What we literally have in common – own in common – are our public lands, our national parks and forests. In the West especially, glance at the photo library on your phone and it will probably look a lot like the person’s next to you in the coffee shop. Your parents’ and grandparents’ faded photo family albums probably have similar pictures too. That’s because our public lands shape us. They hold our uniquely American stories.

Memories of that backcountry trip. High meadow lakes. Campfires. A bird dog, smiling next to grouse. A successful deer hunt. A first fish. A family picnic. Close your eyes for a second, and you can probably see your own moments in a wild place.

All of this comes from the wild public lands we all still own. Which is why it is so unsettling that the administration continues to try to hand those places over to the highest bidder. And why it’s so disturbing that they are pushing deeper into our forests, threatening future generations’ freedom to experience what we have been lucky enough to know.

It’s hard to keep up, but the direction is clear: sacrificing our wild public lands.

Recently, the president tossed aside executive orders from Presidents Nixon and Carter that formed the foundation for how agencies manage recreation on our public lands. The process is called travel management planning and it helps identify the best places for ATVs, dirt bikes, horses, hikers and mountain bikers so people can enjoy public lands safely, responsibly and without undermining each other’s experiences. We have enough public land to support many different ways of getting outside, but only if we plan carefully. 

These agreements can be hard to forge, but they help protect access, reduce conflict and keep public lands healthy for all. By ending the basis for them, the administration has left many public land users rightfully nervous about what will happen now.

Meanwhile, the media reported that the administration plans to direct the Forest Service to open lands recommended for wilderness designation to development and other damaging uses. Through an ongoing review, the administration has also signaled it plans to take a similar approach to more than 100 million acres of wildlands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The result would be permanent and intentional: wild places degraded so badly that they would no longer qualify for wilderness designation. Because once wildness is gone, you can’t bring it back.

Most troubling of all is the largest proposed rollback of conservation protections in American history. The administration has announced it intends to remove protections on 45 million acres of national forests and instead allow roads to be punched into some of our wildest public lands.

Here’s what happens when roads get built: they bring wildfire. They pollute streams. They harm wildlife. In my home state of Montana, 97% of summer elk habitat is on unroaded forests, away from civilization, high in the mountains, in cool, deep cover. Such forests also provide clean drinking water for millions of people. They are where people go to hunt and fish and camp and hike — where memories are made.

So why these attacks on our wildest forests? Why steal from future generations? Why open remote places to development when there is an enormous and urgent need to manage the forests near communities, to protect them from wildfire? Why develop wild lands when we could instead put people to work improving access and maintaining trails?

Our country is blessed with lands that are still wild, where wildlife can roam freely, cold creeks still flow, and a person has the freedom to wander. These lands are our common ground. They are where we go to remember what freedom feels like. In a way, conquering them conquers us.

One force can stop this: the people who own these lands, all of us. We can demand better of our elected officials now, and at the ballot box in the months and years ahead. Future generations are counting on it.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and The Wilderness Society Action Fund.

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But both times, I answered that question about what keeps me going with no hesitation: wildflowers.

That mountain hike was through an area dominated by rocks that originated in the earth’s mantle and were transformed by great pressure on the deep seafloor before being uplifted millions of years ago. These rocks are low in calcium and other soil nutrients and high in metals like chromium that are toxic to most plants. So any plants able to survive and grow here are special, and to see them, and their beautiful flowers, you have to hike into places that seem barren until you walk slowly and look carefully.

My greatest reward on the Siskiyou Mountains hike was the split-hair paintbrush, its flowers a unique delicate lavender, their outline softened by downy silver hairs. Then there were the hardy succulent stonecrops, the oddly twisted flowers of parrots-beak, and the delicate blossoms of Lewis flax, their color the same cerulean blue as the sky. Finally, at the end of the trail, I came to a glade with tall beargrass in bloom, their tiny star-shaped flowers gathered into white globes that seemed to hang weightless in the air. All in all, an incomparable reward for my aches and pains.

