Thank you.

The Wilderness Society

By Yvette Lopez-Ledesma

Update: California voters have passed Proposition 68 on June 5 in the primary election ballot, investing $4 billion to protect water, bolster drought preparedness, promote groundwater clean-up, and increase access to clean, safe neighborhood parks.

When I was growing up, my family often turned to parks and California state beaches to bond and play outdoors. My good health as a child and in my pre-teen years can be partially attributed to having spaces for safe, active recreation close-by. The feeling of being enveloped in fresh air and the overall quality of life near these open spaces led me to develop a love for the outdoors. Trips to the local park were always an opportunity to run free and make friends over a game of tag.

My family also loved to take road trips. As we traveled through the state, I started to notice that many places didn’t have access to safe parks and beaches. In so many rural farming communities, dense urban centers, and border towns, recreation meant running around in someone’s front yard or playing video games in the living room. For the places that did have parks nearby, often other barriers prevented us from using them. On outings to visit family in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles and Riverside, I usually spent time indoors with my cousins, because outdoor air quality was bad and parks were not safe for children to play.

As I have grown, so too has my love for parks. I find myself with less proximity to the open spaces of my childhood, and recognizing my own need for the outdoors, I chose a professional career in environmental advocacy. For the past 13 years, I have lived in the Northeast San Fernando Valley with my partner and our two dogs. Our post-war, single-family-home neighborhood of Arleta is nestled between two freeways, and marked by wide arterial streets and desolate pits of dirt that serve as a place for storm water capture. We have one local park within walking distance, but it is inadequate for the need in the area.

The parks-to-people ratio in our neighborhood is 1 acre per 1,000 people — far below the national average of 10 acres per 1000 people. The closest beaches are a 45-minute drive away, or a two-hour transit ride. I find myself driving for miles, just to access open space for an occasional weekend walk or hike.

I find myself driving for miles, just to access open space for an occasional weekend walk or hike.

Our neighborhood sits in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, where the L.A. River begins. Historic flooding in this region spurred the rapid transformation of the river, its natural streams and tributaries, into a vast network of fenced off concrete channels, crisscrossing and dividing neighborhoods. Neighborhood leaders and conservation advocates have already proven through small-scale restoration projects, that these channels can be transformed into a gateway to recreation, waters and open space. This is fertile ground for biking and walking trails, places to play and exercise outside. It’s one of the many places across the state where multi-benefit park projects can boost community health and improve water quality and quantity. In a state that is working to reach ambitious climate goals, create more resilient communities, and recover from drought, these benefits matter and make lives better.

So how can we transform these concrete channels that achieve only the single-purpose of flood control, and opt for multi-benefit projects, particularly in our most park deprived, concrete surrounded communities?

Policy change and legislative action are the most decisive way forward. In a time when the federal government is threatening our access to public lands and clean water, leaders in California are pushing back hard. We need to support political efforts to ensure that all Californians have access to clean water and the various park and natural landscapes that make up our great state.

A historic achievement on June 5 shows how advocates for parks, open space, sustainable water policies, and conservation came together to generate support for Proposition 68, The Clean Water and Safe Parks Act.

Prop 68 appeared on the June 5th primary election ballot in California as a bond measure for parks, natural resources protection, climate adaptation, water quality and supply and flood protection. A broad group of residents, community groups and environmental organizations rallied to support California’s outdoor spaces, promote healthier neighborhoods, and protect the state’s natural resources — and voters responded, passing the proposition.

This $4 billion bond measure represents a powerful opportunity to not only ensure access to clean water and safe parks, but also to provide jobs and education, funding for additional conservation projects and to connect parks, trails, and beaches. It calls out the need for urban multi-benefit projects and focus efforts on disadvantaged communities, like mine. Prop 68 isn’t just an investment in solving current problems, it recognizes the on-going need to improve resilience as climate change brings more frequent extreme weather events, extended periods of heat, drought, and the heightened wildfire danger that can harm local communities.

Prop 68 will also address many of the barriers that prevent people in California from accessing nature, creating new pathways from the urban to the wild. Our connection to parks, open space and water starts in local neighborhoods and Prop 68 is a unifying force for equity.

Now the challenge is to make sure the immense potential of Proposition 68 is realized. For many neighborhoods, that means taking traditional water management areas, often fenced-off eyesores, and transforming them into green space that can be accessed and used in multiple ways by the community — to walk, bicycle, exercise, rest, gather and play outdoors.

I ask that you take some time to visit www.yes68ca.com to learn more about the investment priorities of Prop 68, and I urge your support for safe parks and clean water.

Visit www.yes68ca.com to learn more about Prop 68

Yvette Lopez-Ledesma is the Assistant Director for The Wilderness Society’s Urban to Wild program. Based in Los Angeles, the program works to make public lands more inclusive and to inspire everyone to care for our wild places.

When Kellie Walker started looking for work at a nonprofit, she scrolled past an online listing from The Wilderness Society three or four times.

“Wilderness, nope. Wilderness Society, nope,” she remembers thinking.

Walker, who is black, grew up in the Maryland suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., and spent her childhood summers visiting family in Detroit. Though her grandmother always insisted she spend time outside each day, her childhood didn’t give her much experience with the wilderness.

“When you are in the lower socioeconomic bracket, you’re not thinking about going to a park. Not one that isn’t close,” Walker said. “It’s not even on your radar because you can’t get there.”

Eventually, Walker realized she wanted to pursue working for The Wilderness Society based on the merits of the position itself, not because she had a great passion for environmentalism. And the barriers that discouraged her from cultivating an interest in environmental issues are far from unique.

People of color are underrepresented in environmentalism and in the outdoor recreation industry. Green 2.0, a research group that analyzes data on diversity in environmental organizations, found that as of April 2017, the full-time staffs of the top 40 environmental non-governmental organizations are on average 73% white.

Only one in five visitors to national parks is nonwhite, and since The Wilderness Society focuses on public land conservation and access, this is something of a damning trend in the organization’s homogeneity, too. At The Wilderness Society, 86% of the staff is white. Of the senior staff, 96% is white.

When Walker first began working for The Wilderness Society as an operations specialist a year ago, there were only three other black women in the organization, which employs about 150 people total.

“It was that disconnect — the fact that all four of us looked different… and people still called us the other’s name, which was a little rough,” she said. “I was the newbie, how could you possibly get me confused as Heather?”

In environmentalism, and especially in land conservation, there’s an unspoken expectation that the people who do this work care about the environment, and that they care because they’ve had direct experiences with the outdoors. Many people who work at The Wilderness Society spend their free time kayaking, camping, and hiking in the backcountry. For people like Walker who haven’t had those experiences, the motivation to work in environmentalism may not be there because of a lack of exposure.

