What we literally have in common – own in common – are our public lands, our national parks and forests. In the West especially, glance at the photo library on your phone and it will probably look a lot like the person’s next to you in the coffee shop. Your parents’ and grandparents’ faded photo family albums probably have similar pictures too. That’s because our public lands shape us. They hold our uniquely American stories.

Memories of that backcountry trip. High meadow lakes. Campfires. A bird dog, smiling next to grouse. A successful deer hunt. A first fish. A family picnic. Close your eyes for a second, and you can probably see your own moments in a wild place.

All of this comes from the wild public lands we all still own. Which is why it is so unsettling that the administration continues to try to hand those places over to the highest bidder. And why it’s so disturbing that they are pushing deeper into our forests, threatening future generations’ freedom to experience what we have been lucky enough to know.

It’s hard to keep up, but the direction is clear: sacrificing our wild public lands.

Recently, the president tossed aside executive orders from Presidents Nixon and Carter that formed the foundation for how agencies manage recreation on our public lands. The process is called travel management planning and it helps identify the best places for ATVs, dirt bikes, horses, hikers and mountain bikers so people can enjoy public lands safely, responsibly and without undermining each other’s experiences. We have enough public land to support many different ways of getting outside, but only if we plan carefully. 

These agreements can be hard to forge, but they help protect access, reduce conflict and keep public lands healthy for all. By ending the basis for them, the administration has left many public land users rightfully nervous about what will happen now.

Meanwhile, the media reported that the administration plans to direct the Forest Service to open lands recommended for wilderness designation to development and other damaging uses. Through an ongoing review, the administration has also signaled it plans to take a similar approach to more than 100 million acres of wildlands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The result would be permanent and intentional: wild places degraded so badly that they would no longer qualify for wilderness designation. Because once wildness is gone, you can’t bring it back.

Most troubling of all is the largest proposed rollback of conservation protections in American history. The administration has announced it intends to remove protections on 45 million acres of national forests and instead allow roads to be punched into some of our wildest public lands.

Here’s what happens when roads get built: they bring wildfire. They pollute streams. They harm wildlife. In my home state of Montana, 97% of summer elk habitat is on unroaded forests, away from civilization, high in the mountains, in cool, deep cover. Such forests also provide clean drinking water for millions of people. They are where people go to hunt and fish and camp and hike — where memories are made.

So why these attacks on our wildest forests? Why steal from future generations? Why open remote places to development when there is an enormous and urgent need to manage the forests near communities, to protect them from wildfire? Why develop wild lands when we could instead put people to work improving access and maintaining trails?

Our country is blessed with lands that are still wild, where wildlife can roam freely, cold creeks still flow, and a person has the freedom to wander. These lands are our common ground. They are where we go to remember what freedom feels like. In a way, conquering them conquers us.

One force can stop this: the people who own these lands, all of us. We can demand better of our elected officials now, and at the ballot box in the months and years ahead. Future generations are counting on it.

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

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M-44s are designed to kill coyotes, foxes and feral dogs that sometimes prey on sheep and newborn cattle. They also kill at least 150 nontarget species.

This April 15, the Trump administration lifted former President Biden’s M-44 ban on the Bureau of Land Management’s 245 million acres, and once again, M-44s will be deployed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.

“I’ve worked since 1994 with countless people who have lost their dogs to M-44s or been poisoned themselves,” said Brooks Fahy, director of Predator Defense, a nonprofit based in Eugene, Oregon. “M-44s can never be used safely. They are indiscriminate killers, and no young child, dog or wild animal can read a warning sign. I firmly believe it is only a matter of time until an M-44 kills a child.”

During Trump’s first term, M-44s were in widespread use but hugely unpopular. The public wanted them banned. In 2019, when Trump’s EPA issued a proposal to keep them registered for use, there was such public outcry that the agency pulled the proposal.

Four months later, EPA reissued its proposal. During the public comment period, it received 22,390 written responses. All, save 10, opposed continued M-44 registration. The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to consider all “relevant matter presented” in public comments. Yet Trump’s EPA ignored the law, and M-44s remained registered until Biden’s ban.

This April 15, the Trump administration bypassed any public comment period, reauthorizing M-44 use on BLM land via a memorandum of understanding between BLM and USDA.

Wildlife advocates are furious. Predator Defense called the Trump administration’s resurrection of M-44s “insane.” Project Coyote called it “devastating.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “Reinstituting use of poison bombs sounds like war tactics from 1970s rebel guerrillas in Angola and not the actions of public lands agencies. Their statutory and moral responsibility is to steward native wildlife, not poison the animals.”

So, who’s pushing M-44s back on public land? Whoever it is, it’s not sheep producers, explained Carter Niemeyer, employed by Wildlife Services for 26 years and supervising field agents for much of that time. M-44s were created mostly for them, but they now use guard dogs. Littering public land with poison bombs scented to attract canids is the last thing sheep producers want, he said.

Still, Trump spokesmen claim that the M-44 ban was lifted to benefit the wool industry. There’s widespread speculation that Trump ended the ban simply because Biden imposed it. 

