Environmental preservation is in big trouble in the United States, and one of the most tragic components of its slow strangulation is the narrow margins upon which it’s currently facing its tip into the MAGA abyss in the U.S. House of Representatives.
During the 20th Century’s “Golden Era of Congress,” from 1954 to 1994, Wilderness and environmental bills were reliably bipartisan. But for well over 30 years since the 1994 Contract for America midterm elections that began our hyper-partisan era of gridlock, Republicans haven’t just been opposed to conservation measures, but increasingly hostile to the idea of conservation at all.
During the early 2010s Congressional Republicans spent much of the Obama administration “practicing” destructive environmental policy with bills Obama was sure to veto, but which nonetheless gave the House’s anti-conservation faction abundant opportunities to figure out how to best tear down a heritage that has otherwise been the pride of the United States since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt 120 years ago.
Now, even as the GOP barely retains a majority in the House of Representatives and is facing an electoral wipeout this fall, Congressional Republicans are putting their “shock and awe” anti-conservation plans into action while they can, even if the margin of victory is a single vote, perhaps with a few Vichy Democrats added in.
In 2014 I wrote that Democrats had complacently come to under-value and under-appreciate Barack Obama as president, even though he was the only person at that time standing between us and the abyss of increasingly reactionary, anti-conservation Republican rule. While the Trump administration(s) bear the lion’s share of blame for the cruel and calamitous state of our country since then, the GOP was already in the midst of a hard-right turn by 2014 and well on its way to the curated fascism we’re living under today, aggravated in part by the uninspiring, poor performance by Democrats in the 2014 midterms when it seemed few if any Democrats could even be bothered to show up to vote.
By the time Mitch McConnell was actively impeding Obama’s efforts to appoint a new Supreme Court justice upon the death of Anontin Scalia in early 2016 — when Democrats were facing an unasked-for and similarly uninspiring Hilary Clinton presidential candidacy that was the political equivalent of eating your vegetables — Democratic voters were in full apathy. Sadly, over the last decade, the results of that apathy have had a calamitous impact on our democracy, and on our environmental and conservation heritage.
Here’s a few samples of what’s been going on, especially since the beginning of the year, and how you can take action NOW:
🌲 The House of Representatives made unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn a 20-year ban on toxic copper mining near Minnesota’s iconic Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — an extraordinary wildland and one of the nation’s most beloved angling and boating locales — to lease adjoining lands in the Superior National Forest to a Chilean mining firm, which is expected to mine raw materials to be sent to China. Trump’s diseased fingerprints are all over this deal. The Senate takes up the bill next, offering conservationists one last chance to stop it, but it’s a tall order of advocacy even with the ongoing push in the Senate to hold ICE and the runaway Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accountable. Please call your senators and tell them to Save the Boundary Waters NOW!
TAKE ACTION: Call both your U.S. senators immediately and tell them to vote NO on H.J. Res 140. If Republicans can get away with destroying the Boundary Waters, one of the original Wilderness areas designated with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, they’ll do so anywhere. Tell your U.S. senators that protecting the Boundary Waters isn’t a partisan issue, it’s about whether we still believe some places are sacred. The Boundary Waters belong to all Americans — NOT a Chilean mining company with contracts to send ore to China.
🌲 The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), always understaffed and subject to shaky leadership on its best day, abandoned its own scientific findings to approve a new four-lane highway through endangered desert tortoise habitat in Utah’s Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. The decision to move forward with construction of the Northern Corridor Highway overturns a previously endorsed alternative to upgrade the existing Red Hills Parkway within the City of St. George, along the southern border of the conservation area, in a manner that would’ve posed less environmental risk and even resulted in better traffic flows. That, apparently, isn’t an amenable outcome for the BLM or the state of Utah in 2026 when there are endangered, prehistoric species to cruelly usher out of existence.
TAKE ACTION: This is a developing story with a potential lawsuit that may be filed by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. In the meantime, while there is no active public comment period, contact the St. George BLM office and leave a message for the field office manager that you do not support the highway through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area.
🌲 Also in Utah, where best conservation practices go to die, Utah’s entire congressional delegation is attacking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Established 30 years ago during the Clinton administration and a longtime fuel injector for the region’s outdoor recreation economy, Utah’s all-Republican delegation — apparently still unhappy about the monument’s 1996 designation blocking their ability to ride destructive thrillcraft and clearcut native pinyon-juniper forest — petitioned the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan as “rules” subject to congressional reversal. Amazingly, the GAO agreed. The Utah delegation is now expected to introduce a bill under the CRA, fresh off its use to poison the Boundary Waters, to call for a “resolution of disapproval” requiring only a majority vote that would eliminate the monument and prevent the BLM from issuing a similar plan in the future. This sets another terrible precedent for Republicans to further decimate conservation policy across the country. If Congress passes this resolution, it will undo any conservation-related management and undo protection of the endangered species and fossils the monument was intended to protect in the first place.
TAKE ACTION: Utah’s congressional delegation is expected to introduce a joint resolution to undo the current management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument any day. Call your members of Congress NOW: your U.S. congressperson in the House of Representatives and your state’s two U.S. senators and tell them to vote NO on the joint resolution! Let your friends and family in other states and communities to take action too!