Though Anastasia Greene, communications manager for The Wilderness Society for the Northwest region, enjoys spending time outdoors, she believes it shouldn’t be a prerequisite for working in environmentalism. Greene said anecdotally that she thinks it has been in the past.

“There’s all these little mentalities around what it means to be an advocate for the environment,” the Seattle-based Greene said in an interview at The Wilderness Society’s D.C. office. She is a woman of color leading regional communications strategies for the Pacific Northwest.

“It is an environmental organization, so there are people who are just gonna love like getting outside and extreme sports… But I think part of the culture that we really have to address is the expectation that if you don’t like these things or if you can’t do these things that you’re somehow less.”

Opening mainstream environmentalism up to more diversity is encouraged by a blossoming of smaller organizations such as Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, Green for All, Adventures for Hopi, the Greening Youth Foundation, Big City Mountaineers and the Center for Diversity and the Environment. The Wilderness Society has joined with its Urban to Wild campaign, which helps connect urban and low-income communities to public lands that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Urban to Wild (U2W) is an effort to reduce the barriers to outdoor spaces faced by our country’s rapidly growing and diversifying urban populations. Over the next year, U2W will be working in the Los Angeles, Puget Sound, and Albuquerque metro areas to enact new policies and practices. According to The Wilderness Society, the U2W model focuses on “protecting local parks and open space, creating new transit to trail opportunities and working with public land managers to ensure they are inclusive of local community needs.” The organization also plans to develop a U2W coalition on the national level.

Community-building for people of color in environmentalism, with specialized conferences and social and professional networking opportunities, helps people feel more comfortable and supported in their work. The People of the Global Majority in the Outdoors, Nature, and Environment (PGM ONE) summit brings together environmental and outdoor recreation industry professionals who identify as nonwhite to share their experiences. Outside of the professional environmentalism world, Instagram accounts like Brown People Camping and Women of Color in Nature highlight the recreational experiences of people of color and inspire others.

Walker is hopeful about the The Wilderness Society’s capacity for change. She says that the organization, spurred by changing views on the importance of diversity in environmentalism, is enacting policies designed to recruit people of color. For example, the policy sets a goal that a certain percentage of qualified applicants who are chosen to be interviewed should be people of color depending on the location of the position.

In D.C., where the population is majority non-white, that goal is 25%. The goal is less ambitious for the more rural offices out west, where the candidate pool includes fewer people of color. In Wyoming, where the population is over 90% white, the target proportion is only 10%.

“They’ve acknowledged it, and I think that was the biggest step ever, because once you acknowledge it, you have to do something about it,” Walker said.

“The Wilderness Society is truly committed to becoming a better organization every day by investing in a welcoming workplace culture, building a stronger recruitment network to diversify our staff, and challenging ourselves to make sure that public lands benefit us all,” said Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society. “The experiences of our staff should be a constant reminder of both what we have accomplished so far and how much we have yet to do — as an organization and within the conservation community as a whole.”

Recruiting interns and employees from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) is a new step The Wilderness Society is taking, due in part to the enthusiastic outreach of recruiters like Shaw-Walker.

“I did have a lot of people pass, just glancing like, ‘No, I don’t stand outside,’ and I had to say, ‘Hey, we don’t just stand outside,’” Walker said of recruiting at HBCUs. “While they didn’t know they were looking for me, I knew I was looking for them.”

But recruiting employees of color is only the beginning of the battle toward equity. Environmental professionals of color often face tokenization and microaggressions in the workplace, like being assigned to work on justice and diversity campaigns because of their identities.

Heather Davis served as the assistant director of The Wilderness Society’s Urban to Wild campaign until October 2017, when she took a management position at the National Wildlife Federation. In an October email to The Wilderness Society’s staff, Davis wrote that she was tired of being pigeonholed into certain positions because she is a black woman.

“I am realizing that as young as I am, I am tired,” she wrote. “I am tired of the burden of feeling like I must and I need to work on justice issues in the conservation and environmental community simply because this is baggage that I carry and bring as a woman of color.”

“This is why our diversity, equity and inclusion work as an organization and as a community is so imperative and important because there are other Heathers out there with the skills, desire, and passion to work on conservation and environmental issues, but we need the conservation community to see us as professional conservationists first and people of color second and not assume that because we are passionate about something that we necessarily want to make a career out of it,” she wrote.

Walker admits she, too, fears being pigeonholed. But Greene views it differently.

“To me, it doesn’t feel like being pigeonholed,” she said. “I feel like I need to be there.”

“I value speaking up and knowing that, OK, I don’t speak for all black women, I don’t speak for all people of color, but if I’m in the room, I’m gonna be heard,” Greene said.

The hope is that environmental work will one day be an appealing and welcoming field of work for more diverse communities. Although the organization is still in the middle of fully diversifying all of its offices, including those in the intermountain west, Walker has a good feeling about where The Wilderness Society is headed.

“From what I gather… it was a lot of kumbaya stuff at first,” she said. “But I think since we’ve officially introduced policies that directly affect how we bring new people into the organization, it’s working.”

“Our wilderness in its natural, unaltered state, is more valuable than anything that we could hope to extract from it.”

You may have heard already about the proposed reductions and divisions of the Grand Staircase — Escalante National Monument in southeast Utah. What you may not know is what that actually looks like. For the politicians creating these plans, Escalante is just the name of an area on a map, an area they say isn’t being used for anything worthwhile or financially rewarding. What they fail to see is that our wilderness in its natural, unaltered state, is more valuable than anything that we could hope to extract from it. That value can’t always be shown in numbers or data, it has to be seen, smelt, touched, and heard. It is a spiritual value that has to be felt by the human soul.

I’ve been traveling all around the Escalante region ever since the boundary reductions were proposed by the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. My goal has been to visit the amazing places that can be found within the areas that are to be excluded from both the national monuments as well as the newly proposed national park. In these areas there are plans to mine for coal, drill for oil, pave new roads, plant new grazing fields, and allow ATVs and off roading once again. My aim isn’t only to document these places and share what they look like, but to also share what they feel like in their natural state. I have been working to capture these places in a way that expresses their priceless value. I want to show people that these places are so much more than just rocks, dirt, and tumbleweeds. These canyons, badlands, and valleys contain temples of peace, shelters for the weary soul, and geological masterpieces that surpass even the wildest imagination. Escalante is a witness to the world that our planet is special, that it is a living, super intelligent organism, that creates, enjoys, and loves, just like we do. These places deserve to be protected for their celebration and worship, not altered, excavated, or destroyed in Man’s pursuit of short-term financial gains.

