Congress largely rejected those cuts the last time around, but the administration is trying again, hoping to bully Congress into further weakening the management and protection of our public land.

A major part of Burgum’s strategy has been to continue the administration’s policy of driving out the people who do the work. Over the past year, Elon Musk’s DOGE-driven firings and buyouts gutted the Interior Department’s workforce. About a quarter of National Park Service employees have left since January 2025, including rangers, biologists, historians and maintenance workers, all pushed out through waves of terminations and early retirement offers. There’s also been the slow demoralization of being told your life’s work doesn’t matter.

This month, Interior announced yet another round of buyouts, the latest effort to thin the ranks of the people who keep trails open and fight wildfires.

What’s almost hard to believe is the policy of erasing history itself. Under orders from Secretary Burgum and President Trump, the National Park Service has removed or flagged for removal hundreds of interpretive signs and exhibits across the country.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—the birthplace of the 250-year-old democracy that we’re about to celebrate—an exhibit about enslaved people at the President’s House has been removed. At the Grand Canyon, signs acknowledging that white settlers displaced Native American Tribes were taken down. At the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, some 80 items have been flagged for removal. At Stonewall National Monument, the Pride flag came down.

Climate science has been banished from Glacier National Park, and Grand Teton removed a sign about an army officer who bragged about the massacre of more than 170 Piegan Blackfeet people. The stories of Japanese American internment in the western states, of women’s suffrage, of labor rights—all deemed unpatriotic by an administration that believes you can only honor America’s 250th birthday by pretending half of its history never happened.

At the end of March, Burgum also convened the “God Squad,” officially known as the Endangered Species Committee, for the first time in more than three decades. Its meeting lasted less than 30 minutes, yet the committee voted unanimously to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act. The decision will almost certainly doom the Rice’s whale, a species found nowhere else on Earth, of which roughly 50 remain. It was the first time national security has been invoked to override the Endangered Species Act, and conservationists warn that it will not be the last.

As for the U.S. Forest Service, draconian cuts in its staff are planned along with wholesale closings of regional offices and dozens of research stations. The agency’s reorganization also includes moving its main headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah.

This administration has made its intent clear: Cut budgets, drive out the workforce, erase history, greenlight extinction. Energy extraction is paramount, while conservation, research, and preservation are all values that can be discarded.

These are not disconnected policy decisions. They are part of the coherent vision of a cabinet secretary who sees public lands as surplus inventory and history as a branding problem.

But this is what Doug Burgum will learn: Americans are not going along with it. Polling shows that nearly 80 percent of the public opposes removing factual history from national parks. More than 99 percent of public comments opposed rolling back roadless protections for national forests. Congress rejected the worst of last year’s budget cuts, and it will be pressed to do so again. When the administration, aided by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, tried to sell off public lands through the reconciliation bill, bipartisan outrage killed it.

Doug Burgum can propose all the budget cuts he wants, but he will face determined opposition from all of us who treasure our public lands.

Aaron Weiss, director of the Center for Western Priorities, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues.

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Since then, visitors have continued flocking to parks: More than 25,000 visitors poured into Utah’s Zion National Park on a single day; at New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument, hikers went off-trail across closed restoration areas; at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, sightseers walked through sensitive meadows, ignoring posted signs.

Meanwhile, there’s been virtually a public blackout about what’s been happening inside parks after key staffers were fired. That’s because top agency officials curtailed the freedom of park staff to communicate with the public, while website updates went dark. As the shutdown continues, national parks lose $1 million a day in uncollected fees.

But the government shutdown and its salary hiatus are only the latest blows to national park management. Because of new federal policies aimed at shrinking government agencies, including the Interior Department, one in four Park Service staffers is now gone for good. 

I’ve been learning what this severe cutback looks like as the new Southwest regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the 433 national park sites across the country. I get to care about and advocate for a landscape of remarkable parks across Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona.

One of these parks, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, sits close to my home in Paonia, in western Colorado. Early in the Trump administration, federal reductions cut one-third of its staff. That meant even before the shutdown began, all custodial workers had lost their jobs. Workers who were already filling in for missing staff had to set aside core responsibilities and shift to bathroom maintenance.

