I’ve driven Interstate 15 in Utah dozens of times over the course of two decades, travelling from my home in western Colorado to one of my favorite adventure playgrounds in Zion National Park and nearby. The route takes me through Saint George, Utah, an area referred to as the state’s “Dixie.”

There are a lot of Utah Dixies, though there’s movement to change some names: Dixie National Forest, Dixie State University, and Dixie Downs Drive. Saint George is a retirement community, and Chamber of Commerce signs on the highway extoll the many virtues of retiring to the Dixie area.

But here’s what I notice: Every sign, no matter how often it gets replaced, always features white couples.

I used to ski patrol at one of the Aspen ski resorts. Every year the Aspen Skiing Company would unveil a new marketing campaign, and employees were required to attend a meeting to see what the company would promote that year. Ads and movies featured many hundreds of happy people — happy white people.

I met with the senior executive VP of marketing and pointed out that he was sending a message to folks that Aspen was a playground for whites only. Twenty years later, the Aspen Skiing Company, a company with the best of intentions in advocating for and creating racial justice, still does not include any Black images in its advertising, so ingrained is the image of skiers being white. And full disclosure: The Aspen Skiing Company has engaged me to help them with their mission and advocacy. 

A few years ago I toured the national capitol in Washington, D.C. The tour ended in the rotunda where the guide proudly drew our attention to a huge ceiling painting and border sculptures that had plenty of room to capture key moments in the development of the nation: Brave-looking white guys astride ferocious looking white horses. Chinese railroad workers. Noble “savages,” aka Indigenous peoples. Men, woman and children trekking the Oregon Trail.

But what wasn’t there, in a building built with Black labor, was any depiction of a Black American.

When we sing the national anthem, if we get to the third verse, we pay tribute to slavery even there. The man who wrote this ode to freedom owned human beings who never experienced the freedom that Francis Scott Keys wrote about.

When we were very young, all of us were taught about George Washington’s father’s cherry tree, and the “Father, I cannot tell a lie” story. But most of us learned on our own, years later, that the father of our country owned slaves. But his slave-owning isn’t the odd part. The odd part is that we perpetuate an unimportant lie and neglect an important truth about the father of our country.

On our $20 bill we honor a ruthless slave-owner. In an ad headlined “Stop the runaway,” which Andrew Jackson placed in the Tennessee Gazette in 1804, he promised to pay not just $50 for the return of his escaped slave, but also “ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of 300.” I will be glad to see Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the bill after a long fight to get this done. 

And every Black person has had the experience of waiting in some check-out line, only to have a white person cut into the line right in front of them. In a sense, it’s not even rudeness. America has made us invisible.

So now, here we are… a country tearing itself apart with hate, distrust and dysfunction. Over time I’ve come to realize that racism, intentional or not, is the ladle that stirs this dangerous, unpleasant brew. Do we want a better country for everyone? Recognize racism. Fight it. We’re all in this together.

Wayne Hare is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a retired park ranger, manages wildland fires, and is a decorated U.S. Marine. He writes from Grand Junction, Colorado, and is co-founder of TheCivilConversationsProject.org.

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It has since become clear that Trump cared more about freedom for government and corporations — and for that matter, COVID-19 — to run rampant.

Perhaps nowhere was Trump’s approach more thorough than when it comes to the Earth. He removed limits on mercury and methane emissions, incapacitated the Clean Water Act and gutted protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, to name just a few of nearly 100 rollbacks. All purportedly to help the economy, achieve “energy dominance” on public lands and make him look good — energy-efficient light bulbs, he said, “make you look orange.”

President-elect Joseph R. Biden has indicated that he’ll quickly roll back the rollbacks as soon as he’s inaugurated. Yet a reset is not enough. In fact, many of the rules didn’t cut it under President Obama, and though Obama tried to fix many of them, his efforts often fell short. Here are a few examples of policies and rules that Trump obliterated, and that Biden — hopefully with Congress’s help — could now rebuild, making them better and stronger than before.

Clean Power Plan: President Obama’s plan mandated a cut in power sector carbon emissions by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030, which essentially would have forced coal out of the energy mix while leaving room for natural gas. Before it went into effect, Trump gutted the plan, though it was hardly necessary: Economics forced coal plant retirements after Trump’s election, coal mining jobs continued to wane and emissions dropped even more than the Obama plan would have required. The plan was obsolete before it was finalized.

Biden’s plan must include more ambitious emissions cuts and, equally as important, provide for a just transition for workers and communities that will be abandoned by the fossil fuel industries.

Oil and gas development: Trump rolled over the environment by rolling back rules for fracking, stocking the Interior Department with industry insiders, ramming through approvals of pipelines built by his multi-million-dollar donors, and by slashing royalties paid by oil companies.

Yet Obama’s policies were equally friendly to energy development. His administration leased out two million more acres of public land to oil and gas companies during his first term than Trump and oversaw a drilling boom of unprecedented magnitude. Biden needs not only to roll back the rollbacks, but also to overhaul the leasing process to shift power away from corporate boardrooms and back into public hands, and increase oil and gas royalty payments across the board to give American taxpayers a fair shake.

Bears Ears National Monument: In 2015, the Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi and Zuni tribes asked Obama to designate as a national monument 1.9 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, with tribal representatives having a major management role. When Obama established the monument, it was 600,000 acres smaller than the proposal, and the tribal role was reduced to an advisory one. Trump slashed the monument by 85% and rammed through a shoddy management plan for what remained, further diminishing the tribal role.

Biden should restore the monument, giving the tribal nations an equal role in determining new boundaries and creating a strong management plan.

 That’s only the beginning. Biden will also have to restore another 80 or more regulations, redirect agencies that have been steered off-course, invalidate the lease sale for the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, bring science back into policymaking, stop the building of the border wall, and clean the house of Trump appointees who are trying to destroy the so-called administrative state from within.

 That includes William Perry Pendley — Twitter handle @Sagebrush_Rebel — whom Trump installed as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management in 2019. This September, a judge ruled that Pendley — never approved by Congress — had served unlawfully, and ordered him out of his role. Anticipating Trump, Pendley changed his title and refused to leave, insisting that the law and the court’s order “has no impact” on him.

 With Trump now taking a similar stance, Biden may be forced to drag two people out of office come January.

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