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney — were moving into the White House.