With no rangers left, signs posted on the canyon’s North Rim warned visitors that they would need to “self-rescue” if they got into trouble. Then came the South Rim fire, which closed the park for the first time in its history, consuming several park buildings though sparing the visitor center. It’s no secret that wildfires in the West are increasing in frequency, even as fewer staff remain to respond.

Of all the American institutions I thought would outlive me, the National Park Service seemed like a safe bet. Throughout 109 years of park history, national polls consistently show that Americans of all stripes love their national parks. They also respect the rangers who bring deep knowledge to their work, rescue adventurers who get into trouble, and help ensure that visitors enjoy themselves. People from all over the world come to experience our national parks and monuments because this country has been wise enough to preserve our magnificent landscapes, wildlife and history.

Yet here we are witnessing a deliberate effort to mismanage our national parks by depriving them of the very people and funding needed for their upkeep. The Trump administration also plans another round of mass terminations, meaning many furloughed park staff may never return.

Earlier this year, Congress gutted $267 million from the Park Service budget, eliminating funding that was congressionally allocated for critical park staffing. President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget also calls for a $1 billion cut, which could force hundreds of park sites to close across the country. 

By starving the Park Service of necessary money for maintenance and repairs, wildlife management, research and other important functions, the administration is setting up our national parks to be sold out from under the American public or handed over to private interests.

We’re living in a moment where hypotheticals—once unbelievable—have become possible scenarios. That is, unless Americans speak up loudly. We need strong advocates to ensure that the Park Service can carry out its mission to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education and inspiration of this and future generations.”

We can help by urging members of Congress to hold the line against more indiscriminate firings of Park Service staff, and to restore funding so that parks can rebuild and flourish in the years to come.

Alex Johnson is the Southwest Regional Director at National Parks Conservation Association, npca.org, and 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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“Good Morning.” As an introvert I don’t understand why I have to say Good Morning to every member of a 30-person group. Nor does Good Afternoon roll of the tongue as nicely. Too many plosives and fricatives. Yesterday I got yelled at for not saying a cheery enough “Good Morning” to a passing hiker. I did not realize I was at a Downtown Abbey garden party.

Then there’s the consoling “You’re Almost There” hello. For one thing, I am almost never almost there when assured that I am. Volunteers at 10-Ks or marathons are warned to never, ever, tell someone they are almost there. Almost there is when you can see the parking lot.

An annoying question is “Everything OK”? Why are they asking this? Admittedly I have more gray hair than brown, but do I look so decrepit that they are concerned about my well being?  What would they do if I said, “It would really be 0K if you took my pack!”

“How you doing?” Do they really want to know that my trick hip is acting up, and my pack irritates that weird spot on my scapula? Probably not. 

“Good Luck.” Again, why? Is the only thing that will assure my success a whim of fate? I used to answer, “In the words of the immortal solo climber of Mount Everest, Reinhold Messner, ‘I do not believe in luck.’” That usually gets me a blank look.

“Where did you start and how long did it take you?” People usually ask me this while hiking in Grand Canyon. But why ask a random stranger how they did? I’m not racing. One woman asked me this at Bryce Canyon National Park because she and her boyfriend were attempting a loop. She thought they were on the wrong trail, but her boyfriend thought she was wrong. Turned out he was the one who was wrong, and he wasn’t happy about finding that out.

“Is it really harder hiking uphill?” Is this a trick question?

“Where are you going?” That seems a deep philosophical question to pose to a complete stranger. 

“How was it?” I guess I could answer on a scale of one to ten…

“Was it worth it?”  I’m always tempted to reply, “No, turn around now.” 

“Does this trail go anywhere?” “No,” I want to say, “it just kind of sits there.”

“If I hike down this trail, is there another way out?”  Not really: Walk in, walk out, is usually the case. 

Sometimes a joker will ask, “Are we there yet?”  “I sometimes answer, ‘Buddha would say, ‘We are always there.’ That gets me a laugh now and then.”

