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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 In June, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rescinded “seven agency-specific regulations” that resulted in a 66 percent reduction of mostly environmental reviews that will offer little opportunity for public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

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

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

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

I see more big wildfires in our future.

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

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

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That’s what some rock climbers must be thinking. They want to enter designated Wilderness in order to drill permanent anchors into wilderness rock faces, turning these wild places into sport-climbing walls.

When the Wilderness Act became law in 1964, it put wildlife and wild lands first, decreeing that these special places should be left alone as much as possible. This unusual approach codified humility, arguing that some wild places, rich in wildlife and natural beauty, needed as much protection as possible.

So far, the Act protects less than 3% of what Congress called “untrammeled” public land in the Lower 48. These are unique places free of roads and vehicles and most manmade intrusions that afflict the rest of America. 

The Wilderness Act also prohibits “installations,” but to get around this, a group called the Access Fund has persuaded friends in Congress to introduce a bill that would, in effect, amend the Wilderness Act. 

Introduced by Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from the anti-environmental delegation of Utah, and co-sponsored by Democrat Joe Neguse from Colorado, the “Protect America’s Rock Climbing Act” (PARC Act) has been promoted as bi-partisan. 

Yet over 40 conservation groups, from small grassroots greens to large national organizations, have written Congress to oppose the bill. Wilderness is not about human convenience, they say, it’s about safeguarding the tiny pockets of wild landscape we’ve allowed to remain.

The PARC Act directs federal agencies to recognize the legal use of fixed anchors in Wilderness, a backdoor approach to statutory amendment that even the U.S. Forest Service and Department of Interior oppose.

In a hearing on the bill, the Forest Service stated that “creating new definitions for allowable uses in wilderness areas, as (the PARC Act) would do, has the practical effect of amending the Wilderness Act. (It) could have serious and harmful consequences for the management of wilderness areas across the nation.”

Beyond the permanent visual evidence of human development, fixed anchors would attract more climbers looking for bolted routes and concentrate use in sensitive habitats. That impact is harmful enough, but the bill also sends a loud message: Recreation interests are more important than preserving the small bit of Wilderness we have left. 

What’s coming next is clear. Some mountain bikers, led by the Sustainable Trails Coalition, have introduced legislation to exempt mountain bikes from the prohibition on mechanized travel in Wilderness. 

Then there are the trail runners who want exemptions from the ban on commercial trail racing. Drone pilots and hang-gliders also want their forms of aircraft exempted. 

What’s confounding is that climbing is already allowed in Wilderness. This bill is simply about using fixed bolts to climb as opposed to using removable protection. That’s apparently confusing to some people. 

An article in the Salt Lake Tribune went so far as to wrongly state that, “a ban on anchors would be tantamount to a ban on climbing in wilderness areas.” 

But now, even some climbers are pushing back. The Montana writer George Ochenski, known for his decades of first ascents in Wilderness, calls the Tribune’s position “Total bullsh*t.” In an e-mail, he said bolting routes “bring ‘sport climbing’ into the wilderness when it belongs in the gym or on non-wilderness rocks.” 

For decades, many climbers have advocated for a marriage of climbing and wilderness ethics. In Chouinard Equipment’s first catalog, Patagonia founder and legendary climber Yvon Chouinard called for an ethic of “clean climbing” that comes from “the exercise of moral restraint and individual responsibility.”

We don’t like to think of recreation as consumptive, but it consumes the diminishing resource of space. And protected space is in short supply as stressors on the natural world increase. With every “user group” demand, the refuge for wild animals grows smaller. Meanwhile, a startling number of our animal counterparts have faded into extinction.

As someone who loves trail running, I understand the allure of wedding a love of wild places with the love of adventure and sport. But I’ve also come to see that that the flip side of freedom is restraint, and Wilderness needs our restraint more than ever.

Dana Johnson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a staff attorney and policy director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness nonprofit.

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That’s because after years away, I’m back in the West, living in western Colorado, near millions of acres of public land. If the love of wide-open spaces defines a Westerner, then our region gives us lots to love.

Alaska, which is 95.8% public land, may be king among all states, with so much wide-open space available to everyone, but Nevada is close behind at 87.8%, and Utah is next at 75.2%. Idaho ranks third at 70.4%, and Colorado has 43.3%, with most of that land west of the Continental Divide.