“M-44s are unforgiving,” said Niemeyer. “Any animal that triggers one is dead. With traps and snares, you can usually release nontargets. Random coyote poisoning — ‘preventive control’ — is killing coyotes anywhere and everywhere because one might someday eat a sheep. When we had, say, two coyotes regularly killing sheep, we’d remove them. That’s ‘corrective control.’”

Robert Crabtree, America’s leading coyote researcher, found that random killing creates more coyotes. In natural populations, average litter size at birth is five or six. But competition in summer decreases pup survival to one or two. Random killing reduces competition, resulting in higher survival.

Niemeyer found that random killing also creates chaos by replacing older coyotes that have learned the dangers of depredating livestock with younger, inexperienced coyotes that do depredate.

But random killing is precisely what will now be happening on BLM land.

There has been legislation to permanently ban M-44s on federal lands, but it has been in limbo for years. Thanks to public outrage, there’s new life in a bill called “Canyon’s Law,” named for teenager Canyon Mansfield from Pocatello, Idaho. In March 2017, when he was 14, Canyon encountered an M-44 on BLM land behind his house. He thought it was a lost sprinkler head.

When he picked it up, his 3-year-old yellow Lab, Kasey, got hit in the muzzle and died. Some of the cyanide also sprayed Canyon’s face, damaging his eyes. Until his late teens, Canyon suffered from chronic cyanide poisoning. It’s unclear if he suffered permanent damage.

Americans who love public lands, their dogs and wildlife need to ask their legislators to support Canyon’s Law, H.R. 4180 and S. 2179, banning M-44s. Primary sponsors are Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon. At this writing, there are seven cosponsors.

Longtime wildlife writer and author Ted Williams 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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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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Writer Stephen Trimble called it a “Valentine’s Day Massacre” after 2,300 employees of the Department of the Interior were summarily fired, leaving the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Geological Survey and several other agencies short-staffed. Eventually, the Forest Service lost nearly one-quarter of its workers.

Many rural communities reacted with shock as unemployed workers faced the sudden loss of income and benefits. Visitors were unhappy about the loss of skilled rangers and inadequate maintenance of trails and bathrooms.

As former firefighter Riva Duncan put it, the mass firings cut the muscle of the workforce, not the fat. “Cost-cutters have no idea how government works or who does what,” she said. Probationary workers, for example, were not on probation for poor performance; rather, they were simply new to their job, which might have even been a promotion.

Duncan said one fired staffer told her she was outraged by the wording of her termination, as every performance rating she’d received as a ranger on Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest was “excellent.” This was her cursory dismissal: “The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated your further employment would be in the public interest.” She had been making $19.10 an hour.

Stephen Trimble uncovered a threat to national parks in Utah as the administration solicited bids for coal leasing on 48,000 of BLM land, much of it on and near the boundaries of national parks such as Capitol Reef, Zion and Bryce Canyon. This made little sense, he wrote, because mining would harm the vistas of these magnificent places that attract millions of people every year. The move was part of the administration’s intent to pursue “energy dominance” on public land.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s directive to all national parks to restore “truth and sanity” to the nation’s history drew scorn from writer Ernie Atencio. He noted that history wasn’t meant to accentuate the positive, it was to describe what happened no matter how dark. The signs that went up at public lands urged visitors to report unpatriotic materials that “fail to emphasize the country’s grandeur.” By all accounts, most people responding called the directive dangerous and ridiculous.

It was the push to sell off public lands to the highest bidder that most alarmed the public. Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced that notion several times, but hunters, hikers and environmental nonprofits pushed back hard, and his plans were defeated. Then there was Trump’s nominee to head the BLM, former New Mexico Republican congressman Steve Pearce. According to Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities, Pearce was a terrible choice because he had co-sponsored several bills to “dispose” of vast public lands he called useless.

Tracy Stone-Manning of the Wilderness Society eloquently explained why public lands were so valuable to all Americans. She called them “one of the country’s great equalizers,” and said that selling off public land ought to be unthinkable.

Other opinions included Laura Paskus documenting the climate change affecting New Mexico and Arizona. Recurrent drought dried up rivers, causing hotter heat waves and consistently warmer summers.

Pepper Trail denounced the Colossal Biosciences corporation for its boast that it had used gene editing to create three dire wolves, a species that went extinct some 10,000 years ago. Trail wrote that “the most basic goal of conservation is not to preserve individual animals; it is to help populations sustain themselves in their native habitats.” Trail called the company’s claims a “delusional fantasy.”

Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff listed some of the many ways hikers screw up in the Grand Canyon, leaving plenty of traces behind. One found object was unusual, though—a vial of someone’s ashes. “I reported finding the urn to park rangers,” she wrote, “and for the next month was identified as ‘the lady who found the body.’”

A final word for Thanksgiving came from ecologist Pepper Trail, who wrote about nature’s cycle of gift exchange. “The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control,” he said. “To be alive seems a miracle.”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, subscribe at writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives in rural western Colorado.

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