Several times I have been asked where the next shuttle bus stop is. If this is asked while on a trail in the Grand Canyon, the answer is “A mile back and a thousand feet up the way you came.” Poleaxed stare. “The bus doesn’t come down here?”  “No,” I want to say, “they tend to stick to the paved road.”

One young man told me, “I hope I can do this.”  I said, “It looks as though you are.”  “No, I mean when I am as old as you.” I guess I can take that as a compliment. Then there is the compliment: “I hope I’m as fit as you when I’m your age.” I want to reply: “I might be as fit as your age!”

A friend who let her hair go grey during COVID told me that she gets a lot more positive comments than she used to: “Young hikers used to mutter under their breath when I passed them. Now they tend to do a thumbs up and say, ‘Good for you.’”

I was hiking one day with a group of women who have hiked the West on trails for years, when a man stepped to the side to let us pass. He beamed at us as he said, “You ladies look radiant.”  Now that is the kind of trail talk I like.

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 an educator at the bottom of Grand Canyon. 

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It is our place of origin and Navajo spiritual traditions are rooted here. Even when we were forcibly removed from our homeland by the federal government’s Army in the 19th century, our spiritual and cultural connection to these lands has never been extinguished.

Utah Navajos still make use of this historic homeland, which is now known as the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, designated by President Obama in 2016. It is where we practice our ceremonies; gather herbs, firewood and cedar poles; hunt for game; rejuvenate our spirits and caretake our sacred places. Because the monument closely involves us, Navajo and other tribes in the area have been pushing for tribal management.

For many years, the Navajo and other local tribes—Hopi, Uintah, Ouray Ute, Zuni and Ute Mountain Ute—worked together to gain federal protection for this land. But what we gained is now threatened by developments that defile and dishonor the cultural and spiritual significance held by Navajo and other Native peoples.

The most recent example is the plan to build a 460-foot telecommunications tower on a parcel of land owned by a Utah state agency, the Trust Lands Administration. The land that would house the tower is in the heart of the Bears Ears National Monument.

If erected, this alien-looking tower will be a spear in the heart of the Bears Ears area. I am also saddened to think there will likely be more inappropriate developments on Utah Trust Lands within Bears Ears, now that the state has derailed a proposed land exchange between the Trust Lands Administration and the federal government.

The land exchange would have helped ensure that Navajo homelands are managed to protect our cultural and spiritual traditions. Now these lands—our heritage—face death by a thousand cuts.

The company placing the telecommunications tower has applied for and received a conditional use permit from San Juan County. But the company must also apply for and receive a variance from the county, because any tower higher than 35 feetis prohibited. So far, it has not applied for a variance.  

The National Park Service opposes the tower and has submitted comments to both the Utah Trust Lands Administration and San Juan County. The federal agency said the tower would blight the viewshed, diminish the area’s dark skies, and harm habitat for several threatened and endangered bird species.

For more than a century my people have had to fight for our rights. In 1868, when Navajos were finally allowed to return from forced exile, we were confined to a reservation south of the San Juan River. It was much reduced in size from our original homeland.

The prime lands higher up near the water and lush vegetation of Bears Ears were denied us. Nevertheless, these lands have always been a part of our cultural traditions, despite a documented history of racial injustices levied against Utah Navajos.

At every level, from county to state to the federal government, that history includes violations of voting rights, education and civil rights. All had to be litigated in federal court. Through all of that, Utah Navajos have fought to conserve and protect the public lands we traditionally used.

These lands need to exist as nature intended—to regenerate traditional plants and provide homes to wildlife that in turn sustain Navajo cultural traditions.

The Utah Trust Lands Administration and the federal government have a chance to do the right thing for Bears Ears. I urge the state of Utah and the federal government to restart discussions about a land exchange.

Otherwise, more out-of-place and inharmonious developments such as this 460-foot blinking tower could come to dominate the Bears Ears landscape.

Mark Maryboy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He served from 1984 to 2000 as a San Juan County, Utah, commissioner, and from 1990 to 2006, he was a delegate to the Navajo Nation Council.

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Three presidents have signed Bears Ears proclamations. Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, but supporters were devastated when Donald Trump eviscerated the monument the following year, reducing its area by 85%. In 2021, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries and then some.

