That they flourish is due to Yellowstone’s huge expanse of wildlands — you’d have to drive 1,000 miles to circle what’s called the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

But new policies from Washington, D.C., would dramatically reduce the size of these wildlands and threaten wildlife’s ability to survive.

Bigger is better for wildland ecosystems, a lesson learned soon after Yellowstone was established as the nation’s first national park in 1872.  When General Philip Sheridan explored the region, he realized even then that the park was far too small to contain its migrating wildlife; he urged expanding the park. I’m an ecologist who has studied the region, and we know even better today that climate, soils and food sources vary enormously from place to place, causing wildlife to sometimes seek new ground.

Through the years Congress has understood this pattern and acted. Federally protected lands around Yellowstone have been steadily enlarged, with national forests created in the late 1800s, designated wilderness areas created in the 1960s, along with wilderness study areas from the 1970s to 1980s, and inventoried roadless areas in the 1990s.

The Yellowstone ecosystem now has as much — or more — lands protected for wildlife than anywhere else in the lower 48 states. These lands are needed to keep intact what makes Yellowstone unique.

Protected federal lands have been the most important buffer against fragmented and developed private lands. In an Ecosphere paper, I reported that on privately owned land, vital signs of ecological health across greater Yellowstone had mostly deteriorated since 1970. But it was the opposite on protected federal lands, with most remaining stable or improving.

As this disparity became widely known, conservation collaboratives have formed to maintain or restore wildlife habitat on large private ranches, while also helping rural homeowners and recreationists learn how to reduce their impacts on wildlife. 

For example, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition is using wildlife-friendly fencing to contain cattle while still allowing wildlife to migrate. The coalition also supports range rider programs to reduce predator impacts on cattle. And the Teton Conservation District provides The Mountain Neighbor Handbook: A Local’s Guide to Stewardship in the Tetons to new residents around Jackson, Wyoming. 

Now, this administration is promoting policies that harm rather than help the Yellowstone area. If enacted, these policies would:

• Accelerate logging in national forests and expand access for motorized vehicles.
• Open inventoried roadless areas to roadbuilding, logging and mining.
• Roll back protections for wilderness study areas.
• Open the habitats of endangered species to development.

The Trump administration is telling us that these policy changes are needed to reduce fuels and protect communities from severe wildfires. The science shows otherwise. An analysis published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in 2014 found that people’s lives and property are best protected by reducing fuels immediately around homes — not in remote wildlands that are critical for wildlife.

Stripping federal land protections would deliver a knife to the heart of what makes Yellowstone special. Unfortunately, the other great natural ecosystems across the country face the same loss of protections.

What can we do? Comment on the Roadless Rule before October 6. We can also speak loudly and tell our elected representatives to halt the administration’s destructive policies. We can vote wisely in November to stop proposed rollbacks of federal land protections.

If we can block these threats, we can return to working collaboratively across ranchland associations, land trusts, conservation groups, local and tribal governments, recreationists, residents, and visitors. We all know how precious wild country and wild animals are to this nation, and we’ve learned what it takes to keep wildlife thriving.

We have to fight harder than ever now to keep intact the wild places we have left.

Andrew Hansen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is professor emeritus of ecology at Montana State University and lives in Bozeman, Montana.

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In the Wallowa National Forest, Huckleberry Mountain sustains rare species like the Wallowa rosy finch, and on the Malheur National Forest, there’s an Alaska yellow cedar forest hundreds of miles inland from its core range. 

These three national forests in eastern Oregon share something in common: They are intact roadless forests now on the verge of losing the protections that have kept them free from industrial logging and new roads. These lands are also common ground shared by Tribal members, hunters, anglers, wildlife watchers and anyone who values a quiet trail into the backcountry. 

Roadless areas cover nearly 2 million acres of Oregon’s national forests, all currently shielded from clearcuts and roads by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Enacted 25 years ago, the rule was widely supported because it solved two problems at once. It restrained further road building in national forests that already faced a maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars. It also curbed the steady erosion of opportunities for backcountry hunting, fishing and quiet recreation on lands undisturbed by roads.