The estimated value of coal and oil reserves within the current monument boundaries has been reported to be anywhere between $212 and $312 Billion. It’s incredibly apparent what the motives behind these new boundary reductions and alterations are by viewing them on a map in respect to where the majority of the coal and oil is located. What I am sure many people are unaware of is that even within the two national monuments and proposed national park, mining and drilling will still be permitted. These plans seem to have nothing to do with preservation and everything to do with extraction and exploitation. Having one national monument on one side of the road, and another on the other side makes no sense from a touristic standpoint. Making a national park that excludes an enormous amount of the popular landmarks or their trails doesn’t seem to be the best plan either as far as creating protection or an attraction.

People that have sided with the new decisions say that it will be better for the local economy, and that their financial pursuits have been unfairly limited by the current national monument restrictions. My personal belief is that our public lands should be preserved for the good of many, citizens as well as foreigners, not used up for the benefit of a few.

Arguments have been made that even with the mining, oil drilling, paved roads, ATV off-roading, and increased grazing, the many incredible landmarks of the Escalante area will still remain intact. Anyone who has visited will know that these places have so many more dimensions that should be preserved for our benefit other than just the way they look. The experience a person can have in this wild area has so much more to do with the silence, the space, and the freedom one feels by abandoning the busyness, noise, and hurry of the modern day cities and suburbs. These places are the last few havens we have left where we can still experience the sacred stillness of the natural land. Among this incredible stillness, our minds, bodies, and spirits can finally become still as well, and we can become more in touch and in tune with our true selves, the meaning of life, and the world we live in.

Tour some of the areas in Grand Staircase-Escalante that will lose protection

Eric Bennett is a full time landscape photographer based in Northern Utah. He travels all over the world capturing photos to inspire humanity to conserve and protect the little wilderness we have left.

Oil, gas, coal and other energy companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to convince lawmakers to do what they want.

Once Donald J. Trump was elected president, the industry titans who dispatch “an army of three lobbyists for each member” of Congress, according to The New York Times, had the ultimate company man in Washington, DC. The ‘company’ in question? Any company interested in making a buck off America’s natural resources, never mind the broader consequences.

To wit: shortly after Trump took office, the CEO of America’s largest coal company, Robert E. Murray, presented his young administration with an “action plan” (read: wish list) featuring energy and other policy priorities. In the year since, Trump has largely fulfilled Murray’s agenda, teaming with legislators and his own lieutenants to gut federal agencies and roll back environmental rules.

Visit our interactive timeline to see all the actions taken by President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to give away our nation’s heritage to energy companies for unfettered drilling, fracking and mining: https://wilderness.org/trumpsellout

As a high-ranking EPA official from the George W. Bush administration said about the big coal wish list, there was “an expectation that these things were going to be accepted or implemented.” Energy interests have gone from a powerful outside force seeking access to a firmly entrenched tactical entity, as much a fixture at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave as the Resolute Desk.

No other chief executive has made such a fervent show of destroying common-sense rules governing how we treat the planet, or more slavishly pursued the agenda of fossil fuel companies.

Trump’s fealty to the fossil fuel cartel is deep, unquestioning and far-ranging. During his very first week in the Oval Office, the president revived the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, ignoring the objections of the Standing Rock Sioux and countless other concerned Americans. He has gone on to launch an unprecedented “review” rolling back protections for lands previously designated as national monuments; reverse an Obama-era rule in order to open public lands for new coal leasing; halt measures to reduce methane waste from drilling projects; and withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.

This is our new normal. A look back at Trump’s many conservation misdeeds so far will be instructive as we prepare to counter the fossil fuel insurgency and tackle the many challenges still to come.

Trump’s cabinet: a coalition of the drilling

After Trump’s surprising election victory, many conservationists were wary, but some were cautiously hopeful, determined to succeed wherever possible in a strange new nation’s capital. While Trump’s energy agenda focused on ramping up coal mining and other fossil fuel development, he had also gone on the record as wanting to keep public lands in public hands, bucking the anti-conservation trend among his political cohort.

But any hopes that Trump would be a protector of public lands were quickly dashed. Before inauguration, Trump began stacking his cabinet with a cast of climate deniers and fossil fuel insiders who would carry out his war on conservation.

To lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a well-known enemy of measures to reduce greenhouse gases and a notorious friend to the oil and gas interests he was suddenly being asked to regulate. For Secretary of State, he selected Rex Tillerson, former head of ExxonMobil, which spent decades avoiding action on climate change and played a key role in loosing a climate-denial misinformation machine that remains powerful in the world of environmental policy.

Most immediately relevant to public lands issues was Interior nominee Ryan Zinke, who initially seemed a moderate voice. But even he emphasized drilling above all else, fearmongered about the mythical “war on coal” and deflected questions about the value of establishing monuments under the Antiquities Act (a sign of trouble ahead). Like Trump himself, then-nominee Zinke said positive things about keeping public lands in public hands; but weeks after he was tapped to head the Interior Department, while still representing Montana as an at-large congressman, Zinke cast a troubling vote for a House rule that would make public land sell-offs easier.

In the time since, Zinke has not only adapted to the shape of the White House that hired him, but seemingly steered its public lands agenda in a troubling direction, cozying up to a broadly pro-drilling and development agenda that values public lands primarily for the commercial opportunities that can be extracted from or erected upon them.

Environmental rules slashed, making it easier to pollute

From the beginning, Trump has centered his pro-dirty fuel agenda on reversing or weakening environmental rules, making it easier for special interests to pollute without consequence.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has been the president’s chief enforcer. In his first few months, Pruitt oversaw suspension of the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature effort to address climate change, and reportedly convinced President Trump to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

Under Pruitt, the agency has fewer staff members than at any time in decades, shedding experience in favor of pro-industry voices. The agency’s new senior leadership have made a series of hasty decisions to unravel the work of lower-level staff. Pruitt even barred researchers receiving EPA grants from the agency’s own advisory panels, a move one former chair of an EPA science advisory board called “scientific censorship.”

Pruitt decided to roll back protections in the watershed of Alaska’s Bristol Bay just hours after meeting with the CEO of a company that wants to build a vast gold and copper mine nearby.

One of the most blunt examples of Pruitt’s work on behalf of polluting special interests (and contravening his agency’s purpose) was a decision to roll back protections in the watershed of Alaska’s Bristol Bay — a directive sent to EPA staff just hours after Pruitt met with the CEO of a company that wants to build a vast gold and copper mine nearby.

As a director for the agency’s Office of Water, who resigned several months after Trump’s inauguration, put it, “[Staff] now understand that the overall process will be to repeal everything requested by industry.” Indeed, through the EPA and otherwise, the administration has rolled back dozens of environmental rules, crowing about his backward march every step of the way.