What’s clear is that Bears Ears remains reviled by Republican officials and cherished by Indigenous tribes and conservationists.

The monument, 1.36 million acres in southeast Utah, lies within San Juan County. The Navajo Nation covers 25% of the county, and Native people account for more than half of the 14,200-person population. Just 8% of the county is private land while another 5% is state trust land.

The rest — 62% of the county — is federal land owned by the people of the United States and administered by the Departments of Agriculture and Interior. This immense commons testifies to the sublime difficulty of the place — beautiful enough to warrant preservation as national parks, monuments and forests. But it’s also arid enough to attract only a few 19th-century settlers to what had been Indigenous homeland for millennia.

I think it’s fair to say that San Juan County’s white residents never envisioned challenges to their political power. But in 2009, the feds came down hard on generations of casual pothunting by local white families. Then, after a century of oppressing their Indigenous neighbors, lawsuits strengthened Native voting rights. The county commission became majority Navajo from 2018 to 2022.

Native influence keeps expanding. The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition first envisioned a national monument and became co-stewards for these 1.36 million acres. They have a champion in Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, but such historic changes make the dominant culture uneasy.

In February, Utah Governor Spencer Cox dramatically withdrew from a Bears Ears land exchange poised for completion. This swap of state trust lands for Bureau of Land Management lands would hugely benefit the state. Details were already negotiated; each side compromised; the stakeholders were largely content.

But in 2024, Utah politics are stark, compounded by distrust and disinformation.

At statehood in 1896, Utah received four sections per township to support public schools and universities. The Utah Trust Lands Administration manages these scattered lands — blue squares on ownership maps — but blocking up these blue squares into manageable parcels means trading land with federal agencies.

Such trades aren’t rare and can be grand in scale. A 1998 negotiation between Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt traded Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument’s 176,000 acres of school sections for BLM land elsewhere — along with a hefty $50 million payment to Utah from the U.S. Treasury. Utah Trust Lands still brags about the deal on its website.

But the old guard is up in arms about the draft Bears Ears Resource Management Plan released for public comment on March 8. The BLM’s preferred alternative emphasizes traditional Indigenous knowledge and land health.

Any such gestures toward conservation elicit local outrage about the feds “destroying” the pioneer way of life. The subtext: the people long in charge don’t want to lose power.

Denouncing federal overreach is always a sure win for Utah politicians. In this year’s Republican primary, San Juan County-based legislator Phil Lyman is challenging the incumbent governor with fierce anti-public lands rhetoric. Governor Cox will need to protect his right flank.

Meanwhile, school trust lands within Bears Ears remain at risk. The second tallest structure in Utah, a 460-foot telecom tower with blinking red lights, could rise on state land in the heart of the monument. It’s been approved by county planners, and the Trust Lands Administration could add poison pills on other lands proposed for exchange.

The elected leaders of Utah have decided that the monument’s integrity and the needs of the state’s children matter less than political gamesmanship.

The five tribes of Bears Ears know better: “It is our obligation to our ancestors…and to the American people, to protect Bears Ears.” Their big hearts will win in the end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Utah and will publish the 35th anniversary edition of his book The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin next winter.

Corrections: The 4th paragraph has been changed to reflect the monument is 1.36 million acres. Previously it read 5 million acres. The 7th paragraph read 1.3 million acres and that has been updated as well to 1.36 million acres. Paragraph 15 is changed to reflect the proposed telecom tower would become the second-tallest structure in Utah. Not the tallest.

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In just two years, wildfire has killed an estimated 13 to 19% of all mature giant sequoia trees. These most massive of trees grow only on certain western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that divides California’s Central Valley farmland from the Great Basin Desert.

The loss of so many “big trees,” as conservationist John Muir called them, is unprecedented.

Many of the best-known stands of giant sequoias grow more than 6,000 feet above sea level in three national parks — Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite. A visit to these immense trees typically begins with a drive up from Fresno. From the valley floor, Highway 180 curves into foothills, then winds onto steep, tree-covered mountainsides where cooler temperatures and higher humidity take the edge off the California sun.

