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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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For decades, large wildfires were managed through the Incident Command System, a framework that depends on highly trained teams at the federal, state, and local level. These teams coordinate everything from strategy to evacuations and communication with communities.

Today, fewer than 38 of the largest teams, known as “Complex Incident Management Teams”, are expected to be available nationwide, a sharp decline from previous years. But even that number is optimistic, because many incident teams are no longer fully staffed. Personnel shortages have forced teams to share members; obviously those members cannot be deployed to different fires at the same time. On paper, capacity remains. In practice, it does not.

This is not an accident. It is the cumulative result of a decade of declining federal participation in wildfire management, compounded now by recent cuts to non-fire federal personnel. These cuts may seem unrelated to wildfire response, but they strike at its core.

Much of the wildfire system depends on specialists from other roles—hydrologists, biologists, planners—who step into fire assignments when needed. As those positions disappear, so does a critical reserve of experienced responders.

What remains is a workforce that’s smaller and increasingly strained. Many of the people still filling these roles are senior employees who, during a busy season, can hit federal pay caps, effectively eliminating financial incentives to keep working long hours under dangerous conditions. At the same time, there’s deteriorating morale and ongoing administrative upheaval, all caused by staff cuts aimed at reducing the size of the federal workforce.

As one fire manager put it bluntly, the only way to cope has been “to care less.”

Against this backdrop, the public is assured that wildfire staffing remains stable. But there has been no comprehensive accounting of how many fire-qualified personnel have been lost through early retirements and deferred resignations, and what could be lost in the new reorganization.

The gap between official assurances and operational reality is growing. This matters.

It matters because the system is already under strain. As of April 23 this year, almost 1.8 million acres have burned nationwide, nearly twice as much as the year-to-date average over the previous 10 years. This includes the 640,000-acre Morrill Fire in Nebraska. Last year, which was a relatively mild fire year, the U.S. Forest Service still spent a record amount on fire suppression—nearly $5 billion.

Why? In part, because of how risk is increasingly avoided. Political and administrative pressure to suppress every fire has changed behavior on the ground. Local decision-makers, aware of the professional consequences if a fire escapes initial containment, are incentivized to order more resources than they might otherwise need.

The result is scarcity that will show up in experienced leadership and fully staffed management teams. The remaining Complex Incident Management teams will be stretched thin, sometimes asked to manage multiple major fires events simultaneously. Fatigue will follow, and with fatigue comes risk—of poor decisions, accidents, or injuries and fatalities among firefighters. Communities will feel it too.

Incident Management Teams don’t just fight fires; they serve as a lifeline for affected areas. They coordinate evacuations, connect local officials with state and federal agencies and help lay the groundwork for recovery. If those teams are unavailable or overstretched, communities will face greater disruption and slower recoveries.

Whether 2026 becomes a historically severe fire year remains uncertain. But the conditions—environmental and institutional—are aligning in troubling ways.

The United States has spent years building one of the most sophisticated wildfire-response systems in the world. That system is now being asked to do more with fewer people and much higher stakes: Wildfire seasons have become longer and more devastating; they are a defining feature of the American landscape.

The question is not whether the fires will come. It is whether we can still respond effectively when they do.

David Calkin is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Until recently, he was a senior scientist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. He now runs a wildfire consulting business in Missoula, Montana.

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That experience led me to understand that the current Trump administration’s unpopular plan to move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters will be every bit as destructive. It will hurt forests, wildlife and communities that rely upon our public lands and waters.

In 2020, almost 90% of the BLM employees ordered to move West chose not to, forcing them out the door. With those seasoned employees went years of wisdom and knowledge of how things are supposed to work, of how to deliver for the American people. 

Today’s Forest Service plan goes farther, aiming to close regional offices and shutter dozens of the agency’s research centers, as we face what some say will be a horrific wildfire season.  

The Forest Service and the BLM combined manage 20% of our country’s lands and waters. These public lands, the places we camp, hike, watch birds, hunt and simply wander in nature, are truly one of America’s best ideas. For Westerners, they are a deep part of our identity.

