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Of all Donald Trump's cabinet nominees so far, Doug Burgum has stood out for appearing to be one of the most conventional.

The billionaire governor of North Dakota – like most picks to lead the Department of the Interior, the largest landowner in the US west – comes from a western state. He is not a conspiracy theorist, he hasn't been investigated for sex trafficking. Unlike the president-elect's pick to lead the Department of Energy, he is not a fracking CEO.

"He's not a lunatic," said Patrick Donnelly, the great basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's not someone wholly inappropriate for the job. But I fear the way his extractive agenda will play out in public lands."

Over the next four years, Burgum is poised to radically remake the agency that oversees 500m acres (200m hectares) of public lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges. A former software executive and one-time climate pragmatist, Burgum has become closely enmeshed with oil and gas industry executives.

Burgum led the Trump campaign's development of its energy policy. After Trump asked oil executives to steer $1bn toward his campaign, Burgum promised them Trump would halt Joe Biden's "attack" on fossil fuels. As Trump makes good on his promise to "drill, baby, drill", Burgum will be overseeing the department that expedites those drilling permits.

"There's going to be an effort to get every ounce of fuel out of the ground and burn it," said Daniel R Patterson, a former environmental protection specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a division of interior, who filed a whistleblower complaint during the first Trump administration. "And if we do that, we're burning ourselves."

Burgum had long had an affinity for Teddy Roosevelt, the US president who established the national parks system and was a champion of the outdoors. Roosevelt was from New York, but had a special connection to the…

Maanvi Singh

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