The road passes through Kings Canyon National Park, where visitors get their first impression of the big trees. As Muir acknowledged, words aren’t sufficient to convey the awe of that first encounter with giant sequoias: “No description can give anything like an adequate idea of their singular majesty, much less of their beauty.”

He added, “Nothing hurts the big tree.” Except in our time: severe wildfire and the chainsaw.

Muir’s words helped inspire the national parks that have protected many sequoia groves from logging, but our concern about wildfires led to government-mandated fire suppression for more than 100 years. Through a federal agency’s zeal, the big trees are in trouble. In the Sierra Madre’s fire regime, developed over centuries, sequoia groves burned every 6 to 35 years. Wildfire thinned the smaller trees and converted fine fuels into soil nutrients.

Without fire, sequoia cones don’t open and spread their seeds. The same fire also creates openings in the forest canopy, giving seedlings the sunlight they need to survive.

Research shows that giant sequoia populations were “stable or increasing” from 500 B.C. through the 1800s. Then came the 1900s, when “there was a massive failure of giant sequoia reproduction.” Without fire, sequoia seeds stopped sprouting, while the buildup of highly combustible fine fuels on the forest floor, and the greater density of smaller trees, increased the risk of catastrophic wildfire. 

As scientists began to understand the problem, the National Park Service implemented a prescribed burning program in giant sequoia groves. Evidence from recent wildfires indicates the program has been successful. Areas treated with prescribed fire burned less intensely, mature sequoias did not die and sequoia seedlings have since sprouted.

Clearly, sequoias need fire to survive.

The challenge is avoiding catastrophic wildfire, a challenge made difficult by today’s dense groves. According to Alexis Bernal, a researcher with the University of California at Berkeley, Sierra Nevada forests typically held about 20 sequoias per acre before 1860. Since then, fire suppression has allowed the growth of as many as 120 to 160 trees per acre.

Bernal advocates extensive logging before fire can resume its natural role. Emergency logging by government agencies has already begun in forests with sequoia groves, including clearcuts along roadways in Yosemite National Park.

Not everyone agrees that logging is the answer. Forest ecologist Chad Hanson, with the John Muir Project, calls Bernal’s approach an excuse to continue commercial logging of public lands. He believes sequoia deaths have been far lower than official estimates and that new trees can sprout even after severe fires.

Unfortunately, Congress has gotten involved. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, introduced the Save Our Sequoias Act in 2022 in the House. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, later introduced the act in the Senate. The bill would expedite mechanical “fuel treatments” by bypassing environmental laws.

We’re just lucky that record snowfall in the Sierra Madre threw a wet blanket on the initiative by reducing fire risk, as the bill has yet to be re-introduced in the current legislative session.

While the unprecedented threat to these priceless trees might be a rare instance in which “mechanical treatment” is justified, chipping away at environmental protections has rarely, if ever, proven beneficial for the environment— especially when politicians try to call the shots.

Giant sequoias need all the help they can get, but that help needs to be informed by good science.

Joe Stone is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the editor of Forest News, the publication of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

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A trio of bull bison — each a ton on the hoof — fed on bunchgrass. I watched my son’s eyes grow wider as one of the bulls approached our truck, as if it might want to rub off its winter coat on the fender.

Not long ago, the Bison Range visitor center would have given my family a history of the place by focusing on Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26^th president and founder of the National Bison Range. Now, that story is getting a much-needed makeover.

TR still captivates the American imagination, as demonstrated by the recent Ken Burns miniseries on PBS. In particular, Roosevelt has been lionized by conservationists. He helped rescue American wildlife from extinction after the market-hunting bloodbaths of the 1800s, created the first national wildlife refuge, and signed the Antiquities Act that enabled the creation of national monuments.

More than any other elected official in U.S. history, he made conservation a household word. Americans were so grateful we carved his face on a mountain.

But that ignores the rest of his legacy. Roosevelt was also a white supremacist who believed that whites were meant to rule the world. His views on race warped his policies, both foreign and domestic. It’s easy to dismiss this dark side of Roosevelt as reflecting the norm for his era, but he was behind the times even in his times.