The political demonstration was completely different. Joining some friends and neighbors, I went from a burning sense of outrage about a senseless foreign war and also a strong sense of civic duty. I admit it often seems futile to make these gestures of resistance in a little town in southern Oregon. But I don’t stop, and what keeps me going, what gives me the energy and will to speak up, is time spent outside with flowers, birds and the beauty of wild landscapes. In short, the nurturing grace of nature.

I know many people are suffering from the corruption and incompetence of this administration. As a conservation biologist, I am outraged at the attacks on our federal public lands and the dismantling of responsible stewardship by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service. As a scientist, I am appalled at the defunding and mismanagement of our nation’s scientific enterprise, from the National Science Foundation to the Centers for Disease Control. As a citizen, I am furious at the attempts to undermine our system of free and fair elections. As a human being, I am sickened by the treatment of our immigrant friends and neighbors. 

Turning away is of no help, while keeping going as long as it takes seems to require two kinds of response: Resistance, then recharge. 

Resistance can take as many forms as there are outrages to resist, from writing letters to the editor, to registering voters, to taking to the streets to protest or when immigration agents show up. Recharge, too, will be different for different people. But for everyone, I recommend that it includes time in nature. Most of us have an intuitive understanding that time spent outdoors is good for our mental health. A recent spate of research confirms these benefits, such as lowered blood pressure, improved immune function, and reduced stress hormones — all have been shown to correlate with time spent in nature.

My hike across a hot, rocky mountainside would definitely not qualify for what the Japanese call “forest bathing.”  Nor would sitting quietly in a busy city park or your own backyard. But time outdoors doesn’t have to be challenging or fancy to get us out of ourselves and away from screens, giving us the chance to reconnect with the living, breathing Earth.

It just feels good. Resist. Recharge. Repeat. And don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers.

Pepper Trail is a conservation biologist and contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Oregon.

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The well remains, leaking methane and salty wastewater into the ground for the foreseeable future. Plugging it could run north of $300,000. The company forfeits its $10,000 and vanishes. You and I cover the rest. That math rewards walking away, and it sat protected by federal regulation for more than 60 years.

In 2024, after a decade of warnings from the government’s own auditors, the Bureau of Land Management raised that minimum bond from $10,000 to $150,000, so that the companies pulling wealth out of our land would clean up after themselves. This week, the Interior Department proposed restoring the old number.

The new rule would cut the minimum bond on a single lease back to $10,000 and drop the statewide bond, which covers all of a company’s wells in a state, from $500,000 to $25,000. Both cuts top 90 percent. Interior calls its return to the old days trimming red tape.

We already know what a $10,000 bond produces, because the Government Accountability Office found that by 2018 the average bond that the Bureau of Land Management held against a well was $2,122, while cleaning one up ran from $35,000 to over $300,000. By 2022, the Interior Department counted nearly 16,000 orphaned wells on federal land, abandoned holes with no company left to plug them. Congress put up $4.7 billion in 2021 to start clearing that backlog. That was our money, spent shoveling out a mess that cheap bonds made inevitable. Now we get to do it again.

A bipartisan group of Western senators warns that rolling back the 2024 rule could leave taxpayers on the hook for more than $15 billion in future cleanup. This stays abstract only until you live near an unplugged well. They vent methane and benzene, a known carcinogen, and leak water laced with heavy metals and salt into soils and aquifers. The stuff travels. A raindrop that falls on an abandoned well in the high country ends up in the creek you fish, the ditch that waters your hay, the tap in your kitchen. We all live downstream of somebody’s leaking well.

What makes this rollback so strange is how few people seem to want it. When the BLM strengthened the bonding rule in 2024, it drew more than 260,000 public comments, and over 99 percent backed the reform. Polling also found that 90 percent of Westerners believe oil and gas companies should pay to clean up their own drilling sites. You won’t find many propositions in this country that nine of 10 of us agree on, but making polluters cover their own bills is one of them.