Until moving back West, I hadn’t thought about public land being vital for anything as basic as cutting firewood. Yet in most states without much accessible public land, firewood is an expensive proposition. Here, from May through October in Colorado, it’s ours for the permit, which costs about $4 to $10 for a cord of wood. That’s enough to fill a full-size pickup bed four feet high.

How much do you need? I’m told three cords add up to “just getting by” in Montana or Wyoming, but true winter wealth is more like six cords. While you’re gathering wood, you can also scout for a Christmas tree. That requires just an $8 permit — a world away from pricey conifers grown on a tree farm.

Writer Dave Stiller’s firewood-gathering advice is to take blowdowns or the slash piles left by logging companies. Once you’ve finished gathering, according to the Forest Service, “revisit and monitor the effects of your harvest… Become a steward of that place as you study the plants and how they respond.” In other words, think like an owner who cares about the land over the long haul.

Patrick Hunter, a Sustainability Studies student at Colorado Mountain Community College in Carbondale, thinks our public lands embody a “generational legacy” that’s become a cornerstone of our democracy. From young to old, the diehard fans of public lands are volunteers from nonprofits who “adopt” a trail, constructing and advocating for them.

Political cartoonist Rob Pudim tells of hiking a trail he’d worked on for several summers and feeling an onrush of possessiveness: “I own this land,” he recalls thinking. In a way, he’s right. We do own this land, though it is managed — even if we rarely see a ranger — by federal agencies.

No one knows how many people have gone to public land with one solemn purpose: to throw ashes of their dead into a stream or launch them into the air from a mountaintop, a practice that’s allowable in most Western states’ national forests. It forever connects someone to that particular place outdoors.

And for a lot of us, the best of life can be what happens during a summer of camping, mushroom hunting, fishing, wildlife watching or just “getting out there.” Some hunters also become advocates for wildlife and public lands, championing public access.

Still, the damage we’ve done to public lands in the West is visible and remains — mining, drilling, dam building, nuclear bomb testing, dumping nuclear waste piles along rivers and other sensitive places. Because of that legacy, the Superfund program, finally established in 1980, aims to restore these lands, some so altered that no real fix is possible.

Public land also serves as a link to modern history. Throughout the West we can still see architectural marvels built by Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago. And ghost towns that were once small cities continue to fascinate us as we think about the economic jolt that triggered their abandonment.

Today, we’re experiencing a similar jolt as increasing aridity alters how the West works. Or doesn’t work. Meanwhile, as we struggle to figure out what we’ve got to do to adapt, at least I know what I’ll say this Thanksgiving. I am forever grateful to the public land that gives us room to breathe.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives with his family in Durango, Colorado.

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More on feral hogs directly. But first some background on another feral ungulate. Few issues in the West are more incendiary than management of “wild horses.” Advocates proclaim them “natives” that should be “wild and free.”

Opponents submit that these proliferating aliens are harming land and wildlife belonging to all Americans.

The federal management goal for these horses on public lands is 27,000. Yet the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency charged with tending them, estimates the current population at 64,604. The Journal of Wildlife Management reports 300,000 on all lands — public, private and tribal. Federal law precludes effective feral-horse management. Unmanaged populations increase by 20 percent annually.

No less prolific are feral hogs. They’re “wild and free,” too. Having grown up with horses and hogs, I can attest that hogs are more intelligent than horses. And while feral hogs are destructive of native ecosystems, they’re no more so than feral horses. So why are there no feral-hog support groups protesting their culling on public lands?

Happily for native wildlife, there has yet to be a Wild Hog Annie. “Wild Horse Annie” was the Nevada woman whose campaign to save “wild horses” inspired animal lovers across America to write impassioned letters to senators and congressmen, demanding that feral equines be protected forever.

The result was the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, which mandated the BLM to manage these animals so as “to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance.” That task is impossible. No invasive species can thrive or even exist in “natural ecological balance.”

So we spend $160 million a year rounding up feral horses and placing them on perpetual welfare, with almost 50,000 permanently held in corrals or pastures. That’s more than half the $300 million we spend on all 1,618 endangered and threatened species native to the United States.