There is a reason Forest Service headquarters are based in Washington, DC. It’s where our nation’s leaders work. Believe me, I did not want to move to the capital from my home in Montana to run the BLM, but to be able to fight for Western people and places, I had to go to the seat of our nation’s power. 

I was often in the Interior Secretary’s offices. I frequently walked to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, talking through thorny problems such as how to protect wildlife while permitting transmission lines. Washington is where people manage relationships with Congress, where budgets get made.

The administration says all their changes are about bringing leadership closer to where the work happens. That’s a political talking point, and it’s false.

If DOGE’s dismantling of government agencies last year provides any lesson, then cruelty and disruption are the real point. These changes aim to create chaos, deliver the administration’s stated goal of traumatizing employees, and imperil the very existence of public lands — lands that belong to all Americans. We improve the management of our forests by giving foresters the resources they need and letting them make decisions based on sound science and collaboration, not by gutting their agency.  

Over the course of the last year, the Forest Service forced or coerced roughly a quarter of its approximately 30,000 employees to leave. In this latest round of engineered chaos, thousands of people will be reassigned and ordered to move. If BLM history is any guide, almost all will leave their positions rather than uproot their families. The agency could soon be left with roughly half its former ranks. 

Think of your job. Now, think of half of your colleagues gone. Would your organization be able to recover from the loss and demoralization to do its work? 

There are inevitable repercussions to this radical attack on our public land management agencies: Campgrounds will close. Trails won’t be maintained. High fuel loads near communities will go unaddressed. Wildfires will become even harder to fight. More sawmills will close. The health of our land, waters and wildlife will decline. With things going wrong on the ground, some will demand that these lands be transferred to states or sold to private industry.  

That’s exactly what the people in power today want. The choice of Utah for the Forest Service headquarters—home to Senator Mike Lee, who leads the charge on public land selloff, as well as to the state that is suing to try to take over millions of your public lands—reveals the administration’s true agenda.

The inevitable does not need to happen. There is one power to stop our public lands from being mismanaged to the point of selloff: It’s the outrage of the American people.

Americans overwhelmingly support public lands and want future generations to enjoy the freedoms found in them. Our public forests, rivers and deserts deserve to be treated better, and the federal land managers who work tirelessly deserve better. It’s up to us to demand it.  

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

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You might call this unusual because Durango has access to a backup supply. In 2011, voters approved spending $6 million to buy 3,800 acre‑feet of water storage in a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse. The rationale was simple: The town could build a pipeline and ship that water into its system whenever dry times occurred.

But since then, not much has happened.

Former city manager Ron LeBlanc tried to move the project forward before retiring in 2019. An engineering study in 2023 concluded that the town should connect Lake Nighthorse to its system using one of three possible pipeline routes. Still, no construction began.

Durango’s mayor, Gilda Yazzie, says the city paid for its share of a pipe at the base of the dam, along with what’s called a manifold—a device that would split water among the four users of Lake Nighthorse. But nothing has been built to connect that manifold to Durango’s water system.

Lake Nighthorse itself is the scaled‑down result of the Animas–La Plata Project, authorized by Congress in 1968. That project would have covered the Animas and La Plata river valleys with canals, pumps and pipelines. Instead, the final plan built just one dam and one pumping station, leaving the Animas River free‑flowing.

That decision helped protect the area’s natural beauty while also attracting more people to Durango. Some of those new residents have since moved into fire‑prone areas. Many Western cities have learned the hard way about not securing enough water to fight wildfires. Fires racing through Los Angeles in 2025 wiped out entire neighborhoods. Water storage ran out and hydrants went dry.

Durango water engineer Steve Harris has 52 years of experience in the field and is known for promoting water conservation. He thinks Durango is making a serious mistake by not connecting a pipe to Lake Nighthorse.

“The city has a century of the Animas and Florida Rivers being so good to them with steady year-around flows that they don’t even know they need storage,” he said. “They may only find out during a water crisis.”

Right now, Durango has 10 to 30 days of water stored in its Terminal Reservoir, which holds 267 acre-feet. That’s annual water consumption for about 600 households; Durango has over 9,000 households. The city depends mainly on the Florida River, with large draws of summer water from the Animas River. When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers dry up or clog with debris from fires, the city could run out of water within weeks.