This contradictory man was someone who knew birds by their songs and wrote bestsellers about the beauty of nature. Yet he also threw around racial slurs and used pseudo-science to justify his racist policies.

So, what are we to make of this today? Is TR a hero for being a trustbuster, savior of the Grand Canyon and the egret? Or did he set destructive policies for a century to come? Perhaps both are true.

Case in point: The huge bison that thrilled my son. Before 1776, tens of millions of bison roamed North America. But by the time Teddy Roosevelt was a young cowboy in the Dakotas in 1883, only a few hundred animals still lived in Canada and this country, somehow avoiding the mass slaughter that accompanied Manifest Destiny. After Roosevelt shot one of the last lonesome bison, the death is said to have sparked a change in him, spurring him to become a conservationist.

But there is more to that story. Indigenous people had created deep cultures of conservation that predated Columbus. In Roosevelt’s day, tribes were desperate to save the bison and their way of life. It was Indigenous people, such as Sam Walking Coyote and Michael Pablo, who helped rescue a small herd of bison from Saskatchewan, and brought them back to the Flathead Reservation.

President Roosevelt also wanted to restore bison, and as president in 1908, he created the National Bison Range by taking 18,500 acres out of the Flathead Indian Reservation. But this action ignored the wishes of the Salish, Pend Oreille and Kootenai people, who had been forced to live there since 1855. What’s more, the bison refuge was run not by the tribes, but by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which mostly inflated Roosevelt’s role in the story and dismissed those of Native Americans.

But history has written a new chapter. Congress in 2020 moved to return management of the Bison Range to the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, and this May, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited the Bison Range to take part in a celebration of that long-awaited change.

The return of the Bison Range to the Tribes is a “triumph and a testament to what can happen when we collaboratively work together to restore balance to ecosystems that were injured by greed and disrespect,” said Haaland at the ceremony.

It has taken decades, but a historic wrong has been righted. All we had to do was look honestly at history and one of our conservation heroes.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director at Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana

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That’s better than stalking parking lots before sunrise and finding trails turning into conga lines, but it makes me all the more interested in a new national park that’s in the works. It’s even closer to home than I would have thought possible.

It’s also closer to you. “Homegrown National Park” is the brainchild of Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware and author of Nature’s Best Hope. His pitch: we’re in trouble biologically, and it has to do with things we often take for granted: basics like soil and water, and pollinators for most of the crops we eat, without which we two-leggers could quickly become extinct ourselves. Half a century after banning DDT, we’re still losing 60 million birds a year, and it’s not just their pretty singing that’s at stake. 

You could thank a yellow warbler, for example, for the coffee you’re drinking, which might have been ruined back in Costa Rica if not for the birds providing pest control on the plantation. As for those timbers holding up the roof over your head? It’s birds like the chickadee that helped protect that Doug fir from spruce budworm back in the forest.

When it comes to the food chain, those of us at the top will do well to understand what’s at the bottom, and here’s the rub: Saving trees is not enough. We also need the birds and bugs, and they can’t all live in national parks.

Despite our wealth of public lands, most of the country is under private ownership. Tallamy’s idea is to capitalize on that with a large number of small projects — as small as a city lot in the old railroad town of Livingston, Montana, or even a corner of your own front yard. 

So it’s about my yard, and maybe yours. They don’t have to be ecologically pristine to be biologically valuable, and you don’t have to dig up the whole lawn to make a difference. But if we build it, who will come? Even a few square feet of native plants can bring a missing species back home.

In Livingston, after Beth Madden planted her “postage stamp” lawn with native shrubs and wildflowers, the variety of visiting birds grew from seven species — mostly non-native starlings, pigeons and such — to more than 50. She saw flocks of warblers feasting for hours on tiny bugs to fuel their migration, and a giant sphinx moth pollinating the new bee balm. 

Over in Bozeman, a resident who started with a typical lawn found herself in the middle of a “pollinator desert,” despite being right across the street from a park, which consisted of mowed grass and just a few trees. Using thick layers of mulch and water-wise native plants, she turned a hot, south-facing part of her yard into a refuge drawing bees, moths, and before long, butterflies. As conservationist Paulette Epple noted, “The last plant blooming in the fall is smooth aster and it is always crawling with bees.”