Trump has repealed a protection for streams that would have forced the coal mining industry to stop dumping toxic coal waste and clean up after itself; moved to revoke the Clean Water Rule, which provides a mandate to protect thousands of streams and wetlands; suspended a rule that seeks to limit methane pollution from oil and gas development on public lands; delayed implementation of rules intended to prevent accidents at facilities that use and distribute dangerous chemicals; and stalled rules that increase oversight and safety measures for the use of certain highly toxic pesticides.

Broader actions aimed to change the underlying structure of environmental protection, as in the case of a quietly issued secretarial order that radically altered the way federal agencies prepare environmental analyses and disclose their actions to the public.

William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first administrator, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has lamented that he and others “spent 40 years putting together an apparatus to protect public health and the environment,” and Pruitt and others have already made fast work dismantling it.

Drilling, mining, logging & development poised to invade American lands and waters

When not hacking away at sensible constraints on pollution, Trump and his appointees have single-mindedly pursued the national goal of “energy dominance.” In practice, this means zealously encouraging drilling and mining on our wild public lands and waters, even when completely uneconomical or harmful to priceless landscapes.

There might have been no better example of this than Secretary Zinke’s decision in March 2017 to lift a recent moratorium on new coal leasing on public lands, notwithstanding either the climate change ramifications or the larger market forces that have sent coal into a terminal and irreversible decline.

Not long after the coal decision, President Trump signed an executive order opening most of the Arctic Ocean and some of the Atlantic Ocean for offshore oil drilling. Early in 2018, the administration went even further on that count, proposing to open nearly all offshore U.S. waters to drilling.

The theme of selling out our public lands and waters persisted with lease sales in Alaska’s Western Arctic Reserve and next to Bears Ears National Monument, Dinosaur National Monument and Theodore Roosevelt National Park, as well as a quietly launched effort to open drilling in ocean sanctuaries containing habitat for whales, sharks and sea turtles.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture even recommended re-opening more than 1 million acres of land adjacent to the Grand Canyon for uranium mining. At the end of 2017, in classic ‘news dump’ fashion, the Trump administration quietly issued a decision encouraging mining next to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, threatening the watershed of one of America’s most popular public lands.

In less direct ways, too, the Trump regime and associates pushed an extractive agenda, deciding to change the landmark (and bipartisan) sage-grouse conservation plans in what Nada Culver, senior director of Agency Policy and Planning at The Wilderness Society, called “a sideways attempt to abandon habitat protection for unfettered oil and gas development.”

Trump’s first fiercely pro-drilling year reached its peak — or, rather, its exploratory well-shaped nadir — in December 2017, when Congress escalated the White House’s onslaught with a tax bill that invites oil and gas drilling in the sensitive coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last great, intact wild ecosystems on the planet. Trump cheered this development on and, following passage of the bill, boasted it would produce “tremendous energy” despite evidence to the contrary.

Unprecedented gutting of national monument lands

In April 2017, President Trump showed once and for all that the vaguely pro-public lands statements he and surrogates issued on the campaign trail were a huge fraud.

Bowing to a few extreme members of Congress, Trump signed an executive order launching a “review” of public lands protected as national monuments. This sweeping action was intended to shrink monument boundaries and open sensitive lands for development. Millions of Americans submitted comments opposing the review and asking that land protections be kept on the books, to no avail.

Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante was a stunning rebuke to Theodore Roosevelt, whose legacy he once promised to honor.

In December, Trump announced his decision to effectively eliminate Bears Ears and vast portions of Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah — the prime targets of the review — potentially exposing thousands of culturally and ecologically important sites to drilling, mining and visitor misbehavior. Shortly after, Interior Secretary Zinke recommended reduced protections for national monument lands in Oregon and Nevada, along with potentially damaging management changes in Maine, New Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

All told, it was the most extensive rollback of land protections in American history, a stunning rebuke to Theodore Roosevelt, the conservationist president par excellence whose legacy a then newly-elected Trump once promised to honor. Groups including The Wilderness Society have filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s proclamations, and we expect further monument attacks by the administration and its coadjutors in Congress.

Our Wild? Not if Trump has anything to say about it…

Trump’s monument rollbacks played into a larger campaign that undermines the foundation of American conservation — the radical “land takeover” movement.

Originating in state legislatures but increasingly prominent at the national level, the movement aims to pluck large swaths of territory from the protective shield of federal agencies so that they can be taken over by state governments — making it easier for these places to be sold off to oil, mining and logging companies.

Candidate Trump had told Field & Stream he wanted to keep public lands in public hands, an implicit rejection of the land takeover movement, but this position didn’t last. After being sworn in, Trump’s Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, attended a prominent pro-land takeover group’s annual meeting. Shortly thereafter, the Interior department tacitly supported land sell-offs by offering positive testimony for a bill that would push the Bureau of Land Management to sell off 6,000 acres of public land in northwestern Arizona. In early 2018, Interior made its most shameless move yet, agreeing to a secret “land swap” that would give a portion of Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge to the King Cove Corporation. That highly controversial move is the first step to building a road that could endanger numerous migratory birds, brown bears and caribou while threatening to close off access to sportsmen.

Moving into the second year of the Trump administration, the public land takeover threat is mutating, easing away from the political fringes to operate more in the guise of common-sense reforms. One example: a bill recently passed out of committee to cut a Massachusetts wildlife refuge by half, highlighting a troubling defection by a congressman who ordinarily defends public lands, Rep. Bill Keating. As proposals like this gain more avenues for passage through Congress, a complicit — indeed, supportive — White House will mean they enjoy a clearer path to becoming law.

Undermining the core of American conservation

As if its varied and sustained attacks on public lands aren’t bad enough, the Trump administration is subtly eroding the ability for Americans to enjoy the lands they own.

Americans still love public lands — in fact, more people visit national parks now than at any time in history — but the Trump administration is working to chip away at that bedrock. In October 2017, the Interior Department proposed raising entrance fees at 17 national parks, sometimes drastically, even as the Trump administration continues to starve public land agencies. While the fee increases may stretch the typical family vacation budget, they would take about 173 years to address the national parks’ deferred maintenance backlog, a stated reason for the change. Not long after that news, the administration decided to eliminate six of the fee-free days it offers for all national parks.

Taken together, these indicate a political regime that is, at the very least, uncaring about whether Americans are actually able to enjoy the wild places that belong to them. Or perhaps they calculate it will be easier to carve up public lands for drilling, mining and logging if people can no longer afford to visit.

Amid unprecedented attacks, the resistance lives on

President Trump is the most anti-conservation president in American history, and the runner-up, whoever that may be, isn’t particularly close. No other chief executive has made such a fervent show of destroying rules governing how we treat the planet, or more slavishly pursued the agenda of fossil fuel companies.

Fortunately, the Trump presidency has given rise to a formidable resistance ethic. In courtrooms, in the streets of Washington DC and at the ballot box, millions of Americans have reaffirmed that they value “Our Wild,” galvanized by threats that are unusually brazen and rapacious.