Climate change and a 25‑year drought highlight this risk. In the last eight years, on 34 days, the Animas River averaged less than 100 cubic feet per second, a low level reached only twice in the previous 120 years. Close calls have already happened. In 2002, the Missionary Ridge Fire filled both rivers with ash and debris and forced the city to cut back pumping. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill sent millions of gallons of waste into the Animas River, stopping city pumping for a week.

When Harris spoke at a Durango Neighborhood Coalition meeting last year, residents expressed overwhelming support for more water storage. That message hasn’t reached city leaders. Mayor Yazzie said voters were happy to support a $61 million sales-tax–funded municipal building and popular new recreation projects. But she said raising taxes for a major water project would be difficult.

“We are looking at a potential water and sewer fee increase to keep the toilets flushing,” Mayor Yazzie said. As for building a pipeline to Lake Nighthorse and a much-needed new water treatment plant—an investment water engineer Steve Harris estimates at about $100 million—“it all depends on how much the citizens are willing to pay for water. “

Durango’s reluctance to invest in its water system stands out in the West, where water storage is usually characterized as urgent. Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, built three separate intake tunnels into Lake Mead to make sure it could keep taking water even as the reservoir dropped.

Durango’s Lake Nighthorse pipeline remains a paper concept. This winter, with snowpack in the San Juan Mountains the lowest recorded in generations, it’s time the town acts to guarantee more water. Fighting flames with empty hoses would be a sorry sight.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

The 4^th paragraph has been changed to reflect Ron LeBlanc as the ex-city manager of Durango. Previously, it read Steve LeBlanc.

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The study, covering roughly 8.6 million acres in six management units, will run for at least three years with the goal of indiscriminately exterminating “as many (lions) as possible.”

Buying into this ancient predator-prey superstition are the nonprofits Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and Utah Wild Sheep Foundation. Each has contributed $150,000 to the cull.

Wildlife managers have no idea how many mountain lions roam the state because estimating populations is essentially impossible. Lions are solitary, elusive and range over vast territories they defend. Unlike ungulates that compensate for mortality with fecundity, predators don’t “overpopulate,” and they’re much slower to recover from culling or hunting.

I asked veteran mountain lion researcher Dr. Rick Hopkins, board president of the Cougar Fund, what science supports a claim that killing mountain lions generates more deer. “None,” he replied. “For years, agencies have made such claims, but when pushed to provide evidence, they can’t. Predator control has never worked anywhere.”

Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources estimates the state’s mule deer population at 295,200—73 percent of the “long-term goal.” That goal is based more on desired hunting-license sales than science. Still, considering the natural ebb and flow of deer populations, 73 percent isn’t bad.

Mountain lions have little or nothing to do with the decline of Utah’s mule deer. Predator populations are limited by available prey. What we learned in Biology 101—that predators control prey—is incorrect: Prey controls predators.Utah has experienced prolonged drought, which peaked in 2022. Reduced forage starved female deer so that fewer fawns were born, and those fawns were sickly and therefore less likely to survive winters. When record-breaking snowfall occurred during the winter of 2022-2023, there were massive mule deer die-offs.

Utah’s mountain lion cull follows hard upon a 2023 state law that opened up year-round, mountain lion killing without requiring permits. Both this law and the current cull outrage environmental and animal wellness communities. The Western Wildlife Conservancy and Mountain Lion Foundation have filed a lawsuit (ongoing), asserting that the law violates the state’s Right to Hunt and Fish Act, which requires a “reasonable regulation of hunting.”

The Mountain Lion Foundation dismisses the mountain lion cull study as a “lethal program without rigorous science,” and reports: “Decades of peer-reviewed research across the West show that intensive predator removal rarely delivers sustained or landscape-scale recovery of prey populations. Instead, it often destabilizes predator populations, leading to younger, transient animals, increased conflict and little long-term benefit for deer.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “The science shows that healthy lion populations create robust and healthier deer herds, with lions selectively removing deer afflicted with the 100-percent fatal and highly contagious brain-wasting scourge known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by malformed, self-replicating proteins called ‘prions.’”

All threats to mule deer pale in comparison with CWD. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunter-support group, calls it “the number one threat to deer hunting.”