Horses and burros are the only ungulates in North America with solid hooves and meshing upper and lower teeth. Most native vegetation can’t deal with that. Yet in some areas BLM range management goals call for 15 or 20 horses when its own science tells it that 100 is the threshold for genetic viability. Why aren’t these marginal herds zeroed out?

“Feral horses are worse than cows,” declares retired BLM biologist Erick Campbell. “When the grass between shrubs is gone, a cow is out of luck, but a horse will stomp that plant to death to get that last blade. When cows run out of forage the cowboys move them, but horses are out there all year. BLM exacerbates the problem by hauling water to them.”

And this from Dave Pulliam, former Nevada Department of Wildlife habitat chief: “Horses will stand over a spring and run off other animals. In desert country, seeps and springs are the most important habitats for a whole myriad of species — sagebrush obligate birds, mule deer, bighorns, pronghorns, everything. And horses absolutely beat springs into mud holes. But our wildlife constituents don’t get as vociferous as the horse lovers.”

“Vociferous” is an apt adjective. Feral-horse groups confound the media, bully the environmental community, terrify Congress, beat up BLM and spew junk science. They are also well-funded and adept at manipulating people who have dreamed of owning horses since childhood. And they chant three mantras:

Cows do more damage than feral horses. That’s like saying we should ignore Covid because more people die from heart disease. The only thing wrong with cattle grazing is that it’s not always done right. When it is done right it can benefit native ecosystems by duplicating the range-renewal role of bison. That’s why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy lease land to ranchers.

Feral horses are historical treasures because they descended from animals brought from Spain by the conquistadores. They’re not. They’re mostly mongrels — a morass of domestic breeds that have recently escaped or been discarded.

Feral horses are native because a somewhat similar species was found in North America before it went extinct 10,000 years ago. That’s like calling elephants native because the continent once sustained wooly mammoths.

With feral horses, facts should outweigh sentiment. Yet wise management is an uphill and losing battle. It’s time for science and common sense to prevail.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. He writes exclusively about fish and wildlife for national publications.

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Instead, I hear that these animals are living symbols of the American West. From Portland urbanites to Idaho ranchers, and also from the many Indigenous peoples whose forebears called the horse their brother, no one can imagine this region without herds of mustangs and burros running free.

From the federal government it’s a different story. Hewing to a strong pro-livestock bias, the Bureau of Land Management has for decades spun a false narrative about an “overpopulation” of equines that, the agency claims, are in danger of starving and destroying their habitat. The agency would have us dismiss what photographers, tourists and advocates document every day: thriving, robust families of horses living peacefully on vast stretches of federal lands.

The reality is that wild horse populations are negligible compared to the vast numbers of cattle and sheep, to which the BLM allocates up to 80% of forage on designated wild horse Herd Management Areas. The agency complains that 80,000 wild equines is too many, yet omits mention of the 1.5 million cattle and sheep it allows to graze on public lands at the taxpayer-subsidized rate of just $1.35 per animal unit month.

Two prominent, mainstream environmental organizations — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Western Watersheds Project — exposed the BLM’s own grazing data that reveals commercial livestock, not wild horses, responsible for overgrazing.  These organizations were joined by the Sierra Club last November in calling on the BLM to stop scapegoating wild equids for rangeland damage that is attributable to vast herds of beef cattle and flocks of sheep.

Then there’s the tired debate about whether wild equines are native to the West. The ancestors of today’s wild herds evolved on the North American landscape over millions of years, paleontologists say. It is true that wild horses were wiped out from their home turf at the end of the last Ice Age — likely by human hunters — but some Indigenous tribes insist the horse never completely died out.

Whether they are a native species that never left this region or are native species reintroduced to their birthplace, wild equines evolved on this landscape. Because cows evolved in the cooler temperate pastures and forests of Europe, they struggle to survive in our harsh, arid ecosystems, while wild horses and burros prosper.

Driving around the West you’ll pass thousands of skinny cows while families of vigorous, healthy horses thrive on public rangelands. And while cattle congregate and trample sensitive riparian areas, wild horses will travel up to 20 miles a day in search for forage. With their simple digestive systems, they help spread native grasses far and wide.

Burros even serve as ecosystem engineers, digging wells in parched desert areas that provide a water source for other wild species. Horses and burros are prey animals that also serve as a food source for native carnivores, which, if spared from extermination to benefit livestock, help regulate wild horse populations.