The industry argues that high bonds tie up money that could fund drilling, and that the BLM can always raise a bond, case by case, on a risky operator. But case-by-case review is the exact system the GAO spent years documenting as broken, the one that let the average bond sink to $2,122 in the first place. This is one piece of a much larger rollback of public-lands protections moving through Washington right now.

Strip away the language about energy and red tape and what’s left is a subsidy. A private company keeps the profit. The public inherits the cleanup, paid in advance by taxpayers who will never see a dime of the oil.

The good news is that the rule isn’t final. The BLM has to take public comment through August 24,  and it has to read what comes in.  If you’ve ever hunted, ranched, camped, or drawn water near a federal lease, this is the moment to say so. Tell them you don’t want to pay the bill. The land belongs to all of us. So, for now, does the tab.

Will Pattiz is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the co-founder of More Than Just Parks, a public lands advocacy and media organization.

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With advice like that assuring what seems a doable hike, it’s probably not surprising that during 2025, Grand Canyon Search and Rescue responded to 848 hiker assists and 232 search and rescue incidents. What’s more, 11 people died. In just the month of May last year, there were 13 rescues in a seven-day stretch.

One of the “in” hikes these days is the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim. This involves hiking 21 to 24 miles with almost 10,000 feet of elevation change. This feat requires serious levels of fitness and preparation. Yet on social media, posters encourage complete strangers to go for it, even daring people to try it twice. That would be almost 50 miles.

This seems like telling strangers traveling to Boston to be sure and run the marathon while there.  After all, lots of runners do it in four hours.

All of this makes me yearn for a little humility. When I led hikes for my local Sierra Club chapter, I would post that the trail was for experienced hikers.  I then got calls from people who had never even laced up their boots before, saying they had read online that someone ran it in three hours, so how hard could it be? Well, I’ve read about climbing K2 without oxygen, but that does not mean anyone can do it.

Online posters always like to brag about what a piece of cake it was for them, so surely an average hiker could do the same thing. But “surely” might turn into finishing a hike at midnight or knocking on the door of the ranger station at 2 a.m., whimpering that they simply cannot go another step.  Or they may end up being one of those search and rescues.

No one seems to post that a hike in Grand Canyon was the gnarliest thing they have ever done, that they almost collapsed on the trail due to heat stroke — a current danger — and thirst. 

Print media is often no better.  Outdoor magazines tout “Ten trails where you will never see another hiker!” That’s usually because the trail is expert-only, or not really a trail at all. I have met these backpackers far from the madding crowd, and usually they aren’t where they thought they were because they tried but lost the “see no other hikers” route. 

Backcountry rangers have told me that they cringe every time one of these articles comes out.  Partly because sending novices onto expert routes often results in calls to SAR, and partly because when hikers get lost, they often construct unnecessary and often misleading trail cairns which then must be removed. Nor does it help that the Park Service isn’t as adequately staffed to help hikers after losing about one-quarter of its permanent staff since January 2025. 

Online influencers rarely have skin in the game. Have they even been to the trail they brag about?  In cyberspace, one may say anything and there is no way to fact-check. I could post that I was the first woman to hike rim-to-rim with one foot tied behind my back, and no one could prove otherwise.

We need more humble hikers, people who post that a difficult and popular hike is not a creampuff, that it was a long, scary trek and they came out after dark with no flashlights, threw themselves at the feet of the nearest park ranger, and pledged their first born for a drink of water. 

I hope humble-hike descriptions may one day be welcome. Most hikers might not want to admit that they could not blithely knock off 20-plus miles with a song on their smiling lips, but they might relish the truth of a posting that went like this: “It was the hardest thing I have done IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, I threw my pack at the nearest dumpster, and I am now going to track down the person who said it was a cakewalk and slap him upside the head.” 

I can only hope that this might generate a few “likes.”

Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, a Grand Canyon educator, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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The Utah congressional delegation is not likely to celebrate. They’re chomping at the bit to challenge this executive power. In the Senate, Utah Republican Mike Lee leads the charge against what he calls “presidential abuses of the Antiquities Act.” The Act, though, deserves high praise, and Iowa Congressman John Lacey, a witness to cultural vandalism run rampant in New Mexico, deserves our belated gratitude for championing the law.

The law allows presidents to establish preserves solely on public lands that already belong to the people of the United States, and only if these lands harbor “objects of historic and scientific interest.” These objects can be big. One of Teddy Roosevelt’s first uses of the Act protected the Grand Canyon, a bold interpretation of the law that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1920.

After a president uses the Act to conserve historic places or significant landscapes, Congress often later elevates these national monuments to national parks, as happened with Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Grand Teton, Olympic, Death Valley, Saguaro and two dozen others.

One national park pilgrimage traced by millions of awestruck travelers begins at St. George, Utah, following an itinerary that wouldn’t exist without the Antiquities Act. Heading east, first comes Zion, preserved originally as Mukuntuweap National Monument by William Howard Taft in 1909, and now the second most visited national park.

This national parks tour leads next to Bryce Canyon, where you perch above hoodoos protected by President Warren Harding in 1923. Winding east on Scenic Byway 12, you drive through the slickrock bowls and fossil-filled badlands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase in 1996, and for the first time gave the Bureau of Land Management a conservation role instead of transferring control to the National Park Service. President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act in 2021 to restore the monument after its evisceration by Donald Trump.

Highway 12 leads to Capitol Reef National Park and its great wall of barrier cliffs. Established as an Antiquities Act national monument by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, it was later greatly enlarged by both Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.

Onward through Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which embraces Rainbow Bridge National Monument, designated by President Howard Taft in 1910, to Bears Ears National Monument, Barack Obama’s 2016 bow of respect to regional tribes and their sacred lands. After a five-year truncation by Trump, Joe Biden restored Bears Ears to full size.

On to Moab, past Canyonlands National Park, created by an act of Congress and so the single exception to all these Antiquities Act preserves, and, finally, to Arches National Park, first designated a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1929.

This is only a partial list of Antiquities Act preserves in Utah. Why so many?

The answer: aridity. Utah has the nation’s second highest percentage of public land because we are the second driest state. Our arid land couldn’t provide a living to homesteaders, so two-thirds of Utah remains publicly owned. Utahns surrounded by these public lands have inherited a gift.

All Americans have equal say over national public lands, yet the Utah delegation claims state rights that have no basis in law or history. They pepper the Supreme Court with lawsuits, and are attacking Grand Staircase right now, seeking to overthrow the current conservation-leaning resource management plan.

The American people believe otherwise. An impressive 91 percent of Western voters say national monuments should retain existing boundaries; 94 percent say rollback of environmental laws is a serious problem. In Utah, 75 percent of voters want the delegation to prioritize conservation on public lands over energy production.

On its 120^th anniversary, let’s celebrate this essential law that allows presidents to maintain, strengthen and highlight the bedrock values of our diverse lands, cultures, and communities. The writer Wallace Stegner famously said that national parks are “America’s best idea.”

The visionary Antiquities Act brings this idea to life, on the ground, for us all.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A new edition of his classic natural history of the Great Basin Desert, The Sagebrush Ocean, will be published in October.

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M-44s are designed to kill coyotes, foxes and feral dogs that sometimes prey on sheep and newborn cattle. They also kill at least 150 nontarget species.

This April 15, the Trump administration lifted former President Biden’s M-44 ban on the Bureau of Land Management’s 245 million acres, and once again, M-44s will be deployed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.

“I’ve worked since 1994 with countless people who have lost their dogs to M-44s or been poisoned themselves,” said Brooks Fahy, director of Predator Defense, a nonprofit based in Eugene, Oregon. “M-44s can never be used safely. They are indiscriminate killers, and no young child, dog or wild animal can read a warning sign. I firmly believe it is only a matter of time until an M-44 kills a child.”