In Utah, CWD has been detected in 356 of the few mule deer checked. Symptoms include fearlessness and loss of coordination, behaviors inviting lion predation, and thereby removal of disease vectors.

What’s more, mountain lions are resistant to CWD. They deactivate prions through digestion, removing them from the environment. That further protects mule deer as well as possibly protecting people. In 2022, two hunters who ate venison from a CWD-ravaged deer herd in Texas died from prion disease. Given the rarity of human prion infections, this seems an unlikely coincidence.

The Idaho Capital Sun quoted Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, as follows: “We are quite unprepared. If we saw a (CWD) spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans.”

Dr. Mark Elbroch of Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to conserving wild felines, told me this: “Heaps of science show the beneficial contributions of mountain lions. Humans are healthier when we live with mountain lions.”

So are mule deer.

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

A mountain lion drinking, photo by David Neils, Wild Nature Photography.

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I took delight in the abundant crops of acorns and bright red madrone berries. The madrone trees were thronged with feeding robins and hermit thrushes, and the oaks were alive with squirrels, jays and woodpeckers. Although neither acorns nor madrone berries will be part of my Thanksgiving feast, my feeling of thanks for this bounty came easily and naturally.

Then, further up the trail, I passed through a stand of dead ponderosa pines. Throughout the West, many forest areas are experiencing severe conifer die-offs, and these skeletal dead trees represent fuel for the wildfires that we all fear. Looking up at them, I certainly didn’t feel any stirrings of gratitude.

But just then, a hairy woodpecker landed in the largest snag and began to hammer away, anticipating a feast of beetle grubs. For the woodpecker—and the beetle grubs—the dead trees were a gift, something to be grateful for.

So, what else was I missing? I looked down at my feet. There was the usual jumble of the forest floor: fallen leaves and conifer needles, bits of lichen, with some scattered manzanita berries. If anything in nature deserves to be called humble, it’s layers like this of decay.

But as soon as I knelt and focused my attention, there it was, waiting to be acknowledged: gratitude. From a nearby clump of brush came the sounds of a towhee’s big feet scratching through the fallen leaves. For towhees, the duff is a banquet table, spread with a cornucopia of seeds, insects, sowbugs and spiders. For the seeds, the litter of the forest floor is where they need to be, where they have their only chance to germinate and grow. For the insects, sowbugs and spiders, it is a world complete, their grazing land and hunting ground, the habitat that makes their lives possible.

I stood and took a long drink from my water bottle. That water came from the watershed surrounding me, its stream fed by snowmelt and filtered through the ancient granite soils of the Siskiyou Mountains. I took a deep breath. The oxygen that filled my lungs and keeps me alive is the gift of photosynthesis, produced over billions of years by plants and cyanobacteria.

To state the obvious, none of this—none —is humanity’s doing. The birds, the berries, the decaying leaves, the spiders and the sowbugs, the life-giving atmosphere and the life-giving water—all are gifts that we receive, some so essential we cannot imagine their absence. Others are so useful it seems they were made for us especially, and for those we sometimes remember to be grateful. Others appear to be of no use to us whatsoever, or even to be intended for our harm, and why would we ever be grateful for those?

But nothing in nature is wasted.

Every gift given is accepted: the dead tree by the beetle, the beetle by the woodpecker, the woodpecker by the hawk, the dead hawk by the scavengers, then by the decomposers, then by the germinating ponderosa pine seed rising from the fertile duff.

All of this is one oversimplified cycle of gift exchange. The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control. To be alive at all seems a miracle.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us imagine the world we share with every living thing. Let us give thanks for this planet, this blue and green ball spinning in a lifeless void, holding us all and making possible our every heartbeat, our every breath. And not just ours, but the existence of all life, and of all the interrelations that make our world healthy and resilient and diverse and beautiful.

This year, when I sit down to my Thanksgiving feast, surrounded by loved ones, I will try to be mindful of every kind of giving thanks.

Pepper Trail 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 ecologist in Oregon.

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Many people lost everything and are now sheltering far from home, where they face an uncertain future. Unfortunately, climate change is part of their story.

