Facebook founder visits Glacier, controversy ensues

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg toured Glacier National Park earlier this month, but the tour was not without its controversy after it was found out that President Donald Trump’s Interior Department prevented Park superintendent Jeff Mow and U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Daniel Fagre from meeting with him.

Fagre is one of the pre-eminent climate change and glacier scientists in the country and has worked in the Park for decades. Just last year, he and Mow accompanied then-Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell in the Park to talk about climate change.

Fagre and Mow had planned to accompany Zuckerberg, but Interior Department officials in Washington, D.C., decided to assign park rangers to the tour instead.

Zuckerberg, who has previously criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate decision, highlighted the effects of climate change on the park in a Facebook post.

Not having Mow and Fagre along didn’t change Zuckerberg’s message to the public.

“In a couple of decades, there may not be any glaciers left in the park at all,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Scientists predict Glacier National Park’s glaciers will largely disappear by 2030.

Mow has participated in the park service’s climate change response program and has given public presentations on how warming temperatures are affecting parks in Montana and Alaska, where he previously worked.

“We really have a bully pulpit to begin talking about climate change,” he said of Glacier officials in a 2015 TEDx talk in Whitefish.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s spokeswoman, Heather Swift, denied that the decision to pull Mow and Fagre from the tour was related to the climate change debate.

“It was about using government resources and tax dollars responsibly, especially at the height of busy season,” she told the Associated Press.

So the agency assigned other park officials to Zuckerberg, and he was given “first-class treatment,” Swift told the AP.

Asked how much money the Interior Department saved by substituting park rangers for Mow and Fagre, Swift declined to provide an amount.

“Every tax dollar matters,” she said.

The Washington Post first reported about Interior Department officials preventing Mow and Fagre from meeting with Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg did not meet with any local media during his tour, which also included a stop on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.