But now, the Trump administration is working to unwind the Roadless Rule and strip all wild forests of these protections, with a comment period to do just that ending October 6. The administration claims that repealing the rule is necessary to combat wildfire, even though wildland firefighters and scientists widely acknowledge that most wildfires start along roads.

In defending the move to repeal the Roadless Rule, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said that management of roadless areas would go through a “thoughtful process” and would not “be a free-for-all.”

It is a test case because the newly released Blue Mountains draft management plan, covering the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla National Forests, is the first forest management plan in the country to be drafted on the assumption that roadless protections will no longer exist.  It gives the public the first real look at what forest management without the Roadless Rule actually means. The picture it reveals is bleak.

The plan for the three forests would triple logging levels, open old-growth forests to logging, scrap the road density limits that keep elk and other wildlife secure, and substantially weaken watershed protections that keep sediment out of salmon and trout streams.  

That is hardly a thoughtful process. It’s the free-for-all Chief Schultz said would not happen.  

It also runs against sound science. Roadless areas are well established as invaluable habitats for wildlife. The Forest Service’s own wildlife reports for the Blue Mountains reference roadless areas more than 650 times.

The native salmonids that are cultural icons of this region — Chinook salmon and steelhead, bull and redband trout — depend on the clean, cold water that roadless forests provide so well. Despite this, the Forest Service’s environmental impact analysis for the new management plan devotes a mere three sentences to how stripping away conservation protections for these areas would affect wildlife. 

This matters even if you’ve never set foot in the Blue Mountains, because what happens here will most likely become the template for other national forests.  

Eliminating roadless areas sets up our national forests for more logging roads that taxpayers can’t afford to maintain, more sediment in the streams that hold favorite fish runs, fewer quiet drainages to hunt elk, and fewer refuges for threatened species that depend on intact habitat.

In the enduring words of former President Theodore Roosevelt, “Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children.”

Now is the time to defend that heritage.

Submit comments opposing the removal of roadless protections in the Blue Mountains plan by September 30.

Keats Conley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives in Idaho and is senior policy and planning specialist at Defenders of Wildlife. When she worked for the Forest Service, she served on a specialized forest planning team.

Chapter 8 has been changed. It once read “The draft plan, covering 720,000 acres..” and now reads, “The draft plan, covering over 720,000 acres..”

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What also stood out about him was his public leadership — his readiness to march and commit civil disobedience, protesting against national, state and local government when he found their policies harmful and short-sighted. His targets included both a coal-fired and nuclear power plant, our war in Vietnam and the death penalty. He said he also opposed abortion. A Christian, Berry was a critic of organized religion for what he saw as its abstract notion of compassion.

He believed in staying rooted, living a simple life. He wrote, for example, in longhand with a pencil. His wife Tanya then used a manual typewriter to edit and complete his writing.

Berry leaves a sizable body of essays and poems, and 16 poems feature a “mad farmer” who rails against agriculture dominated by corporations that push rampant consumerism. “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain,” declares the mad farmer, stand-in for the author.

He also wrote a poem often quoted for its moving simplicity, “The Peace of Wild Things.” It was written in 1968 when the country was roiled by resistance to the Vietnam War; in particular, the draft.

“The Peace of Wild Things”

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Gary Nabhan, one of Berry’s admirers and a fellow writer, reacted quickly to Berry’s death. An ethnobotanist, Nabhan himself is a towering moral authority, speaking out from the Southwest against our government’s 30-foot-tall metal wall that blocks wildlife trying to migrate from both Mexico and the United States:

“Oh, we lost a saint today as Wendell Berry passed from standing on and standing up for this land to dwell within it. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, no single individual did more to broaden the environmental movement by including working landscapes than did Wendell,” Nabhan wrote.

“But for all his influence and contributions, it was simply his eloquence, humor and goodwill that won most of us over. My first year in college I carried a copy of his little set of poems, Farming, a Handbook, in my back pocket as if it was a complement to The Bible. “So here’s to the mad farmer who changed American letters, farming, and earth care for the better!”

Another admirer and friend is Taylor Brorby, an assistant professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman, who is also an author and environmentalist. Brorby said he had a complicated relationship with Berry.