During Trump’s first term, M-44s were in widespread use but hugely unpopular. The public wanted them banned. In 2019, when Trump’s EPA issued a proposal to keep them registered for use, there was such public outcry that the agency pulled the proposal.

Four months later, EPA reissued its proposal. During the public comment period, it received 22,390 written responses. All, save 10, opposed continued M-44 registration. The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to consider all “relevant matter presented” in public comments. Yet Trump’s EPA ignored the law, and M-44s remained registered until Biden’s ban.

This April 15, the Trump administration bypassed any public comment period, reauthorizing M-44 use on BLM land via a memorandum of understanding between BLM and USDA.

Wildlife advocates are furious. Predator Defense called the Trump administration’s resurrection of M-44s “insane.” Project Coyote called it “devastating.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “Reinstituting use of poison bombs sounds like war tactics from 1970s rebel guerrillas in Angola and not the actions of public lands agencies. Their statutory and moral responsibility is to steward native wildlife, not poison the animals.”

So, who’s pushing M-44s back on public land? Whoever it is, it’s not sheep producers, explained Carter Niemeyer, employed by Wildlife Services for 26 years and supervising field agents for much of that time. M-44s were created mostly for them, but they now use guard dogs. Littering public land with poison bombs scented to attract canids is the last thing sheep producers want, he said.

Still, Trump spokesmen claim that the M-44 ban was lifted to benefit the wool industry. There’s widespread speculation that Trump ended the ban simply because Biden imposed it. 

“M-44s are unforgiving,” said Niemeyer. “Any animal that triggers one is dead. With traps and snares, you can usually release nontargets. Random coyote poisoning — ‘preventive control’ — is killing coyotes anywhere and everywhere because one might someday eat a sheep. When we had, say, two coyotes regularly killing sheep, we’d remove them. That’s ‘corrective control.’”

Robert Crabtree, America’s leading coyote researcher, found that random killing creates more coyotes. In natural populations, average litter size at birth is five or six. But competition in summer decreases pup survival to one or two. Random killing reduces competition, resulting in higher survival.

Niemeyer found that random killing also creates chaos by replacing older coyotes that have learned the dangers of depredating livestock with younger, inexperienced coyotes that do depredate.

But random killing is precisely what will now be happening on BLM land.

There has been legislation to permanently ban M-44s on federal lands, but it has been in limbo for years. Thanks to public outrage, there’s new life in a bill called “Canyon’s Law,” named for teenager Canyon Mansfield from Pocatello, Idaho. In March 2017, when he was 14, Canyon encountered an M-44 on BLM land behind his house. He thought it was a lost sprinkler head.

When he picked it up, his 3-year-old yellow Lab, Kasey, got hit in the muzzle and died. Some of the cyanide also sprayed Canyon’s face, damaging his eyes. Until his late teens, Canyon suffered from chronic cyanide poisoning. It’s unclear if he suffered permanent damage.

Americans who love public lands, their dogs and wildlife need to ask their legislators to support Canyon’s Law, H.R. 4180 and S. 2179, banning M-44s. Primary sponsors are Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon. At this writing, there are seven cosponsors.

Longtime wildlife writer and author Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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Perhaps the world’s most widely known earthwork, it cost the artist less than $10,000 and took only six weeks to construct, thanks to rented heavy equipment and a hired crew. Smithson created other earthworks, but none received near the attention of the Spiral Jetty. It is 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide, and the locally excavated basalt rock and mud extends about 600 feet into the lake, curling inward twice, counterclockwise.

It juts out from a remote northern beach of the Great Salt Lake that once was the site of failed oil explorations. The black-gold rushers of the 1930s left most of their equipment behind to rust, and what little oil they found filled black puddles afterward. The other-worldly decadence of this place is said to be what attracted Smithson, and a word closely associated with his land art is “entropy,” a slide toward disorder and randomness. What Smithson might never have anticipated is that his artwork was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.