Another bird enthusiast tried for years to attract hummingbirds to her feeders, with no luck. But after swapping out her petunias and marigolds for more bird-friendly plantings, she was rewarded with her first calliope hummingbird.

Even in downtown New York City, along the reclaimed Highline Trail, Doug Tallamy found native plants growing on “grit,” plus four species of native bees, and two monarch butterflies nectaring away — all 30 feet above city traffic. 

My own yard is a study in benign neglect, but last spring my neighbor and I decided to put in a “friendship hedge” along our property line. Together we planted two types of native currant bushes, and pollinators were on them before we’d even put the tools away. Come fall, the bushes with the most berries turned out to be — surprise, surprise — the same variety as a wild currant that was already growing just up the hill. 

You won’t find it in a travel brochure, but Homegrown National Park is open year-round. No crowds, no lines, and no reservations required.

Asta Bowen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She writes in Montana.

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When Westerners think of Yellowstone, probably what comes to mind are its grizzlies, exploding geysers, wolf packs and bison traffic jams, not to mention bubbling, iridescent hot pools that attract swarms of visitors from all over the world. The park is a jewel of the Northern Rockies, but to this journalist who has covered its stories for 35 years, the real miracle of Yellowstone is its intricate world of wildlife.

Yet any discussion of wildlife here comes wrapped in a paradox. Despite Covid-19, or perhaps because of it, in 2021 Yellowstone smashed monthly, seasonal and annual visitation records, notching nearly 4.9 million visits. That is 860,000 more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic struck. This year, given social media and marketing aimed at the park’s 150^th anniversary, it’s possible that Yellowstone could surpass the 5 million mark.

Even if it doesn’t hit that milestone, many locals who have visited the park for decades say its roads and its capacity for serving visitors are already overwhelmed, as are many public facilities in the gateway towns of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Although the crushing visitation happens on a tiny percent of parkland, all these curious tourists create waves of troubling ripple effects.

Yellowstone is neither a standalone island nor a drive-through zoo. It is unique, the last ecosystem in the Lower 48 to contain all of the original mammal species that were on the landscape before Europeans arrived on the continent.

Now, based on the diversity and health of its wildlife populations, Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1872, when poachers, bounty, and market hunters nearly wiped out all wildlife in the country.

Grizzly bears have been rescued from a population free fall. Wolves were brought back by the Interior Department under Bruce Babbitt in the mid-1990s, and the park’s bison population, which  numbered just 23 at one point in the late 19^th century, is at 5,000.

Had Yellowstone not been created, had winter range beyond Yellowstone not existed, and had environmental protection laws not been put in place, it’s doubtful that those original species would have survived. Many biologists think most would have been lost.

Not all are celebrating Yellowstone’s birth. Some have portrayed the park as an emblem of injustice that resulted in the removal of Indigenous people from native homelands. These critics see a park which non-white citizens say they have never felt invited to embrace as part of their heritage. This needs to be addressed by the National Park Service and remedied.

What cannot be repaired, once broken, are the fragile threads of biological connections holding the ecosystem together. And those connections extend for miles outside the park boundaries, through migration trails and rivers.

These days, the boom in outdoor recreation in the West has been crowding the park’s adjacent national forests. The high numbers rival public-land use levels around Moab, Utah’s Wasatch, and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, places that don’t have Yellowstone’s diversity of wildlife. Another threat is that neighboring states like Montana have promoted the killing of park wolves and bison when they cross Yellowstone’s invisible boundary.

Private lands surrounding Yellowstone are also getting built up, transformed by mostly unplanned development. Such development is the biggest threat to the survival of grizzlies and other park species, warns Chris Servheen, who served as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national director of grizzly bear recovery for 35 years. Wild animals always suffer when roads, houses and people move into their territories, Servheen says. Coexistence may be the goal, but humans always win any dispute with wildlife trying to survive.