“I don’t know what there is to say about a man who has so consistently frustrated me and who shaped my own thinking beginning 20 years ago, who’s taken me seriously, who has been my pen pal for a decade, and who has now died.

“The last time I saw Wendell, he took me out to the barn to call in the sheep. We stood, overlooking the Kentucky River, and he asked me, both of us staring ahead, if I ever had writer’s block. I was too young to know better and said no. He said for the first time in his life he had it, had been working on essays for years about a book others told him not to publish. And then he turned and asked me, ‘Are you happy?’

“I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. I miss him more than I can say.”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives and writes in Western Colorado. 

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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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Yet here we are buying bottled water even by the cup. People buy teeny bottles that hold less than 8 ounces of water. Then while hiking or traveling, they drink and then toss.

Plastic marked PET and HDPE for are said to be recyclable. Said bottles are shredded and melted into “nurdles,” the picturesque name for plastic pellets used as raw material to make more plastic products.

That sounds promising, but according to the Container Recycling Institute, 70% of all bottles wind up in landfills, the ocean, or littering the landscape.  On trails in Grand Canyon National Park, I mostly pick up empty water bottles, each one probably weighing one-third of an ounce. It seems a job that will never be obsolete. Shouldn’t we have learned by now that refilling water bottles is the way to go?

We’ve all learned that plastic is nasty stuff. Yale Climate Connections cautions that each time plastic is melted and remolded it degrades, and recycled plastic is more toxic than “virgin.” The plastic can be “up-cycled” once into a fleece jacket, but eventually that jacket will get shuffled off to the landfill. 

The real reason to drink bottled water is because of its purity, right? Pure fill-in-the-blank spring water. Yet the Los Angeles Times found that about 64% of bottled water is filtered tap water, and Consumer Reports found that bottled water can contain heavy metals and bacteria. A liter of bottled water might contain an average of 240,000 plastic micro-particles.

Even if bottled water comes from a spring, it must still undergo filtration and ozonization, meaning it is no longer “pure” spring water. Most spring water is also said to be minimally treated to maintain its “natural” characteristics, whatever those are.

Let’s talk about the carbon footprint. Is it green behavior to fly water across the country from a remote Pacific island?  In areas where water is mined locally, sometimes from public land, are locals concerned about depleted aquifers? Is that water taken for bottling—in effect—stolen?

Then there’s designer water with all kinds of flavoring, hydrogen water, which adds more H2, or oxygen-enriched water.  At what point does water become sort-of-or-not-water? 

I was once on a VIP tour of a resort in the desert that boasted bespoke water. When those bottles ran out, I offered to refill them, but people told me they would drink nothing from the tap. So I took the bottles into the company van, refilled them from a huge, portable jug that had been filled from who-knows-where but probably the tap, and handed them back. I was told triumphantly: “See? This water is superior.”

At the beginning of the Bright Angel Trail in Grand Canyon one day, I saw a hiker trying to tie a flat of bottled water onto her pack. I politely ask what the Sam Hill she was doing and was told that she’d been advised to drink a liter of water every hour while hiking. I pointed out that this particular trail was popular in part because potable water was provided at several rest stops along the way. She looked offended: “I do not drink tap water.”

As long ago as 2012 it was widely reported that 20% of the waste stream in national parks was disposable water bottles, leading to sales of bottled water banned in parks. Unfortunately, that ban was rescinded by the federal government in 2017, though parks still encouraged visitors to bring and refill their own bottles. No matter—the parks estimate that most of the waste they dump each year is still plastic bottles.

Who remembers drinking from the garden hose. Anyone? Did your fingernails turn black and fall off? A character in the book, True Grit, proclaimed that he once drank water from a muddy hoof print and was glad to get it. While I might not go that far, I have drunk from a lot of questionable sources, and I’m still here to tell the tale. You might want to try the tap.

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

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Such quiet is a rare gift. I haven’t been in Goodall’s Tanzanian rain forest, but recently shared Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park with a 25-year-old cousin visiting from urban America. Once in the canyons he kept pausing to say, “it’s so peaceful, so still.” He was astonished and renewed by that quiet.