But Smithson knew his jetty would start changing the minute he finished it, and he made no effort to tidy up its shape or surroundings.

From ground level is looks like a jumbled pile of rocks. It’s only from the hillside above or the air that its distinct lines take shape. A visible change is that years of submersion added a cupcake-icing of salt to the black basalt rocks.

My partner of 30 years and I went on one of our first road-trip dates to see the jetty, which is, only 15 miles from Golden Spike National Historic Park. But once there, we found ourselves looking around in frustration and shouting, “Where is it?” because in the early 1980s, the jetty was completely covered by Salt Lake’s foamy waters.

The northern end of the lake is now sometimes Barbie-pink, just as it was when Smithson decided to stack rocks there into art. The pink is from the microorganisms that thrive in the increasingly salty water of the lake. When we visit the park these days, we watch people walk on the rocks and marvel at how much the lake has dried up and how far it’s receded since our first visit.

In academic circles, Spiral Jetty has probably been written about more than any other land art. Smithson’s work is said to express the intersection of landscape, art and environmental history, and while most art in a museum is a snapshot in time, earthworks are site specific and always changing. Whatever you choose to call it, Smithson’s approach is spreading. During the covid Pandemic when indoor art didn’t seem accessible, the jetty gained popularity with visitors, and Utah’s Box Elder County made significant road and sign improvements to accommodate the crowds.

However, not all land art is celebrated. “Stop stacking rocks” is a sign I never thought I would see in parks, but the do-it-yourself rock art that tourists try to create damages ecosystems, with desert parks harmed the most. Ecologists say that moving rocks harms stream beds and the wildlife that lives among the rocks. Some visitors have also taken to emulating the British artist Andrew Goldsworthy, who creates ephemeral works with rocks, trees, and plants that sometimes float off on water.

Spiral Jetty may be well known but it’s still remote. When I go there now, it’s with a better camera and a drone. Though the road has been improved, it’s still a quiet place with no cell service, and always, when I round the corner to the now-expansive beach where the jetty morphs into its next chapter, I feel a dose of awe.

Dennis Hinkamp is a Utah writer and contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. The academic paper, Reframing the Landscape: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, by Amy Reid, examines the lasting significance of Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork.

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He also started a UN Foundation to help bring peace to the world, thanks to his starter $1 billion contribution, and he tapped former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado to lead it. Wirth recalls how Turner, once dubbed “Captain Outrageous,” liked to shoot from the hip and could never be bothered by whatever passed as political correctness. A plaque on his desk in Atlanta said it all: “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”.

Most of all, Turner left a significant swath of private lands in better condition than he found them. In Montana and other parts of the Rockies, Turner bought huge ranches and made sure the land was healthy enough to grow a bison herd to over 55,000 animals at its peak.

Turner never subscribed to the notion that property rights trumped the common good. He also challenged the conviction that landowners ought to be able to do whatever they want on their land—even if it resulted in environmental harm.

As an entrepreneur with green intentions, Turner believed he could operate better and cheaper in recovering wildlife and rivers on his ranches that had been degraded by overgrazing. He was able to show that smart management also offered safe harbor to wildlife without sacrificing profit.

Some locals around Bozeman, Montana, in the 1980s thought Turner was out of his mind when he placed a conservation easement on his 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch, one of the largest easements in America at the time. The easement limited development in perpetuity, and had Turner exploited the Flying D as a real estate play, he could easily have made hundreds of millions in profit. 

Turner could make a big impact on people. One was the billionaire businessman Thomas Kaplan, who likens Turner to a combination of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. Kaplan says Turner inspired him to co-found Panthera, now the leading global wildcat conservation organization, as well as The Orianne Society, named after his daughter  and dedicated to perpetuating the survival of snakes.

