It looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger has swapped his cyborg suit for a forest ranger badge.
Last month, the former California governor was made an honourary forest ranger, receiving his very own Forest Service jacket and badge at a U.S. Department of Agriculture ceremony.
He also shook hands with Smokey the Bear, thus making the designation official.
At the ceremony, Schwarzenegger said, “When I became governor of California, [I saw] firsthand the kind of devastating fires we have in California. I also have seen what climate change has done. We used to have a fire season, which was in summer and fall. Eventually, this [included] spring and there is fire all year long.”
The Forest Serve praised Schwarzenegger for his continued work on climate change issues. While governor, he supported the Global Warming Solutions Act, a law that states California must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Since leaving office in 2011, he co-founded R20, the Regions of Climate Action, an international non-profit that assists governments lower emissions. And last year, he opened the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the University of Southern California.
However critics believe Schwarzenegger’s legacy is less forest green and more “olive-drab.” The environmental group Sierra Club said that the former governor’s efforts to boost corporate California interfered with his environmental policies.
Also inducted as honourary forest rangers are actress Betty White, a long-time protector of wilderness and wildlife, and The Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell, who works as a tree farm owner in Georgia.
Now that he’s a Forest Ranger, perhaps Schwarzenegger will quit smoking cigars and trade in his vintage army green Jeep for a more environmentally friendly Prius. This shouldn’t be too hard for the Austrian Oak—in 2006 he gave up six of his seven Hummers, and he converted his remaining truck to run on vegetable oil.
