President-elect Donald Trump was fairly clear about his indifference—and worse—toward environmental protection during his campaign. He denied climate science at every opportunity, vowed to eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (though he called it by the wrong name), and, when asked who would protect the environment if not the EPA, he blurted out “we can leave a little bit.” If there was any sliver of doubt over Trump’s intentions, it disappeared last month when he started making appointments. His picks for the heads of the EPA and the State, Energy, and Interior departments are particularly dismal for the planet. Here’s why.

Scott Pruitt

Nominee for: EPA Administrator
Current Job: Attorney general of Oklahoma
Known for: Suing the EPA
Honors and Distinctions: Triple-A ball club Oklahoma City RedHawks set a minor league attendance record while Pruitt was general managing partner.

Scott Pruitt refers to the Clean Power Plan—the Obama administration’s signature rule to reduce carbon pollution from U.S. utilities—as “the so-called Clean Power Plan.” That pretty much tells the story.

The so-called attorney general of Oklahoma doesn’t much like the EPA, and he is the media’s go-to quote machine for criticizing the agency. Pruitt accused the EPA of threatening states with a “gun to the head.” He called the Waters of the United States rule, aimed at protecting streams and wetlands, a “devastating blow to private-property rights” and an “unlawful power grab.” Pruitt has also joined lawsuits against nearly all major EPA rules in recent years.

Pruitt’s critics call him a puppet of the fossil-fuel industry—a label that is rarely applied so literally. In 2014, he signed a letter to the EPA, accusing the agency of overstating air pollution from natural gas wells in Oklahoma. According to the New York Times, however, Pruitt was not the author of the letter. In fact, lawyers for an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company, Devon Energy, wrote the letter for him. (The company later praised the letter as “Outstanding!” which is a bit like a chef who won’t shut up about how delicious the food is.)

According to Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, “Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.”

Rex Tillerson

Nominee for: Secretary of State
Current Job: Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil
Known for: #ExxonKnew
Honors and Distinctions: Eagle Scout, Russian Order of Friendship

In 1977, a senior scientist at Exxon warned company brass that carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels was affecting the earth’s climate. Since then, rather than working to address its role in the problem, Exxon has undertaken a sustained campaign to obfuscate the link between oil and global warming. For example, Exxon has given donations into the six figures to the Heartland Institute, an organization largely dedicated to denying climate change. The company is now under investigation for what environmentalist Bill McKibben calls “the most consequential lie in human history.”

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has dismissed the investigation as something that “happened decades ago” (the same excuse Trump gave for his lewd comments about sexually assaulting women). In his public statements, Tillerson has tried to have it both ways on climate change. He acknowledges global warming as a general problem and referred to the Paris climate talks as “some serious issues that need to be talked about,” but his company has continued to make investments that would destroy the targets laid out in the Paris agreement. He has also said that “there is no scientific consensus on the human role in climate change” and believes we can just “adapt” to changing weather patterns and rising sea levels—as if doing so would be simple, or cheap. Tillerson, like Trump, thinks there are “much more pressing priorities” than climate change. As secretary of state, Tillerson would be the primary authority in ensuring follow-through with international climate agreements, like the one signed in Paris.

Rick Perry

Nominee for: Secretary of Energy
Most Recent Job: Governor of Texas
Known for: failed presidential bids, forgetting stuff, the quickstep
Fun(ish) Fact: Perry once fatally shot a coyote while out for a jog.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. In a 2011 presidential primary debate, Rick Perry vowed to eliminate three federal departments: “Commerce, Education, and the um, ah, what’s the third one there, let’s see…oops.” After some head scratching, Perry later identified the department he was unable to remember as the U.S. Department of Energy—the same department he’s now nominated to lead. If Donald Trump had been elected president of irony, Perry would be the obvious choice for energy secretary.

Perry is an intriguing character. On the one hand, he oversaw a significant expansion of wind-energy production in Texas and even won cautious plaudits from the American Wind Energy Association. “He created an environment conducive to economic investment through robust infrastructure and competitive power markets that allowed new technologies to enter,” AWEA CEO Tom Kiernan told Science.

On the other hand, he’s a climate change denier. Perry claims that the planet is actually cooling and regularly questions the “so-called science” of climate change. As governor, he censored discussion of climate change in Texas state reports and accused climatologists of lying for money.

Ryan Zinke

Nominee for: Secretary of the Interior
Current Job: Republican congressman from Montana
Known for: Let’s face it—nothing (yet)
Fun Fact: Rocks the flip-flops, especially on conservation issues

Ryan Zinke is so obscure that the Washington Post began its report on his nomination by listing his undergraduate degree. Zinke’s primary qualifications to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior seem to be that he’s from the West, he hunts, and he was a Navy SEAL. (President-elect Trump loves a military man.)

Zinke doesn’t have much of a political record, but what he does have is not encouraging. The Interior manages 500 million acres of federal public land, and so far, Zinke has amassed a 3 percent voting score from the League of Conservation Voters. Since entering Congress in 2015, he has cast only one positive environmental vote, against a bill that would have stripped funding to renewable energy programs. (Don’t get too excited—the overwhelming majority of members voted against it.) Zinke supports the Keystone XL pipeline and opposed a rule that would have limited methane releases from oil and gas operations on federal lands.