This canyon country stillness is under attack. The assaults come in waves powered by motorized vehicles, engines revving.

First, the Trump administration proposes abandoning the 2023 Bureau of Land Management travel plan for Labyrinth Canyon. This 300,000-acre Utah wildland along the Green River just north of Canyonlands National Park is a gem—a fretwork of slickrock canyons along the river. Labyrinth preserves quiet for rafters, hikers, and bighorn sheep. No death-defying rapids here on this lazy, looping stretch easily paddled by families in canoes.

In a model compromise, the current Labyrinth plan maintains access to more than 800 miles of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) routes, closing only 317 miles to vehicles. In the surrounding Moab region, more than 4,000 miles of routes remain open. OHVs have plenty of room to roam.

But moderation is never enough for Utah politicians determined to motorize every inch of our public lands. They are pushing to reopen 141 miles of closed OHV routes at Labyrinth and hoping for even more. You can comment here before October 24.

In another backtrack on conservation in Utah, the administration has solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 acres of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks. The big views from Capitol Reef, Zion, and Bryce Canyon don’t stop at the park boundaries. Visitors, many from other countries, would be horrified by such industrialization of these world-class destinations. Rural Utah depends on these tourists to survive economically.

These are lands that even the conservative second Bush administration deemed unsuitable for mines. As Cory MacNulty, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said of the proposed leasing, “It’s absurd.”

Now the OHV battalions are threatening to overwhelm Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill on October 5 to open virtually every road in Capitol Reef to off-roaders. They claim that disabled Americans need this fundamental change to park policy, though even the park’s back roads are currently accessible by moderately high-clearance cars and trucks. There’s absolutely no need to permit noisy and destructive OHVs.

The senators’ second bill would potentially open other national parks to OHV use. Lee tried to pass nearly identical bills in 2021 and encountered a buzzsaw of resistance from national park advocates.

As retired Capitol Reef superintendent Sue Fritzke said, “OHVs would denigrate the very resources those sites have been set aside to protect, with increased dust and noise and impacts on wildlife, endangered species, and visitors.”

At each mile farther into remote corners of the park, off-highway vehicles become more problematic. Even though a majority of riders obey the rules, some will go off-road. They just will. Their vehicles are designed for this exact purpose. In Capitol Reef’s considerable backcountry—as in all underfunded national parks and monuments— staffing does not allow for constant patrolling to apprehend and ticket wrongdoers.

Capitol Reef is a place to slow down, not speed up. To revel in quiet, not reach for earplugs. To share the healing land with tenderness and restraint.

Lee disrespects national park values with these twin bills, and Curtis, who likes to tout his nature sensitivity on hikes with constituents, should know better. Their misguided proposals should be left to wither in committee and die. Those of us who love the restorative peace of national parks will just keep fighting such regressive bills.

In her last interview, Jane Goodall asked us to never give up: “Without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing. If people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. Let’s fight to the very end.”

We will.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Utah.

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Why did few people notice this directive to dramatically increase logging from our public lands? One answer is that it got lost as an engaged public fought selling off millions of acres of public land.

Final score: We got to keep the land but not the trees.

Most people support careful logging as part of the smart management of public forests. For instance, a now-irrelevant bill called Fix Our Forests Act had been steadily advancing through Congress, gathering support from both the timber industry and dozens of green groups, ranging from The Nature Conservancy to the Citizens Climate Lobby. By targeting over-abundant small trees while leaving the hardy big ones, that bill would have increased logging while protecting habitat and reducing wildfire.

Trump’s new law eliminates those protections, freeing loggers to cut big trees and leave behind the small ones. This will worsen existing tinderbox conditions, particularly in the West.

The law also essentially outsources some public forest management to corporations. It directs the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to develop at least 45 separate, 20-year contracts with private companies. The contracts would enable companies to log across whole districts—not yet determined—or even entire national forests.

An approach this broad has a sordid history of inefficiency, waste, and environmental destruction. For example, the Skokomish River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula suffered decades of damaging floods as a result of the sweeping contract one company had for the so-called Shelton Sustained Yield Unit. That sweetheart timber deal created many bare, flood-prone hillsides and lasted from 1946 until 2022.

