The Death Knell of America’s Greatest Conservation Legacy

November 11, 2025•Tommy Hough

In October, anti-Wilderness Senator Mike Lee of Utah — the GOP senator whose recent scheme to enact a massive sell-off of federal public lands was pushed back by a coalition of public lands advocates, hunters, anglers, and conservationists — introduced the Border Lands Conservation Act (S. 2967). If passed, the bill will gut the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act and allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build roads, land aircraft, and install surveillance across the nation’s 112 million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System.

This is not a future any of us should want. The Border Lands Conservation Act would mark the death knell of our nation’s greatest conservation achievement, and the gold standard of American environmental protection. It would herald the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine lands and habitat throughout our country, and the extermination of thousands of species reliant upon those 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.

Sadly, there are some in our environmental community whose short-sightedness and lack of historical context not only left a number of our nation’s most important environmental advocacy organizations weakened in capability and mission at the exact moment of Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, but who continue to frown upon extraordinary conservation policies like the Wilderness Act because they see them as a kind of intrusion of purpose upon inherently wild lands, as though these lands weren’t already threatened with destruction and exploitation, or worthy of value or protection.

Those who adopt this view not only fail to take into account the legal framework the Wilderness Act provides to secure protection of these special places, but that the lands preserved as Wilderness today were already within federal holdings. Had things been left to run their course in 1964 in the still-expanding engine of the post-World War II economy, there would have been little left of these priceless locales today not logged into oblivion, mined, drained, draped with ski ramps, strangled by wires, concreted over, privatized, walled off, or suffering the indignities of destructive recreation and related exploitation.

The Wilderness Act was established to preserve our nation’s most extraordinary public lands in the face of relentless development — not lay conquering claim to them. In passing the Wilderness Act, the United States Congress revealed a level of humility unimaginable today, and did so at the pinnacle of America’s then-unstoppable economic growth and power. By an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 73 to 12 in the Senate and 373 to 1 in the House of Representatives, Congress determined some areas of our nation should remain off-limits and left as is, for all time, in their primeval state. That it passed by such wide margins is extraordinary, and speaks volumes of President Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of Congress, along with his commitment to the bill and the conservation ideal.

The idea that a limit could and should be placed upon how far human enterprise can extend so ecosystems can naturally evolve, free from human manipulation or permanent presence, was a revolutionary consideration in 1964. Upon signing the bill into law in a low-key Rose Garden ceremony on September 3rd of that year, Johnson said “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” LBJ would later sign the similarly progressive National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act into law in 1968, laid the groundwork for Redwood National Park and what became the Endangered Species Act, and signed 300 conservation measures into law including bills to protect clean air and water, govern waste disposal, and limit pesticide use.

Today, the Wilderness Act has enabled Americans to preserve 803 designated Wilderness areas across the U.S., from Florida to Alaska. These special places provide habitat for wildlife, havens for threatened species, filter and clean the air we breathe, protect rivers and watersheds, provide clean drinking water, preserve invaluable cultural sites, boost nearby economies with tourism and recreation dollars, serve as natural laboratories for education and scientific study, and provide uniquely wild places for Americans to recreate, depressurize, and escape the mania of the modern world in the freedom of the hills.

The values the Wilderness Act protects are available for all Americans to experience and enjoy today, and opportunities remain for even greater swaths of federal public lands to be protected as Wilderness. None is more critical than preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, now laid bare for exploitative destruction as the Trump regime throws this last great frontier open to oil exploration.

But as has been feared for years, Republicans are now actively working to do away with our nation’s most successful conservation legacy, and deny the nation’s citizenry of their wild, public lands birthright. From one end of the country to the other, Senator Lee’s Border Lands Conservation Act will allow the criminally out-of-control DHS to engage in activities otherwise prohibited in designated Wilderness areas, including:

The construction and maintenance of roads and physical barriers.
Deployment of tactical infrastructure and technology, including observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, vehicle barriers, fences, roads, bridges, drainages, and detection devices.
Use of motorized vehicles, motorboats, and motorized equipment, including those with internal combustion and electric engines.
Use of aircraft and development of related infrastructure for landings and takeoffs.

Neither Senator Lee’s aims or the pressure of destructive development are unique or new. We’ve already lost tens of millions of acres of natural areas on federal public land to drilling, logging, mining, and other extractive threats during the first 25 years of the 21st century. And to no one’s surprise, the Border Lands Conservation Act is on track to open Wilderness to logging and related resource extraction efforts to prioritize the fallacy of “fuels management” that predicates the similarly deceptive Fix Our Forests Act. Lee’s bill will similarly create destructive fuel breaks, and allow for the construction of new roads in our Wilderness areas. Short of selling these lands off to the highest oligarchal bidder as private golf resorts or colossal hunting preserves, these are our worst fears realized.

While initial reporting on the bill has focused on its impact on federal public lands and Wilderness within 100 miles of the nation’s northern and southern borders, analysis by the Montana-based conservation outlet Wilderness Watch found the bill’s provisions that amend the 1964 Wilderness Act will apply to every Wilderness area in the nation. With DHS thuggery now spread across the entire U.S., any Homeland Security director could conjure up any one of a number of border security premises or false flags to send bulldozers or ATVs crashing past trailheads, or install remote video surveillance systems in any Wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System. That is, if Mike Lee’s bill becomes law.

Just this year we’ve pushed back against proposed rollbacks to the Roadless Rule, Public Lands Rule, and now the dismembering of the Endangered Species Act, but those decisions are up to the administration. The Border Lands Conservation Act, like the equally awful Fix Our Forests Act (now up for a vote before the full Senate), is a matter before Congress that gives We the People greater latitude in making our concerns clear.

The Border Lands Conservation Act has nothing to do with conservation or security, only privatization of our public lands and police state intrusion into our wild, backcountry locales. Make no mistake: this bill puts our nation’s conservation legacy on the line. We must not yield to its destruction. We must show those who seek to decimate our wild places and advance the regime’s lawlessness our spine. We win, or we die, because there will be no coming back from this defilement and destruction if we allow it to occur on our watch.

Please call your two U.S. senators NOW at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to oppose Senator Lee’s Border Lands Conservation Act (S. 2967). You can also utilize this web contact form to connect with your state’s two U.S. senators. Please also share this message with your friends and family in other states — be they red, blue, or purple states — and encourage them to do the same. Speak loudly. Give to environmental organizations you trust. Arrange meetings with your U.S. senators and representatives and their staffs. Take them to visit Wilderness areas and other special places. Organize. Our predecessors never gave up. Neither can we.