On October 12, ex-Typhoon Halong, the second and stronger storm, slammed into the villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. A late jog in the storm track gave the over 1,000 residents little warning.

As gusts topped 100 miles per hour and seawater surged inland, houses never built for such conditions floated away or crumbled. In Kipnuk, people crawled through the windows of flooding houses and waded in darkness and howling winds toward their neighbors, only to find their homes gone, too. The school provided shelter.

Rescuers arriving in Kipnuk found nearly all homes destroyed and failing water, sanitation and power. Far from Alaska’s road system, the village of 700 evacuated, in what became part of Alaska’s largest-ever civilian airlift.

Helicopters plucked people from eroded runways, carrying them 60 miles to Bethel, population 6,200. As shelters overflowed, C-17 military transports thundered in to bring survivors to Anchorage, another 300 miles from home. Exhausted survivors filed from planes without much more than their clothing.

Many do not know when or if they’ll ever return home.

Their plight is unique in America. No roads lead to these communities. No utility trucks are headed their way, something we see after Western fires and Atlantic hurricanes. Everything arrives slowly and at exorbitant cost by barge or plane, mostly in summer.

Additionally, many residents live by a subsistence economy. They have lost hard-won winter stores and precious boats, snow machines and other expensive tools for securing food. They are American refugees.

In a day, these members of close-knit and culturally distinct communities suddenly scattered to Bethel, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and elsewhere. People are generously sharing necessities, but they can’t replace connections, like the daily use of Yup’ik language and humor, or a young person walking in the door with fresh traditional soup for an Elder.

Although fierce fall storms are common in Alaska, scientists have long warned that ongoing warming in the North Pacific and Bering Sea can energize the storms beyond historical norms. Today, a stubborn Pacific marine heatwave exacerbates the warming. It’s premature to say how much warming fed these storms, but the science warrants dialogue and research, not the recent zeroing-out of federal research funds.

Declining sea ice and thawing permafrost have also dramatically increased erosion in dozens of Alaskan communities, especially during fall storms. The recent storms tore away more land, edging waters closer to vital power and other infrastructure. At the village of Quinhagak, the storm swallowed 60 feet of shoreline and scattered thousands of Yup’ik archaeological artifacts.

Federal reports name over 30 Alaskan villages imminently threatened by erosion. Investing in their resilience to avoid the trauma and astronomic cost of relocation—or sudden destruction—was behind Biden-era clean energy and infrastructure laws, which Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and other Alaskans helped author.

But the new administration abruptly canceled dozens of projects, including a $20 million EPA plan to fortify the now decimated Kipnuk. The work would not have started in time to make a difference by this fall, but what just happened signals an urgent need for investment in vulnerable communities.

The disaster comes amid a government shutdown and the gutting of  Alaska public radio, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service, which now flies fewer weather balloons to aid forecasters near the Bering Sea.

Yet Alaska’s National Guard, Native consortiums, businesses and nonprofits have embraced survivors. They are cleaning up and flying pet-rescue missions. In Anchorage, shelters have opened for survivors, and an already stretched school district is compassionately working to absorb at least 130 displaced students, for whom urban schools may bring further shock.

Western Alaska communities, already bearing their share of the disaster, are also acting on ingrained Yup’ik and Iñupiat values as they support their neighbors. It’s how Indigenous people have thrived here for 10,000 years.

Outside Alaska, news media didn’t give this disaster its due and has since moved on. But people should know about these storms, and can consider giving to the Alaska Community Foundation relief fund coordinated through Alaska Native and other organizations.

Tim Lydon lives in Alaska 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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Staffing and budget cuts at the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are empty ranger stations during peak season, trail crews that never arrive and wildfire teams stretched so thin they can’t keep up.

During the four years when I led the BLM, from 2021 to 2025, I saw what it takes to care for hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. It takes committed, dedicated people—wildfire crews, wildlife biologists, planners, law enforcement rangers—and it takes funding. Today, both are being stripped away at historic rates.

We can already see the consequences. As I write, flames tear through the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, burning down the historic lodge and scarring over 100,000 acres. The fire has raged for weeks since a lightning strike started it on July 4, and it may continue for weeks more.