Perhaps it’s surprising, but even timber interests oppose 20-year contracts. Over 70 logging-related businesses sent a letter sent to the Forest Service, pointing out that by allowing a single company to tie up publicly owned timber in a national forest, “long-term contracts would harm competition, markets and prices.”

Why didn’t industry opposition get heard? One theory is that these contracts can serve as a fig leaf masking the consequences of Trump’s high tariffs on Canadian lumber. As tariffs on Canadian timber raise homebuilding costs, the administration can claim to be offsetting the problem by providing cheaper logs from national forests.

In the meantime, the Forest Service is scrambling to meet an onslaught of new Trump executive orders. In June, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rescinded “seven agency-specific regulations” that resulted in a 66 percent reduction of mostly environmental reviews that will offer little opportunity for public comment.

Last week, Rollins also announced her intent to roll back the 2001 Roadless Area Protection Rule, which protects 60 million acres of wildlands. Until Sept. 19, the U.S. Forest Service is taking public comments for a study on the environmental impacts of rescinding the roadless rule. Fierce legal and political fights are guaranteed in an effort to preserve the rule.

All this amounts to a lot of change for an agency ravaged by Elon Musk’s crew of cost-cutters. Some national forests here in Washington State have lost over a third of their professional staff, while regional offices may be eliminated entirely. Gone are the many experts who had the experience to plan quality timber projects that respect fish and wildlife and reduce wildfire risk.

Will Trump succeed in nearly doubling the cut from our public forests? Based on my 40 years in the field, I predict the outcome will be a modest increase—but at the high cost of a severe reduction of best practices. That means our national forests, streams, and wildlife will suffer as dry fuels keep building up.

I see more big wildfires in our future.

Mitch Friedman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. He heads Seattle-based Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1989 after years with Earth First!. He is the author of Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to a Less Polarizing and More Effective Activism.

Correction: This column was corrected in the first paragraph to reflect that the amount of timber projected to be sold is almost 5 billion, not 5 million.

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The survival of spotted owls meant a lot to me as a young environmental activist. In 1985, I spent days living on a plywood platform perched high in the canopy of an Oregon Douglas fir. The tree was majestic, over eight feet wide at the base—just one of many in a stand hundreds of years old.

 If you’re a certain age you might recall the banners: GIVE A HOOT: SAVE THE SPOTTED OWL. They spawned a bumper sticker in what became a culture war: SAVE A LOGGER, EAT A SPOTTED OWL.

My 40-year career as a conservationist began in those Northwest timber wars as I joined other tree-sitters and protesters to halt the logging of gigantic old-growth trees.

The threatened survival of federally endangered spotted owls in the region’s forests became the central issue in a storm of litigation. In 1994, the dispute finally led to President Clinton protecting 24 million acres of ancient forest housing the owls. But even then, barred owls were invading from Eastern states, stealing a prey base of small animals from the spotted owls. The numbers of spotted owls continued to plummet.

Last August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed off on a controversial Barred Owl Management Strategy that relies on hiring sharpshooters to kill up to 16,000 barred owls a year at a cost of up to $12 million. The plan aims to give spotted owls a chance to survive.

During the 1990s, President Clinton’s sweeping forest plan to save the owls by saving old-growth forests was among many highlights of my conservation career. But I also recall numerous lows-lows. The first was when I learned that loggers had chain sawed that huge tree I’d occupied.

Mostly, I’ve managed to be hopeful about conservation no matter the grief from accelerating losses on the ground. But here’s the dilemma: How are we to process the steady decline of the spotted owl? Conservationists won an epic battle against logging because of these owls, only to see their habitat becoming the arena for an owl-on-owl smackdown.

Must the solution be that we shoot one species to save another? The plan is based on research overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose experiments showed that removing barred owls in limited areas could help spotted owls survive.

When the federal agency’s plan was announced, animal welfare interests sued to block it, arguing that it would fail. They also claimed the costs would add up to more than $1 billion over three decades. Officials at the agency say they will start small and demonstrate their plan’s effectiveness and affordability.