In 2018, every seat in the House of Representatives and about one-third of the Senate will be up for election. History suggests that politicians whose agendas align with Trump, an extremely unpopular president, will not fare well. That means that for all the pain the U.S. has endured since election night 2016, we have a major chance to change course.

Make no mistake — however the midterm elections turn out, oil, gas, coal, timber and other special interests will remain powerful and willing to spend lots of money to influence policy. Donald Trump has given them a place at the table like never before, and countering their clout will take everything we’ve got. But for what feels like the first time in a long while, we have hope that the great conservation gains of years past will win out.

“Trump and his fossil fuel coconspirators can try to destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, carve up Bears Ears National Monument and overturn the anti-pollution rules that protect our communities, but will never roll back Americans’ abiding love for public lands and the physical majesty of their nation,” said Melyssa Watson, vice president for conservation at The Wilderness Society. “As bad as this presidency has been, a day of reckoning is coming for the anti-conservationists in Washington, and the will of the people will endure.”

Originally published at https://wilderness.org/conservation-were-calling-it-worst-president-ever.

The year 2017 kicked off with several big wins. Among them: President Obama expanding the California Coastal and Cascade-Siskiyou national monuments and declaring three new monuments saluting civil rights history in his final full week in the White House.

But even these victories played out under a pall. The election of Donald Trump to succeed Obama suggested the major conservation achievements of the last eight years would be short-lived. On the campaign trail, Trump had pledged to dismantle environmental protections and prop up fossil fuels without regard for how this would affect our lands and the planet at large. Everything seemed certain to change for the worse on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.

About a year later, it’s safe to say Trump has been waging a war on conservation since before he even took the oath of office — from choosing a cast of climate deniers to steer federal agencies, to repealing protections for sacred Native American cultural sites, to helping his congressional cronies open part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

If you feel like there has been too much bad news to keep up with, you’re not alone.

Fortunately, this period of intense threats to conservation has given rise to an equally powerful resistance ethic. With your help, we won a lot of important battles, and even made progress on the wilderness protection front.

This is a non-exhaustive look back at some of the big stories of the year and how we fought back every step of the way.

Trump’s cabinet: a coalition of the drilling

One of the best ways of taking a president-elect’s political temperature is by looking at the advisors, transition apparatchiks and cabinet nominees with whom they surround themselves. On this count, Trump may as well have been drafting a fossil fuel fantasy team. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, chosen to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, was an enemy of measures to reduce greenhouse gases and friend to the oil and gas interests he was suddenly being asked to regulate. New secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, assigned great influence over America’s international climate efforts, formerly led ExxonMobil, which spent decades avoiding action on climate change. Interior nominee Ryan Zinke emphasized energy production on public lands, fearmongered about the mythical “war on coal” and deflected questions about establishing monuments under the Antiquities Act (a sign of trouble ahead). To varying degrees, they and many other members of Trump’s incoming cabinet questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus behind climate change.

OUR REACTION:

We mobilized members to reach out to their senators prior to key cabinet confirmation hearings so we could get potential agency heads on the record about big issues and hold them accountable. Initially, then-nominee Zinke said positive things about keeping public lands in public hands, buoying hopes that we could work with him; but subsequent actions, including his own Interior department’s tacit support of some land sell-offs, served notice that this was not so. Later in the year, we rallied businesses and advocacy groups to file a legal petition directing Zinke to develop rules prohibiting the sale or transfer of public lands, so he could make good on his earlier statements. We still await a response.

In the meantime, we continue to watch Zinke and other agency heads closely, trying to move the needle of public opinion to influence them when it’s possible and marshaling legal resources to counter them when it’s not.

Lawmakers roll back climate and pollution rules

From the very beginning, Trump has worked with Congress to carry out the bidding of the oil, gas and coal industries that spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to influence policy-making in Washington, DC. These efforts center on slashing environmental rules and making it easier for special interests to pollute without consequence.

In Trump’s first few months, this included suspending implementation of the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature effort to address climate change; pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement; repealing a protection for streams that would have forced the coal mining industry to stop dumping toxic coal waste and clean up after themselves; and delaying a rule that seeks to limit methane pollution from oil and gas development on public lands. Broader actions aimed to change the underlying structure of environmental protection, as in the case of a quietly issued secretarial order that radically altered the way federal agencies prepare environmental analyses and disclose their actions to the public.

Through December, Trump has eliminated dozens of environmental rules, and he shows no sign of letting up.

OUR REACTION:

Some of Trump’s environmental rollbacks proceeded quickly and without an opportunity for dissent. When possible, we did push back, including successfully advocating for the Senate to vote against a measure that would have repealed a key rule limiting natural gas waste on public lands. Now that the Trump administration has suspended that rule, we have joined tribal groups and others to file a legal challenge.

Of course, few things are as important as mobilizing the grassroots. To that end, we published online activist toolkits to help people and make their voices heard at the local, state and national levels, and helped promote and organize around the People’s Climate March in the nation’s capital.

Drilling, mining, logging & development poised to invade wildlands

In its single- (and simple-) minded pursuit of so-called “energy dominance,” the Trump administration has zealously encouraged drilling and mining, even when it was completely uneconomical. There was no better example of this than Secretary Zinke’s decision to lift a several months-old moratorium on new coal leasing on public lands, notwithstanding either the climate change ramifications or the larger market forces that have sent coal into a terminal and irreversible decline. Not long after, President Trump signed an executive order opening most of the Arctic Ocean and some of the Atlantic Ocean for offshore oil drilling.

The theme of selling out our public lands and waters continued with lease sales next to Bears Ears and Dinosaur national monuments and Theodore Roosevelt National Park, as well as a quietly launched effort to open drilling in ocean sanctuaries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even recommended re-opening more than 1 million acres of land adjacent to the Grand Canyon for uranium mining. In lockstep with such efforts, the House passed a bill to allow controversial mining projects in the watershed of Minnesota’s beloved Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Logging was also a priority for Trump and his congressional co-ideologists. The House passed a bill to vastly expand the amount of national forest land that can be logged without public input, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski introduced provisions late in the year that could introduce logging and road-building to nearly 15 million acres of designated “roadless” national forest land while potentially setting a much wider, damaging precedent.

In less direct ways, too, the Trump regime and associates pushed an extractive agenda, deciding to change the landmark (and bipartisan) sage-grouse conservation plans in what Nada Culver, senior director of Agency Policy and Planning at The Wilderness Society, called “a sideways attempt to abandon habitat protection for unfettered oil and gas development.”