The horse co-evolved in North America with the lion, the wolf and the grizzly. It’s instructive that while nobody laments the loss of a wild foal to a lion or a wolf, federal officials react fast when a steer or a sheep gets picked off by one of them. 

The federal government has a built-in bias against wild horses no matter the critical ecological role they play in promoting rangeland health. The BLM’s wild horse program is largely staffed by self-styled cowboys with a “round ‘em up” mentality for the equines and a “graze-at-your-will” attitude toward livestock.

Where necessary, wild equines can be managed humanely on the landscape with proven fertility control or an emergency gather. But these are the exceptional circumstances. 

It’s time to reject the BLM’s false narrative that wild horses harm public lands and embrace an approach that truly protects them. Wild horses and burros belong right where they are.

Scott Beckstead is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. The writer lives in Oregon where he teaches classes in animal law and wildlife law. He also serves as director of campaigns for Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. 

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That was probably five years ago, and since then e-bike use has exploded. In 2020, e-bike sales in the United States for just the month of June totaled roughly $90 million, up 190 percent from the previous June.

It’s hard to remember, but regular mountain bikes didn’t become commercially available until the 1980s, and when the early adopters hit trails previously used only by hikers and horseback riders, conflicts happened fast.

People claimed the bikes increased erosion. They worried about collisions and scaring horses. They theorized that mountain bikes would frighten wildlife. Today, those same arguments are being used against electric mountain bikes.

Once again, the controversy seems to stem from the fear of change, perhaps some arrogance and maybe a little jealousy. After all, since I suffered to get to the top of the climb on my own power, shouldn’t you?

In 2017, the International Mountain Bike Association, which had said that e-bikes should be considered motorized vehicles, softened its stance. Instead, it proposed that local land managers and user groups should determine — on a case-by-case basis — whether to allow e-bikes on naturally surfaced trails. Many members canceled their memberships. Some comments were harsh.

One wrote, “If you’re too old to still ride the trails you love, do as many beforehand, reminisce about the good old days and encourage the young. Don’t throw them and our public land under the bus.” That kind of attitude does not bode well for land managers to find an easy compromise.

So, what are the impacts of electric mountain bikes. Do they harm trails, or cause more accidents?

In 2015, the International Mountain Bike Association studied the environmental impacts of mountain bikes, both electric and self-propelled, and found no appreciable differences between the two in terms of soil displacement on trails. Overall, bike impacts were similar to the impacts of hikers.

Horses, motorcycles and off-road vehicles do much more damage to trails.

As for problems caused by speed, traffic studies show that accidents and their severity escalate as differences in speed increase. But do electrified bikes go that much faster than traditional bikes?

To find out, Tahoe National Forest measured the top speeds reached by intermediate and advanced riders using both kinds of bikes. Differences on the downhills were small. On uphills, traditional bikers averaged 5-8 mph, while electric mountain bikes traveled 8-13 mph. This was a difference, but not enough of a difference to cause more accidents, especially if bikers alert others to their presence and ride in control.

Rachel Fussell, program manager of the nonprofit PeopleForBikes, says that more than a battery boost, speed on trails reflects rider skill as well as trail design. She believes that all users observing proper trail etiquette would avert most potential conflicts.

Celeste Young has been a biker all her life and now coaches mountain biking. Her fleet of bicycles has recently grown to include an electric mountain bike.

“The most negative thing I’ve heard is, ‘Oh, you’re cheating,’” she says. “But it’s just another way to be out there. You get an extra boost going up these really hard trails, so it makes a challenging trail fun, rather than demoralizing.”

It’s a puzzling notion that someone accused her of cheating. It would be one thing if you secretly put a motor in your bike during a race, but when it’s an amateur rider going out for fun and exercise, how is having an electronic boost cheating?

The whole thing reminds me — a skier — of the controversy that erupted after snowboards appeared at ski resorts. They were new and fast, and their rhythm on the slope was different than the rhythm of people on skis.

We didn’t like them, and I doubt they liked us. But we’ve worked it out. Now, public land managers face the knotty problem of how much access to allow e-bikes, and where, or whether to segregate them to their own trails. Welcome to the crowded West.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring discussion about Western issues. She lives in Victor, Idaho, and has worked as a wilderness educator, waiter, farmer and freelance journalist to support her outdoor recreation habit.

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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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