Mixed feelings like mine are shared. Madeleine Cameron, who was part of a University of Wisconsin team involved in experimental removals of barred owls, told the Seattle Times: “I personally did not decide to do owl work thinking this is where my career would be. You get there through watching all your favorite owls disappear.” Meanwhile, some biologists foresee adaptation and hybridization. “Sparred” owls already exist in the Northwest, filling the niche of displaced spotted owls.

Reluctantly, I support killing some barred owls. But like Cameron, this is not what drew me into conservation. And now the whole issue might be academic as the Trump administration disrupts scientific research and agency continuity.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutters fired more than 400 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees in March, an action the Supreme Court upheld April 8. With voluntary retirements and likely further reductions in force, it’s a real question whether the agency will have the funds or staff to carry out the shooting of barred owls.

Meanwhile, the bullies of the forest are winning.

Mitch Friedman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. He heads Seattle-based Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1989 after years with Earth First!. His book, Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to a Less Polarizing and More Effective Activism, is about to be published.

The post Must we kill one species to save another? appeared first on Writers On The Range.

The reality is that long after I’m gone, most or all of those wells will remain unplugged. The companies and people who once owned them will have been allowed to walk away from their responsibility to clean up their mess.

Uncapped wells are what happens when the federal government enables the fossil-fuel industry to dominate energy policies, as is happening again now, both in the Interior Department and Congress. The policies emerging would allow companies, including many foreign ones, to profit from public lands and minerals that all Americans own. They would also leave taxpayers holding the bag for cleaning up leaking wells.

These abandoned wells already have consequences for wildlife, air, water and rural people. Kirk Panasuk, a rancher in Bainville, Montana, said: “I have personally experienced serious health scares after breathing toxic fumes from oil and gas wells near my property. And I’ve seen too many of my friends and neighbors in this part of the country have their water contaminated or their land destroyed by rushed and reckless industrial projects.”

Republicans and Democrats in previous administrations and Congresses took pains to reform this historically biased federal energy system because of the damage done to rural communities and American taxpayers. Now, the federal government is rolling back those reforms.

Recently, the Interior Department announced that “emergency permitting procedures” were necessary when carrying out NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Timelines for environmental assessments for fossil-fuel projects were changed from one year to 14 days, without requiring a public comment period. The timeline for more complicated environmental impact statements was cut from two years to 28 days, with only a 10-day public comment period.

In May, the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled its piece of the House budget bill, which enables the federal government to expedite oil, gas, coal and mineral development. It gives Americans basically no say on whether those projects should move ahead, while keeping taxpayers from receiving a fair return on the development of publicly owned lands and minerals. 

The administration’s justification for expediting permits is that we face “a national energy emergency.” No such emergency exists. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas and is producing more oil than any other country on Earth.

Both the House bill—just passed and now before the Senate—and the Interior Department’s policies, ignore the long-standing mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses. Instead, the new policies:

• Drastically reduce the public’s role in the permitting process.
• Allow large corporations to pay to evade environmental and judicial review.
• Exempt millions of acres of private lands with federal minerals and thousands of wells on these lands from federal permitting and mitigation requirements.

The House bill would also slash the royalty rate for oil and gas production from 16.67% to 12.5%, depriving state and local governments of funding they depend on for schools, roads and other essential services. An analysis by Resources for the Future found that the proposed lower royalty rates would result in a loss of nearly $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. 

The Interior Department’s emergency permitting procedures and the House bill are assaults the federal government has waged on public lands since January. The public has been shoved to the side as oil and gas drillers enjoy their energy dominance throughout our public lands.

Now, it’s up to the Senate to strip out these gifts to the fossil fuel industry, and it’s up to us tell our elected Senate representatives that these policies ignore the wishes of Westerners. We have told pollsters innumerable times that we support conservation, not exploitation of public lands for private interests. What’s happening now is radically wrong.

Barbara Vasquez is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A retired PhD

biomedical researcher and semiconductor engineer, she is board chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils and a board member of the Western Colorado Alliance.

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