OUR REACTION:

Throughout 2017, we stumped for the idea that some places simply ought to be off limits to energy development. Our “Too Wild to Drill” report highlighted the last, wildest places under threat from oil, gas and mineral extraction, including the Arctic Refuge and Appalachian Trail. As individual skirmishes popped up, we directed the conversation with lawmakers, asking that they defend the Arctic Refuge, uphold Obama-era oil and gas reforms and push back against bad legislation. We organized a petition to the Interior Department asking that regulations for oil and gas leasing be updated to stop prioritizing drilling over conservation.

As President Trump continues to promise, quite fantastically, that he will bring back coal jobs, we keep elevating local voices who want to move away from dirty coal and its pollution. Our “False Promises” report demonstrated how coal mined on public lands in the West harms communities across the country and why the recent dramatic decrease in demand for coal is unlikely to reverse itself.

Congress votes to open the Arctic Refuge to drilling

The Year of the Drill reached its peak — or, rather, its exploratory well-shaped nadir — in December, when Congress escalated the Trump onslaught with a tax bill that invites oil and gas drilling in the sensitive coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last great, intact wild ecosystems on the planet.

It was one of the worst votes on an environmental issue in the history of the U.S. Congress, striking at the heart of a critical haven for dozens of key species, from polar bears and caribou to migratory birds and musk oxen. Experts believe that drilling cannot be conducted in the refuge without harming habitat and undercutting the very purpose of the refuge. This backdoor maneuver flouted decades of bi-partisan support for protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development.

OUR REACTION:

All year long, we fought tooth and nail to prevent the Arctic Refuge from being opened for drilling. These efforts included publishing a report debunking one of the primary pro-drilling arguments used by oil industry allies, relentlessly lobbing members of Congress to heed public opinion and defend the refuge and launching an advertising campaign to the same end.

“We and our supporters will fight this in the courts, in Congress, in corporate board rooms, and wherever else the fight takes us.”

Congress ultimately ignored the will of people in opening part of the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas development, but we stand unbowed. We will ensure that no drilling rig ever touches this priceless landscape. As Wilderness Society President Jamie Williams noted, “We and our supporters will fight this in the courts, in Congress, in corporate board rooms, and wherever else the fight takes us.”

Bears Ears and other monument lands carved up and disgraced

In April, President Trump showed once and for all that the vaguely pro-public lands statements he and surrogates issued on the campaign trail were a huge fraud. Bowing to anti-conservation members of Congress, he signed an executive order launching a “review” of public lands protected as national monuments under the Antiquities Act, a sweeping action intended to shrink boundaries and open sensitive lands for development. Millions of Americans submitted comments opposing the review and asking that land protections be kept on the books, to no avail.

In December, President Trump announced his decision to effectively eliminate Bears Ears and vast portions of Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments — the prime targets of the review all along — potentially exposing thousands of culturally and ecologically important sites to drilling, mining and visitor misbehavior. Shortly after, Interior Secretary Zinke recommended reduced protections for national monument lands in Oregon and Nevada, along with potentially damaging management changes in Maine, New Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

All told, it was the most extensive rollback of land protections in American history, a stunning rebuke to Theodore Roosevelt, the conservationist president par excellence whose legacy a then newly-elected Trump once promised to honor.

Not to be outdone, fringe members of Congress like Rep. Rob Bishop worked throughout the year to attack the legal basis for protecting places like Bears Ears, moving legislation that would radically cut down the scope of the Antiquities Act and restrict future presidents’ ability to safeguard public lands. After Trump’s monument decisions, Utah congressmen introduced bills that would both codify them and cut off attempts to fight them in court.

OUR REACTION:

After Trump signed the executive order opening monument lands to “review,” we helped elevate the issue and combined with other groups to drive more than 2.8 million public comments to the Department of the Interior, the vast majority opposed to the review. We also partnered with journalist Nate Schweber on the “Dispatches” project to learn how locals really felt about Trump’s rollbacks. Through this project, we were able to expose that local communities were largely against the changes that Trump claimed local people favored.

Finally, in the wake of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante decisions, we filed legal suits against President Trump, boosted by generous support from members. While the fight plays out in court, we are committed to working with partners to monitor the most imminent threats on the ground at national monuments, as well as preparing a response to further monument attacks by the administration and organizing opposition to anti-monument legislation currently in the House of Representatives.

Trump and friends create obstacles to the outdoors

During his confirmation hearing, Secretary Zinke said we need to motivate younger Americans to experience the outdoors and teach them the value of our public lands. He was right. Especially with American children spending less time in nature than ever before, and urban and LGBTQ communities marginalized or forgotten altogether in the “outdoors” discussion, it is vital to embrace an inclusive and equitable vision of advocacy that includes helping more people access public lands, and helping them feel safe and supported while doing so.

We did have one bright spot in this area in 2017: The National Park Service announced it will continue the Obama administration’s popular “Every Kid in A Park” program, allowing fourth graders and their families free admission to public lands. Unfortunately, for the most part, the Trump administration has thrown up obstacles. In October, the Interior Department proposed raising entrance fees at 17 national parks, sometimes drastically, even as the Trump administration continues to starve public land agencies. Just recently, the administration decided to eliminate six of the fee-free days it offers for all national parks. Taken together, these indicate a political regime that is, at the very least, uncaring about whether Americans are actually able to enjoy the public lands that belong to them.

OUR REACTION:

We encouraged members to weigh in during the Interior Department’s official comment period on national park entrance fees, raising awareness of the Trump administration’s nickel-and-dime tactics. Since we can’t necessarily bend the federal government to our whim, we also work to affect change at a more local level and shift the larger culture of outdoor access and recreation in a more equitable direction.

In Washington state, we helped launch Trailhead Direct, a pioneering program serving Seattle residents who may not have vehicle access to get outdoors. Later in the year, we convened the first ever LGBTQ Outdoors summit, bringing people together from the outdoor industry and conservation community. Moving forward, we are dedicated to making public lands a more inclusive space, and developing the next dynamic generation of conservationists.

Public land takeover movement marches on — but so do we

Over the last few years, the “public land takeover” movement has slithered from scattered state legislatures to the nation’s capital. The political aims of this enterprise are to remove places like national forests and wildlife refuges from the protective embrace of federal agencies and give them over to states or private interests. Though the new president and others close to him have offered nebulous criticism of that idea, it was a huge concern entering the Trump era.

Sure enough, shortly after beginning its legislative session, Congress passed a little-known rule authored by Rep. Rob Bishop that will make it easier to sell off national public lands. Days later, fellow Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz introduced a bill under the framework of that rule that identified 3.3 million acres across 10 states to be ‘disposed of’ and sold off. Chaffetz was forced to withdraw the proposal after drawing intense criticism, so anti-conservation lawmakers moved on to a different, subtler approach, exemplified by Bishop (yes, again) asking for $50 million in the federal budget to push state seizure of national public lands. Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake also pushed legislation to sell off national public land, and late in the year, a bill passed out of committee to cut a Massachusetts wildlife refuge by half highlighted a troubling defection by a congressman who ordinarily defends public lands, Rep. Bill Keating. The public land takeover threat is continually mutating.