Five years ago, Dave Hallac, who managed the science division at the park, told me he was worried not just about the Yellowstone ecosystem suffering “death by 1,000 cuts,” but death by 10,000 scratches, as more people scramble for their piece of paradise. The trend has only accelerated.

What is the most enduring “value” of Yellowstone? The park reveals that humans deeply appreciate this special place of wildness. But the park also has an urgent message to those same humans: Our consumption of wild places means we must deliberately decide to accept limits. This is a good thing—and an increasingly rare thing.

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and founder of Mountain Journal in Montana, mountainjournal.org.

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Called the New World mine, it was proposed by the Canadian corporate giant Noranda, and it had a lot of momentum behind it. Yet the mine would have destroyed world-class trout fisheries and wild places for grizzlies and other wildlife in and around the nation’s first park.

Noranda planned to industrialize a rugged corner of the Beartooth Mountains of Montana and Wyoming with its underground mine, mill site and work camp, and 70-mile long, high voltage transmission line. An 80-acre lake of mine waste would have flooded a wetland, all this at the headwaters of three drainages in a landscape prone to avalanches, earthquakes and blizzards.

As Stu Coleman of Yellowstone National Park put it, “If you threw a dart at a map of the United States, you could not hit a worse place to put a mine.”

Still, the mine seemed a sure thing. No mine on public land had ever been stopped, thanks to the power of the Mining Law of 1872, passed the same year that Yellowstone Park was designated. It gives hard-rock mining priority over all other activities. Working back then for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, I recall being told that fighting Noranda was futile and perhaps dangerous.

What happened, though, felt like a miracle. A coalition of unlikely allies came together: anglers, hunters, ranchers, snowmobilers, park visitors, conservationists, scientists, artists and local businesses. All agreed that Yellowstone Park and the nearby wild country were more precious than gold. Together with officials from Yellowstone Park and the Interior Department, they created such a storm of opposition that President Bill Clinton finally intervened.

Looking back, what we did seems like textbook organizing, combining legal and media work supported by generous donors. It took a seven-year campaign until Noranda, beaten in court and bruised by negative public opinion, was eager for a way out.

Negotiations were complex, but on Aug. 12, 1996, President Clinton announced a deal that stopped the mine, bought out Noranda’s interest, retired its claims, and restored lands that had been heavily damaged by mining activity from decades earlier.

I remember feeling amazed when this David and Goliath battle ended. It would still take years for the government to purchase most of the mining claims, and almost two decades to restore the area’s toxic streams. 

At a celebration this year of the 25^th anniversary of Clinton’s announcement, veterans of the fight shared reminiscences, marveling again that we won. Some had gone on to lead other successful campaigns, including bringing back wolves to Yellowstone and protecting the Wyoming Range and Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front from oil and gas development.

All of these campaigns needed strong coalitions and luck to succeed. What did they have in common?

Locally, they shared a diverse and fired-up grassroots base. Then they were able to develop legal and communications strategies that reached out regionally, even nationally. And, because the battles dragged on, they required stamina, leadership, a high level of coordination — and, crucially, substantial funding.

What helped was that the battles centered on wild places or species whose iconic status generated wide support.

In more than 40 years of conservation advocacy, I have seen numerous campaigns fail. Advocates often misunderstood the complexity of what they faced or the need to adapt as circumstances changed. They lacked the skill and openness to sustain a broad-based coalition, ran out of money, or the political climate soured. Sometimes, champions abandoned the fight because the struggle just lasted so long. Success, I’m sorry to say, is hardly the norm.

Yet how wondrous it is when you save a place or restore a species. The New World site is not an industrial nightmare now.

Cutthroat trout swim again in upper Soda Butte Creek. Wildflowers abound in areas where tons of poisonous waste from earlier gold mining is now safely buried. A weasel has created a palace in a collapsed miner’s cabin, and grizzlies excavate whitebark pine seeds nearby that were cached by squirrels.

To me, the New World campaign was not just about stopping a mine. It was about a burning love for a special place that inspired us to keep working together to achieve a shared goal.

Louisa Willcox is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is co-founder of Grizzly Times, which works to protect habitat for grizzlies.

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