Fire is part of the West’s natural cycle, but climate change and decades of suppression have made today’s fires hotter and more destructive. It just doesn’t make sense that the Trump administration is gutting the agencies responsible for managing fire risk when we need these experienced and dedicated people most.

More than 1,600 wildfire-qualified staff have been driven out of the Forest Service in recent months, and as many as one in four firefighting jobs remain vacant. To make it worse, firefighters are being pulled from the fire lines to tend to logistics for some forests, even in one of the most dangerous wildfire seasons in memory. 

The administration has even proposed removing firefighting from the Forest Service entirely, a dangerous move that separates the rangers who know the land best from those dousing the flames.

People of all backgrounds celebrated when we collectively stopped Congress from selling off our public lands earlier this summer. But now, a clear and dangerous pattern is emerging: Shrink these agencies until they break, then claim that selling off or industrializing our public lands is the only fix.

This should alarm anyone who values the freedom these lands provide. Public lands are a great equalizer—places where all Americans have the same right to hike, hunt, fish or camp. And to unplug and touch nature. If we lose the people who manage these lands, our access will shrink under wildfire closures, roads will be gated and campgrounds will close. We’ll lose our freedom to wander.

It’s also a direct threat to conservation. Our public lands deliver clean water, clean air and wildlife habitat. Cutting conservation programs and abandoning fire-smart management will leave forests overgrown and ready to burn—with wildfires too big and too hot. 

Worse still, future generations are going to inherit the choices made today. When the administration guts our parks and public lands to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, they saddle the future with parks and trails that are closed, crumbling roads and buildings, forests prone to even worse fire, smoky skies and “No Trespassing” signs. The cherished traditions we pass down—teaching a child to fish or hunt, camping under a night sky, chasing butterflies—will no longer be available to all.

Westerners know what’s at stake. Poll after poll shows that people across the political spectrum want to keep our public lands public, healthy and accessible. That consensus is powerful, but only if we use it now. Either we protect the agencies that protect our public lands, or we watch the slow-motion sell-off unfold.

We must demand full staffing and funding for the agencies that manage our lands, and we must all stand together—hunters and hikers, ranchers and rafters, anglers and climbers—in defense of the places that belong to us all, and to future generations.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and a former director of the BLM. Like millions of Americans, she is spending her summer vacation on public lands.

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His statement saddened me, since in all the time I spent on Four Corners high points, a persistent haze always limited my visibility to maybe 50 or 60 miles, blurring Shiprock’s sharp spires into a fuzzy silhouette. That’s because a fleet of massive coal-fired power plants in the region churned out haze-producing pollutants, harming humans and the ecology and blotting out vistas from the San Juans to the Sandias. It seemed as if I’d never get a view as clear as Norm’s.

But over the last decade, the failing economics of coal shuttered those power plants. That means the air on the Colorado Plateau—when not sullied by the ever-lengthening wildfire season—has become cleaner as the coal industry faded away.

The shuttered plants include Mojave, Navajo, Nucla, Escalante, San Juan and, most recently, Cholla. The closures certainly sharpened the view of folks all over the region. But more importantly, they kept tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oodles of harmful pollutants (arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide and soot) out of the lungs of nearby residents, many of them on the Navajo Nation.

Yet in defiance of the free market that has boosted renewables, the Trump administration is acting to undo those positive changes and make the air dirty again by throwing multiple lifelines to the flagging coal industry.

It has eviscerated environmental protections limiting mercury and other toxic air emissions, ended Obama-and Biden-era freezes on new federal coal leases, and rescinded limits on carbon dioxide emissions. The administration has also blocked utilities from shutting down plants that are old, dirty and more costly than other power sources.

Trump purports to do this in the name of “unleashing” coal from regulatory constraints so it can be mined and burned to achieve American “energy dominance.” Yet it’s unlikely that unleashing the industry will reverse its decline.

It’s true that delaying implementation of the mercury rule will enable the Colstrip coal plant in Montana—one of the nation’s dirtiest facilities—to continue operating without expensive new pollution control equipment. Generally, though, utilities such as Xcel Energy, Intermountain Power Agency and Tri-State Generation & Transmission are moving forward with plans to retire their coal plants, namely because the aging facilities are dirty, inefficient, inflexible and, most of all, no longer profitable. They just can’t compete with natural gas, solar, wind, and other, cleaner energy sources.