Contrary to early promises by Secretary Zinke, the Trump administration is coaxing this menace along. Echoing legislation passed by the House earlier in the year, the Department of the Interior is rumored to be planning a “land swap” with a private company that would allow construction of a road through designated wilderness in Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a shattering blow to decades of precedent.

OUR REACTION:

After the adoption of Rep. Bishop’s rule making it easier to sell off national public lands, we encouraged our members to find out how their representatives voted and hold them accountable. This experience came in handy. We next identified the first land-grab attempt quietly executed under Bishop’s rule — the bill introduced by Rep. Chaffetz — and amplified it into a galvanizing issue for conservationists nationwide. Under withering criticism, including numerous phone calls from our members and a hostile town hall meeting, Chaffetz withdrew the bill. This would serve as a model to hold leaders accountable for their attacks on Our Wild. Two months later, Chaffetz announced he would not run for reelection.

On the administrative side, we rallied businesses and advocacy groups to file a legal petition directing Secretary Zinke to develop rules prohibiting the sale or transfer of public lands, so he could make good on his earlier statements. We will be monitoring its progress and pressing his office for a response. We will also work to guard Izembek National Wildlife Refuge against a federal land swap that allows an unnecessary road to be built in it, as we have done for decades.

As these attacks played out in 2017, we also raised awareness about the dangers of states seizing public lands, publishing studies showing that lands granted to Idaho, New Mexico and Utah have often been sold off to private interests, including cattle ranchers, oil and gas companies and railroads. Moving into the new year, as public land takeovers take new forms, we will be tracking them every step of the way, fighting them at the state and national level.

Silver linings: Bipartisan hope and wilderness protection

While 2017 was an incredibly trying year, we were able to work with allies in Washington, D.C., and nationwide to get some important things done for conservation, encouraged by a popular movement determined to hold Trump and Congress accountable.

Naturally, we were able to rally a lot of opposition to bad proposals, including bringing about the withdrawal of Jason Chaffetz’s land takeover bill, defeating a rule rollback that would have undercut efforts to limit methane leaks on public lands and driving millions of comments in opposition to Trump’s monument review. We waged (and continue to wage) many legal battles, suing over Trump’s monument decisions, his move to open the door for new offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and many, many others.

The conservation community racked up defensive wins on the state and local level as well, including the withdrawal of a bill in New Mexico that would have opened the door to privatizing public lands. In a powerful statement, the Outdoor Retailer show made the decision to leave Utah over the state’s anti-public lands policies. Even defeats sometimes offered a hint of solace, as a failed congressional amendment seeking to keep public lands in public hands drew surprising support from both sides of the aisle.

Believe it or not, we also made some legitimate proactive gains for conservation. In the spring, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced bills to protect the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a designated wilderness area, signaling that despite Congress’ later, devastating drilling move, we have the political willpower to keep fighting. Later on, long-awaited bills were introduced to protect approximately 35,000 acres of scenic areas on the California’s Central Coast and over 7,000 acres of wilderness in northeast Tennessee. In November, in an unexpected win, Congress passed a bill to protect Texas’ Castner Range. Late in the year, the Senate passed a bill establishing two new wilderness areas within New Mexico’s Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, setting the stage for a major vote in the House.

In some ways, victories are harder to come by than ever, but that has made our achievements all the sweeter. With your help, we are confident we’ll win important battles and stand stronger than ever in defense of public lands in the year ahead.

On Dec. 4, President Donald Trump signed an illegal proclamation to reduce southern Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by 50 percent. Coincidentally, the lands to lose protections are also sites of proposed coal and uranium mines. What do Utah locals think about Trump’s decision? We dispatched journalist Nate Schweber to interview people in the rural communities that would be affected by changes. It is clear from the results that they are not happy. Here’s how they responded:

Cassandra Begay, student, community organizer, Navajo

In May, Begay gained viral attention when Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke snapped at her at a press event telling her “be nice” after she asked him why we wasn’t visiting with tribal leaders during his visit to Bears Ears. Watch the video and learn more about Cassandra Begay’s story here.

Patricia Yeaman, mother, accountant, Navajo

As a Navajo, Patricia Yeaman feels the protection of Bears Ears National Monument is sacred business. Hear more of what she has to say here.

MORE INTERVIEWS
Editor’s note: The interviews below were obtained in the summer of 2017 after the announcement that the Trump administration would review more than 20 national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah. The decision to gut those monuments had not been finalized yet.

Joe Pachack, artist and farmer, Bluff, Utah

Jimmie Maryboy, Vietnam Veteran and resident of Bluff, Utah

Liza Doran, owner of Cow Canyon Trading Post, Bluff, Utah. Learn more of Liza’s story here.

Steve Simpson, owner Twin Rocks Trading Post and Twin Rocks Café, Bluff, Utah

Don Simonis, retired archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bluff, Utah

Vaughn Hadenfeldt, archaeologist and owner of Far Out Expeditions, Bluff, Utah. Hear more of what Vaughn has to say.

Jared Berrett, owner of Wild River Expeditions and Four Corners Adventures, Bluff, Utah. Hear more of what Jared has to say.

Marcia Simonis, Archaeological educator, Bluff Utah. Hear more of what Marcia has to say.

Download more videos and media resources here.

How do locals really feel about Trump’s move to gut Bears Ears National Monument? was originally published in Dispatches from rural America: Locals speak about Trump’s public lands review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s Note: Dave Showalter is a Colorado-based conservation photographer and author, and a Senior Fellow in the International League of Conservation Photographers. His conservation work is focused on the American west, and he has published two books — Sage Spirit: The American West at a Crossroads, published by Braided River (2015); and the award-winning Prairie Thunder, published by Skyline Press (2007). In this photo essay, Dave explores the sagebrush ecosystem of the American west through the lens of the iconic sage-grouse.

You can view more of Dave Showalter’s work at http://www.daveshowalter.com.

By Dave Showalter

Every morning in spring, sage-grouse arrive on their leks, the same open patches they’ve used as mating grounds for millennia, to perform their remarkable courtship display.

No matter the weather or politics in Washington, sage-grouse will arrive on these leks — strutting, fighting, chasing, and dancing to continue the species.

A face of our enduring wild, the sage-grouse have evolved on this landscape for 25 million years. Greater and Gunnison sage-grouse are hard-wired to spend their entire life in the basins and valleys of the intermountain west where sagebrush dominates. Sagebrush habitat is a mostly treeless landscape populated with bunchgrasses, wildflowers and other prairie plants native to the American west.

