What Western writers cared about during a tumultuous year

Once the Trump administration took over the reins of government last year, attacks on public land came fast and furious. Elon Musk’s cost-cutters stormed into federal agencies to root out purported waste and corruption, but what Writers on the Range opinion writers found afterward was chaotic mismanagement.

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.