When signing one of his fossil-fuel-friendly orders, Trump said he would “save” the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, from destruction, adding, “We’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.”

But its operator, Arizona Public Service, said it had already procured cleaner, cheaper generation for the plant, and had no desire to keep burning coal at Cholla. There was no save needed.

If Trump were truly interested in energy dominance and abundance, he would have supported the fastest-growing energy sources—wind and solar power. Instead, his administration is doing all it can to stifle them, from eliminating production tax credits for renewable energy in his “big, beautiful” budget bill, to slowing down permits for clean energy developments on public lands. Both utility-scale and rooftop solar will be affected, boosting the prospects of oil and gas, coal and nuclear.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an Economist column, revealed the philosophy behind the administration’s fossil-fuel fetishization. He wrote that climate change is “not an existential crisis,” merely a “byproduct of progress.” He said he was willing to take the “modest negative trade-off” of climate change—along, presumably, with ever more devastating heat waves, wildfires and floods—”for this legacy of human advancement.”

He is probably correct in saying that climate change and the sullied air over the Colorado Plateau are byproducts of so-called progress. But they are also nasty, deadly and avoidable. Ultimately, going backward toward coal will not only wreck progress, but perhaps life on earth as we know it.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He has long covered the West’s natural resources.

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Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee updated its budget bill to include making over 250 million acres of public lands in 11 western states eligible for disposal, including recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors, according to analysis by The Wilderness Society. 

At the same time, Trump’s Interior Department is aggressively pursuing ways to industrialize, privatize and monetize the public lands. But these places, rich with ecological values, are held in trust for us to conserve and deliver intact to future generations.

Despite the administration’s rhetoric about wanting to reduce the deficit, its goal is to dispose of these lands—to remove them permanently from the public domain. This serves an ideology that reflexively favors private ownership over public enjoyment, whether by diminishing long-term protections on public lands, promoting their immediate development or selling them outright.

What are the effects of this wrongheaded policy?

First, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.Any land pulled out of the public domain for development will never be returned. As a result, wild places will no longer offer open space for people to hike, hunt or fish, wildlife to thrive, waterways to flow unimpeded and much more.

Second, it’s a slippery slope. We lose environmental protections not by a one-time tsunami of destruction, but by nibbles. If we lose a piece of land today for an appealing idea (for example, deficit reduction, space for housing), then tomorrow we will hear an equally appealing idea to develop the neighboring piece. Then the next day, even more land will be needed for another reason. And so on. The process of destruction by nibbling will never end until there is nothing left to devour. 

Third, there’s one upside: It’s an excellent opportunity for conservationists to expand public support for nature.The current attack on public land is enabling conservationists of different stripes to come together and build alliances. Think of hunters and fishers, farmers and ranchers, mountain bikers and horseback riders, campers and birders who all cherish open lands—whatever their politics.

Fourth, we need to make the case for urgency. If public land advocates don’t stand strong now to protect nature, who will?Right now, we need to defend the water, the trees, and the wildlife on the public lands for generations to come. We need to tell our representatives in Congress that their duty is to never sell out the public estate.

Fifth, standing up for nature brings out the best of humanity. The framing of the “debate” in Congress and the public is always human-centric, the same approach that has caused so much environmental destruction throughout the world. Ignored is what would be lost, from water storage and wetlands to places for wildlife to live out their lives. We must tell the story of what nature brings us just by being left alone.

Compared to most developed countries, America is extraordinarily rich in public lands that everyone can enjoy, no matter their income or their background. Thanks to those who came before us who knew their value, Congress set aside these unique places as designated wilderness, national parks and monuments, and other special types of land, not to mention national forests and Bureau of Land Management lands that serve multiple purposes. That means all of us can roam land that has no fences or “No Trespassing” signs.

Humility and restraint, not privatization and exploitation, are the words that unite us as we fight to preserve our public lands. This is the public’s land, and let’s keep it that way forever.

T. A. Barron is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a board member of the World Wildlife Fund and the Wilderness Society, and the author of more than 30 books.

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