A noble western bird with a funky courtship dance, the sage-grouse can handle anything Mother Nature throws at them, from extreme drought to intense cold. But habitat loss is their Kryptonite and could cause this resilient creature to disappear.

An indicator species under threat

When the west was settled, about 16 million sage-grouse lived in the sagebrush ecosystem. Today, due to wildfire, invasive species, and industrial development, the habitat has been reduced and fragmented so much that populations no longer total even 500,000.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers the sage-grouse an “indicator species,” meaning they serve as the key barometer for the health of an entire ecosystem of species. This includes some 350 species, including golden eagle, elk, pronghorn, and mule deer — 351 species, if you count all the humans who contribute to and benefit from a $887 billion-and-growing outdoor recreation industry.

Plans to save endangered habitat at risk

With the sage-grouse threatened by habitat loss, westerners spent years collaborating on a solution that would safeguard sagebrush habitat while allowing public lands to stay open for energy development, ranching, recreation, and other uses.

In 2015, the Interior Department announced landscape conservation plans to protect sagebrush habitat across 10 western states. This reduced threats to 90 percent of the sage-grouse’s most important habitat, precluding the need to list it as an endangered species.

These plans are collectively one of the largest conservation efforts ever undertaken in the U.S., involving years of collaboration and coordination among Republican and Democratic governors, federal and state agencies, biologists, regional conservationists, ranchers, and recreationists.

But that could all change, as new Interior Department leadership considers dismantling this landmark agreement.

It was never about a bird — it’s about us

The debate over who gets to drill, graze, bike, fish, and hunt on sagebrush habitat was never about the sage-grouse — a bird that’s either in the way, or a symbol of all that’s wild in the west, depending on one’s perspective.

The story of the sage-grouse is, and always has been, about us.

Right now, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to pass on a proud natural inheritance to future generations. Let’s leave these plans in place that protect an incredible, American ecosystem.

Amazing photos: Sage rhythms and sage-grouse in the new west was originally published in Our Wild on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

President Trump will soon travel to Utah to announce drastic cuts to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, ignoring the wishes of about 91 percent of Utahns.

Media are reporting that President Trump will arrive Dec. 4 to make the long-expected proclamation, declining either to visit the monuments or consider the sizeable majority of Utah residents who opposed his administration’s punitive review of these and other public lands in the first place.

5 lies the Trump administration tells about its anti-Bears Ears crusade

This sad news is months in the making. In April 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to review 27 public lands designated as national monuments under the Antiquities Act, with an eye toward shrinking boundaries and reducing protection for many of them.

From the very beginning, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante were presumed to loom largest in the administration’s crosshairs. Shortly after, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke opened a comment period to solicit input from the public, ostensibly to inform his recommendations about what to do with these places.

Trump once said he has “heard a lot about Bears Ears” — specifically that it is “beautiful.” But apparently he hasn’t heard enough not to take action that could open more of it to vandalism and development.

When he announced the executive order, Trump offered an odd parenthetical that highlighted the absurdity of the entire process, saying he has “heard a lot about Bears Ears” — specifically that it is “beautiful.” Apparently, the president hasn’t heard enough to reconsider a course of action that could open more of that priceless land to vandalism and development, or even limit access for sportsmen and others who cherish it.

Utahns have rejected Trump’s review of monument lands

Utah politicians — notably Sen. Orrin Hatch, Gov. Gary Herbert, Rep. Rob Bishop and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz — have lobbied Trump to shrink Bears Ears’ borders. Trump has heaped praise on Hatch in particular, treating his advocacy as an imprimatur delivered on behalf of the entire state (read: this guy has assured me that I’m doing what you, the people, want).

But the facts on the ground show otherwise. Polling from before President Obama’s Bears Ears proclamation found that 71 percent of registered Utah voters supported monument status. Comments submitted under Trump’s review show that Utahns reject changes to that status by an even greater margin: just under 91 percent opposed the review.

And while Utahns as a whole are not keen on Trump’s actions, the expected announcement is an especially grave insult to the Native American tribal voices who petitioned President Obama to protect Bears Ears in the first place. Tribal interests already plan a legal challenge to Trump’s decision.

All told, 99.2 percent of the more than 2.8 million public comments submitted about Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and other monument lands oppose the executive order that placed them under scrutiny. Americans don’t support these actions, and they never did.

Stay tuned for more on how we will challenge this outrageous decision.

Originally published at http://wilderness.org/blog/trump-gut-popular-protections-place-he%E2%80%99s-never-visited-he-hears-beautiful.

As President Trump partook in the 70th annual National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, we can think of another bird that deserves a merciful pardon: the greater sage grouse.

For years, the long-term health of this iconic western bird has been imperiled from encroaching development across the West. But recent conservation plans — heralded as one of the greatest collaborative efforts to preserve wildlife habitat in our history — could save this bird.

This is great news, you might say, so why does this funny-looking bird with an even more ridiculous dance need pardoning as much as the White House Turkeys?

Tell Interior Secretary Zinke to pardon the sage grouse before Dec. 1!

The reality is that the sage grouse conservation plans, crafted during the Obama administration, could be in shambles under the Trump administration.

The plans provide the most protection to the most critical wildlife habitat, while allowing millions of acres of public lands to stay open for recreation, energy development, ranching and hunting. It is a rare win for all — ranchers, business owners, sportsmen, energy industry leaders, local elected officials, outdoor recreation leaders and conservationists.

Now, President Trump and his appointees announced they want to dismantle the plans and essentially hand millions of acres of public land over to the oil, gas and mining industries exclusively.

So while we are happy for Drumstick and Wishbone, we think that this endemic species deserves a second chance, too.

Tell Interior Secretary Zinke to pardon the sage grouse before Dec. 1!

Here are 3 reasons to pardon the greater sage grouse:

1. Save the bird, save the herd. More than 350 species, including mule deer, elk, golden eagles and pronghorn, call the sagebrush shrublands home. Science-based management connects critical habitat across 67 million acres and 11 states, preserving an ecosystem threatened by invasive species, wildfire and development.
2. Everyone agrees… except the Trump administration. For decades, ranchers, business owners, sportsmen, energy industry leaders, local elected officials, outdoor recreation leaders and conservationists worked together to find solution that safeguards habitat and allows energy development, ranching, and hunting — a balance the Trump administration completely disregards.
3. Stopping another sellout to the oil and gas industry. Secretary Zinke claims the plans interfere with oil and gas production, but a Backcountry Hunters and Anglers study concludes that three-quarters of sage grouse habitat would likely never be developed for energy development anyway. There’s no conflict of interest, only an intent to sell out our lands to the highest bidder.

We should be thankful for iconic American landscapes and native species, not wrecking plans that help preserve them!

Demand Sec. Zinke stop his attack on sage grouse conservation plans!