Kaplan likes to recount how, when he visited Turner’s Flying D, he saw a wolf pack and howled back and forth with them. The ranch was home to the one of the largest, free-ranging wolf packs in North America, co-existing with Turner’s buffalo, and a population of elk, deer, moose and other wild animals that moved on and off the property.

Turner issued an edict that wolves visiting his land were never to be hunted or lethally controlled. Emulating the Turner model, Kaplan acquired thousands of acres in a vast wetland area of southwest Brazil called the Pantanal, and there he advanced a model of co-existence between cattle ranchers and jaguars. The Pantanal is considered the best place in the world for watching jaguars, and even cattle ranchers, who used to shoot the cats, now have eco-lodges on their estancias.

Turner was aware of his foibles, for which he hoped he would be forgiven. Biologist Mike Phillips, who oversaw a number of rewilding projects for Turner, told me, “In these recent years, as he was in decline, Ted once asked me, “Mike, we did okay, didn’t we?’ And I replied, “Ted, we accomplished exactly what we set out to do so long ago. I reminded him that he had done more as a private citizen to benefit native species than any other individual in the history of the world.”

Phillips said that Turner choked up with emotion.

Jane Fonda, Turner’s “third and favorite wife,” according to those who knew the couple, told me that after a brutal childhood with a hard-driving father who took his own life, along with a sister who died young from lupus, Turner found solace in nature.

“What did he want most of all? asked Fonda. “To be recognized as a good guy. There was a part of Ted who believed that by trying to save nature and bring more peace to the world, he could save himself. But he saved much more than that.”

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and founder of Yellowstonian.org, who wrote an award-winning biography about Turner.

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That approach is relevant for those of us working to protect public lands as we confront the equivalent of a massive hemorrhage. It is Congress’ unconstrained use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to destroy management plans that were thoughtfully considered and years in the making.

With only simple majority votes required in each chamber of Congress, bypassing committee review and without the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster, management plans that involved extensive public participation are being thrown out.

The CRA has already been used to undo six resource management plans and one mining prohibition. What replaces these plans is unclear and has plunged public land managers, local communities and even industry into uncertainty that will linger for years.

Last month, Congress used the CRA to remove protections against mining for roughly 225,000 acres at the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This was a major blow to the watershed of America’s most visited wilderness and a grim moment for conservationists. Now, the focus has shifted to Utah.

Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both Utah Republicans, have introduced joint resolutions to undo the management plan for the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. When you think of Southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante is at its heart; its vast landscape of canyons and mesas knits together Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

If this CRA resolution passes, it could devastate the monument, turning it into a place where out-of-control off-road vehicle use, landscape-level clearcutting, and other extractive activities would all be possible. 

The good news is that this fight is one that we, together, can win. When we do, it will set a precedent to protect all national monuments, national parks and beloved public lands that might be next in line.

In the House of Representatives, the ever-changing margins are razor thin—just ask Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, who struggles with vote counts daily. In the Senate, Mike Lee has proved notorious for wasting valuable time with legislation that has little chance of passing.

We know these elected officials have been hearing from their constituents who are unhappy about their previous votes using the CRA. In both chambers, a growing list of Republicans find they need to bolster their public lands and environmental credentialsbefore the mid-terms.

Lee and Maloy’s doomed efforts last year to sell off public lands proved highly unpopular nationwide and in Utah. Knowing that, members of Congress might want to think twice before tying themselves to the duo’s latest attempts to weaken protection for Grand Staircase-Escalante.

At the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, we’re no stranger to an uphill battle. Ever since SUWA was founded in 1983, we’ve sparred with Utah’s anti-public-lands politicians, who show a level of disdain for our national heritage that seems bizarre in its tenacity. A deep-rooted belief that a federal public lands system simply should not exist seems to drive these politicians—defying logic, economic data and poll after poll.