🌲 This past November I wrote a lengthy essay about Utah Senator Mike Lee’s Border Lands Conservation Act, given the bill number S. 2967. Should this treacherous bill make it to Trump’s desk, it will gut the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act, and allow the already out of control Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem to build roads, land aircraft, and install surveillance equipment across the nation’s 112 million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System. With a budget now exceeding that of the U.S Marine Corps, the FBI, and several nations, the damage DHS could do to our wildlands under S. 2967 is astounding. The Border Lands Conservation Act is, in fact, intended to break the back of the Wilderness Act, which remains the gold standard of American environmental protection, and would herald the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine lands and habitat throughout our country for resource extraction and privatization as oligarchic golf courses and private hunting clubs. Passage of Senator Lee’s horrendous bill would also result in the extermination of thousands of species reliant upon untrammeled habitats beneath a dust cloud of bulldozers, dirt bikes, earth movers, and chainsaws given leave to move without restraint across our wildest, still-intact federal public lands.
TAKE ACTION: Call and email your U.S. senators today and tell them to save America’s wilderness and protect the 1964 Wilderness Act as is. Tell your senators to REJECT and VOTE NO on S. 2967. Have your friends and family in other states call their U.S. senators too! This will be a calamity if passed!
🌲 The cruelly-named Fix Our Forests Act, initially introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Scott Peters, a Democrat, and the late Doug LaMalfa, a Republican, both of California, is a dangerous, industry-backed bill that enables a return of large-scale industrial logging and clearcutting on federal public lands under the discredited guise of wildfire prevention and “forest health.” The bill eliminates public comment, scientific review, and judicial oversight for logging projects on federal lands, impedes public participation in public lands management, undoes National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Endangered Species Act (ESA) requirements, and imposes expedited timelines for judicial review designed to circumvent public oversight. The Fix Our Forests Act also authorizes unholy commercial logging in National Parks, though a related pilot project under the sickening euphemism of “biomass removal” in Yosemite National Park was thankfully halted by a 2022 Earth Island Institute lawsuit. Nevertheless, the Fix Our Forests Act facilitates greater post-wildfire salvage logging, despite the fact even high-burn areas see robust natural regeneration when they’re left alone, plus burn areas have considerably lower fire severity and remain a haven for wildlife. Even fully burned trees and snags continue to provide abundant homes for thousands of forest creatures, from tiny insects, beetles, birds, tree voles, and more. “Thinning” forests through industrial logging only makes them hotter, drier, and more prone to wildfire.
TAE ACTION: The “Fix Our Forests Act” has already passed the House in this congressional session, so please contact your two U.S. senators and tell them to vote NO on this dreadful, destructive bill. Our forests don’t need to be “fixed.” We have a climate change problem, not a forest problem. Politicians should instead advocate for home hardening and defensible space in fire-prone communities, rather than expansive logging in remote forests and wilderness far from population centers.
🌲 Lastly, there’s the highly controversial move by Congressman Cliff Bentz of Oregon to remove the Dog River watershed from the Mount Hood National Forest and add it to the city limits of The Dalles, home to five Google data centers with a sixth on the way that use one million gallons of water per day. “The notion this is for drinking water for residents is a fallacy,” former WaterWatch of Oregon executive director and senior advisor John DeVoe told Oregon Public Broadcasting earlier this month. “The great driver for water in The Dalles is Google.” As noted in an article in SFGATE, transferring even a portion of Mount Hood National Forest to The Dalles would not just change who manages the land, but would “strip away federal protections overseen by the U.S. Forest Service” which “monitors wildlife and enforces environmental standards designed to safeguard ecosystems.” City officials with The Dalles and Google have said the Mount Hood proposal is unrelated to the company’s operations, despite The Dalles’ 2024 master water plan which clearly refers to “an unnamed industrial user” that requires — you guessed it — one million gallons of water per day. The bill has already passed the House as H.R. 655 under the name The Dalles Watershed Development Act. Next stop is the Senate.
TAKE ACTION: Call both your U.S. senators and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 655 and oppose this bill. The free transfer of public lands to a city — benefitting one of the largest corporations on the globe and degrading our water quality and water — is deplorable and MUST be opposed. After you make your calls, ask your friends and family in other states, red or blue, to call their senators and tell them to vote NO as well.
In all of these cases, please be sure to have a script written or some organized notes in front of you, especially if you’re leaving a voicemail, and keep your message succinct and to the point. Whether you’re speaking to an elected official, a staffer, or leaving a voicemail, please be nice and thank whomever you’re speaking with for their time and consideration. You can be nice as well as firm — there’s no room for compromise on any of these matters. If you’re leaving a voicemail be sure to also leave your address so the legislator knows you live in their state and/or district. Then have your friends and family in other states call their representatives too!
Our long-standing and most effective environmental laws have, one by one, been reduced or neutered either by Congress or an absence of enforcement, leading to our current peek into MAGA’s nihilistic environmental abyss. It’s an ugly sight, and unless we can convince Democrats of the need to preserve historic conservation wins and the political popularity of doing do, much of this legislative carnage may quickly come to pass.
Tree plantation clearcut photo © 2005 Ed Siegrist, all rights reserved.