As for his feelings on climate, Zinke told the Los Angeles Times last month that the extent of humanity’s influence on climate change was still under scrutiny and criticized current regulations that require oil and gas projects on public lands to be assessed for their climate impacts. He once considered climate change a national security threat, but since leaving the military and joining Congress, Zinke seems to have gone soft.

Two men hovered over a large, spotted bobcat in west-central Illinois last January. Blindfolded and lying on a blue sleeping bag, the 30-pound male was the first of 17 bobcats that biologists Christopher Jacques and Tim Swearingen would catch over the course of the year. They had just 40 minutes to collect the data they needed—body measurements and tissue samples—before the sedative wore off. When the cat, named M1, woke, he woozily walked back into the woods sporting some new jewelry: ear tags and a radio collar. 

M1’s new necklace was supposed to allow the Western Illinois University researchers to track his whereabouts, but within a week the cat had vanished. “We thought the collar malfunctioned,” Jacques says. A few weeks later, a landowner reported seeing a collared bobcat on his property. M1 had simply rambled out of range, a surprise since the biologists didn’t think the shy cat would wander that far into inhospitable agricultural lands.

Across the country bobcats are making a comeback, thanks to state and international protections. In 1977 the International Union for Conservation of Nature included the cat on its Red List of Threatened Species, which required federal and state agencies to keep track of how many bobcats were killed in the country each year. Since the early 1980s, the U.S. bobcat population grew from an estimated 1 million to 3.5 million. According to data published in 2009, around 5,000 bobcats live in Illinois. Even so, chances are you’ll never see one. Little is known about these animals that look like housecats on steroids (they’re roughly twice the size). Bobcats are nocturnal, shy, and solitary—all traits that make them hard to study and their populations hard to manage.

More than half of the Illinois bobcats prowl around Shawnee National Forest in the south, but bow hunters, who often record the animals they see from their stands, have spotted bobcats all over the state. Researchers and wildlife managers have been using this information for population estimates and say the cat’s numbers are healthy and growing—increasing by 4 percent to 9 percent a year.

This prompted state legislators to pass a law last year that allows the hunting of up to 500 bobcats in certain areas between November and the end of January. It’s the first bobcat hunting season Illinois has had in 40 years, and it’s not without controversy, but Jacques says the cull is unlikely to do much harm to the animal’s population.

This was not the case in the Corn Belt in the early 1900s, when trapping and habitat destruction, as agricultural fields replaced prairie land, nearly wiped out these tufted-eared cats. Sympathy for the animal remains strong here, and many midwesterners have spoken out in the cat’s defense, some even applying for hunting licenses they don’t intend to use.

Due in part to the bobcat’s swift recovery, conservation groups in the Midwest, including NRDC, have focused on boosting predator populations that aren’t doing as well. For instance, NRDC worked with state legislators in 2014 to pass a law that protects cougars, black bears, and wolves as they attempt to reestablish their populations in Illinois.

Bobcats tend to adapt more easily to new circumstances than other predators, says William R. Clark, emeritus professor at Iowa State University, who worked on midwestern bobcat populations for more than a decade. In forests, prairies, deserts, and mountains across the country, bobcats stealthily dine on a buffet of bunnies, mice, and squirrels. The cats aren’t picky about what they eat or where they live, but closely monitoring these elusive animals is critical to making sure they continue to thrive.

Wisconsin allows bobcat hunting in some of its counties, and Indiana is considering a bobcat hunt as well. “I’m not worried that bobcats are going to disappear,” Clark says. “By the same token, I’m not of the mind to say, ‘Let’s just pound the crap out of the population.’” For now, he and other biologists like Jacques and Swearingen are more interested in what the hunts might teach us about these animals.

In the early 2000s, before Iowa legalized bobcat hunting, Clark and his team began working with hunters who would sometimes unintentionally catch the cats in live traps, which capture but don’t kill the animals. The hunters would call up the biologists, who would tag and collar the bobcats before letting them go. Of the 158 bobcats collared back then, 90 percent of them were a result of this outreach with hunters.

When Iowa legalized bobcat hunting in 2007, the state required trappers to give the researchers the bobcat carcasses (usually after taking their pelts). “It was a gold mine in terms of data,” says Clark, who would use the tissue for genetic testing. “We have more DNA in the freezer than anybody in the world on bobcats right now.”

Clark’s team published a study in 2012 showing genetic distinctions among bobcats throughout the United States. The various populations, Clark says, will eventually meet—somewhere in the Midwest—and those differences will disappear.

Working with hunters can be hugely valuable, Clark says, and the sale of hunting and fishing licenses brings needed funding to state wildlife agencies. In this indirect way, hunting “preserves chickadee habitat as much as it preserves bobcat habitat, the sedge wren as much as the muskrat.”

Since the Illinois hunt began last month, the state’s Department of Natural Resources has also been monitoring where hunters make their kills. For their part, Jacques and Swearingen have been hitting the pavement to knock on doors, meet with trappers, and hand out business cards. If someone catches or spots a bobcat, the biologists want that person to know whom to call. The effort seems to be paying off. They have already gathered more data than they collected in all 2015.

Come January, Jacques and Swearingen will set their own traps, live ones. Two weeks ago they called the landowner on whose land they caught M1, asking if they could come back. He told them to come on down; he’s seen two new cats roaming around.