That’s why we are not shy about asking people outside of Utah to join us in speaking up for protecting public lands in Utah. Public lands belong to all Americans, and every day, we urge people across the country to tell their elected officials to speak up for public lands, Indigenous sacred sites and intact ecosystems in Utah—because our politicians won’t.

This is the moment to urge members of Congress to vote “no” on the Grand Staircase-Escalante CRA resolution. A vote could be coming anytime in the next few weeks. Time is of the essence.  

To make the case, everyone who cares about the magnificent red-rock canyons of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Southern Utah needs to act now. The more our voices are raised and registered, the stronger our message urging Congress to listen to the people who want protection and stewardship, not short-term exploitation of our public land.

Scott Braden is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).

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Not this year. In one of the driest springs in Colorado history, our watershed’s snowpack was 26% of normal on April 1. The impact on fire danger, drought, agriculture, economy, and ecology is going to be profound.

But this is the new normal in a climate-changed world.  Colorado has warmed 2.3° F since only 1980.  The Upper Colorado River Basin suffered close to record-low precipitation in March—normally our snowiest month—and record heat. Snowpack peaked at the earliest date and lowest amount ever. This collapsed the ski industry, and many resorts closed in what is typically their most profitable month. 

The kayak run my friends and I like best is called, ominously, “Slaughterhouse.” It flows through an alpine forest at 7,000 feet, near the town of Woody Creek.  Kayakers must navigate tight channels and churning holes, steering around boulders the size of VW buses. 

Though many of us have kayaked this stretch hundreds of times, we never paddle the same river twice, to echo Heraclitus, because flows are always minutely different, as is the turbidity of the water, the quality of sun, or clouds. At the same time, there is a Zen to the repetitiveness: a remembered left turn below a spruce tree to hit an eddy; a crucial line that splits two rocks; the plant smells we recall from last year and the previous 30. 

This friend group of men in their forties and fifties—a photographer, a paramedic, a ski mountain manager, a caterer—has become attuned to the river. We continuously observe snowpack and storm cycles throughout winter, with an eye to runoff. We know that when it reaches 500 cubic feet per second (cfs) we can float Slaughterhouse for the first time. 800 to 1000 cfs is juicy, a joyous party, and that level often holds steady for many weeks. The water gets pushy around 1300 cfs, and some of us stop paddling when it gets too scary. No need to worry this spring: Slaughterhouse, which can peak above 7,000 cfs, topped out at about 250 cfs. 

We know each other like we do the river. Banter focuses on making fun of our paddling. One meme of an upside-down kayak shared on a group chat read: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I lied about having a solid roll…where are you?” If you do happen to swim out of your boat, the group instantly switches from a bunch of jerks to a coordinated rescue team. Expect to hear “Are you doing OK?” for the rest of the day. 

Later, expect to be made fun of at that location for the rest of your life. When we gather at the takeout, we drink beer and reflect on our glories and failures, loitering past dinnertime. 

To be a good kayaker, you have to be willing to suffer the consequences of a mistake. Typically, that means being upside down in cold water, unable to breathe or see. Boaters call this underwater experience “the white room,” or “being Maytagged.” You accept the fact of an inevitable frigid swim, because, as old kayakers say, “We’re all between swims.” This season, the mistake we must endure is a societal one. 

In a sense, kayakers are prepared for the hot, smoky summer ahead: We’ve learned to endure some inevitable pain. Harder to manage will be the loss. We’ll have to forgo the camaraderie, ritual and traditions that come from decades of recreation tied to seasons, place and environment. The truth is, as the planet warms, we’re in danger of losing a sense of who we are. 

The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a term for this: solastalgia, the distress caused by environmental change, creating a “homesickness you feel while still at home.”

It is widely understood that climate change will forever alter our physical world. Indeed, it already has. It’s less obvious that it’s also coming for our friendships, our identity and the spirit and rhythm of our lives.  

Auden Schendler is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Basalt, Colorado, and is the author of Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.

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