Note: A younger friend (S.) sent me a little questionnaire on land policy questions. I found it nice as a practice interview thingie. My answers, very lightly edited, are below.
S: What can young people do to effectively advocate for the protection of public lands?
LNP: The same things you do to advocate for anything! Get educated, find and join the people and organizations working on this, advocate for specific issues (a lot of that is canvassing and calling your electeds etc.,) and I think most important, help get the word out yourself, whether person-to-person or in your own engagement with press or protests, or however else. On this issue, education is probably the most important– public land is a justifiably emotional issue that generates more heat than light, so many complex issues get oversimplified in ways that are ultimately harmful to the cause. The only people who can oppose and correct deficiencies in understanding are the people working to get the word out.
Additionally, Edward Abbey says “Be as I am- a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.” And I think there’s a deep wisdom to that. You don’t have to be an ultramarathoner or AT thru-hiker or big-game hunter or backcountry conservationist to love the place you live. Just taking a look around, driving through, a quick hike, a minute to read the signs, in your local national park site or national wildlife refuge, or even their cousins in the state and county parks and nonprofit conservancies, puts you in touch with it. And being there, bringing your friends, knowing what you’re defending, is just as important as defending it.
S: The government recently announced plans to relocate the National Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Utah. What are your thoughts on this decision?
LNP: I do not like it, nor do most of the forest rangers I’ve talked to. The USFS and all the other land agencies need to be in DC to maintain high-level interagency coordination of policy (as the agencies each have different mandates) and there is a social lubricant of presence in DC that simply makes getting things done in the policy process easier; ie, when the USFS chief and high command are going to receptions and marathons with congressmen, policy wonks, lobbyists, lawyers, activists, and all the rest, doing something like restoring the Roadless Rule in the next administration becomes more possible than it would be if you just went through the usual channels.
That said, it’s not as bad as it’s been made out to be. (This is one of those issues where a public better-educated on public lands issues would be more effective in advocating for them.) The move is easily reversible, and relies on an unfriendly Congressional budgeting process and whatever chaos it causes in the short term should be thankfully easier to manage because a lot of agency lower staff will in fact be remaining in DC. Something similar happened to the Bureau of Land Management back in the first Trump admin, and while the agency is still hurting from that, it is still clearly capable of fulfilling its basic roles under a high-pressure situation.
The really bad things about the USFS “reorganization” are not about the move to SLC (although again, that is a nefarious and stupid decision.) They are about 1) the closure of the research centers, people don’t realize just how important research is not just for science but for management 2) the relocation of regional staff who have spent decades building local relationships and mastering local conditions of land management 3) the cutting-up of previously larger regional budgets to smaller state-level budgets, dividing scarce resources in an underresourced agency and 4) the forced resignations this will cause as all such moves have caused. None of this is fatal but it is definitely a temporary crippling at best. And the fact that it is happening right as the admin is mandating increased resource extraction and Congress is dismantling Land and Resource Management Plans is going to put the agency into deeper dysfunction processing claims and lawsuits, which will allow it even less resources for conservation, infrastructure, visitor safety, wildfire management, etc. etc. etc…. There’s a lot of nefariousness in the admin these days. But the saving grace, as Wes Siler put it, is that the administration’s incompetence will keep the worst stuff exploitation from happening anytime soon. And perhaps by that point Democrats– and, if I have anything to say about it, Republicans who have come to their senses– will be putting the right laws back in place.
S: How does the Property Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 3) relate to public lands, and why do you think it is often misinterpreted?
LNP: Let me first clarify that I’m a hiker, not a lawyer! I build trail and record podcasts, I don’t sign bills or hand down rulings. But this has been something those Wile E. Coyotes in the Land Transfer movement and the old Sagebrush Rebellions have hit at a lot in the past century, and that the environmentalist lawyers of the past half-century have thought about a lot too. Like most bits of the Constitution it unfortunately seems interpretable for whatever anybody wants… I defer to the knowledge of those wiser than me. And please understand that I do not claim any expertise on either the law or the history here, but here I go:
Historically, it basically means the federal government– not the states– makes the law in American territory not yet organized into a new state. Not just fundamental law, but basic civil law as well (and interestingly, I believe it is the Department of the Interior of all places that, through the Office of Insular Affairs, continues to administer that law in the remaining American overseas territories. Just a side note.) This means that when Congress received petitions from citizens in territorial governments to apply for statehood, Congress was essentially granting those states federal land out of its own goodwill, and continued to own and dispose of or withdraw much of that land itself. Of the land that made a new state, all of it became organized into said state, but some of the land in that state remained under the ownership of the federal government, which also granted some to the new state, and of course some was already owned by individuals or companies. Those lands remaining in the hands of the federal government were usually managed either by the Department of War or more often by the General Land Office. For most of the 19th Century, the federal government just kinda got rid of the land it owned in, say, Indiana or Kansas or whatever, either selling it off to private speculators (which was one of the things the early Congress had in mind for paying of the Revolutionary War debts Alexander Hamilton confronted) or eventually in handing it off for free in 160-acre plots to settlers who’d farm and “improve” it and sPrEaD CiViLiZaTiOn or whatever. The railroads in particular had a bad habit of buying up all these claims for themselves and reselling them for way too much money, and also absolutely destroying the resources in the most inefficient possible ways. The settlers meantime never figured out that you shouldn’t try to farm your 160 acres once rainfall got down to less than 20 inches per year, until it was too late and we had a nice little Dust Bowl on our hands. So for very practical economic and ecological reasons– and eventually for romantic preservationist and ambitious technocratic reasons– the federal government began “withdrawing” public land for special purposes. When the federal government withdraws land it basically keeps it from being sold, and assigns it a specific purpose that outlaws other purposes. These had early on been things like military installations or (in a much more diplomatically complex sense we can’t go into right now) indian reservations. But soon they were dam sites, forest reserves, national parks, national wildlife refuges, and all the other great things we know now. The further west you go, the less it makes sense for land to be in private hands simply due to the sheer amount of capital you’d need to improve it and the unsustainability of that margin. Thus the yuuuuge holdings of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management from the Front Range of the rockies all the way to the Pacific Slope.
Many great political controversies in American history have had to do with the federal government’s use of public lands. Remember, the proximate cause of the Civil War was the South’s intolerance of the Republican Party’s refusal to tolerate the further expansion of slavery, specifically in the context of the carving-out of new slaveholding states in the western territories, and whether slaveholders had the right to bring slaves into federal territory in which slavery was banned. (Spoiler– if the government said no, the answer was no.) The supremacy of the federal government to legislate on slavery in the territories was usually on the side of anti-expansion in those times, even when the Slave Power controlled all three branches of the federal government (!!!) Bleeding Kansas, Texas’s invasion of New Mexico, mundane fights over whether the Transcontinental Railroad should end at San Francisco or San Diego– all of these were significantly about whether the federal government had supremacy over public lands and the right to regulate slavery upon them. Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union, One and Inseparable, Now and Forever” speech was on this topic. Honestly, the public lands movement should really go all Reductio ad Lincolneum on the land thieves more often… And it’s not just these; the Credit Mobilier scandal (stocks in railroads receiving land grants) and Teapot Dome (stocks in oil leases on federal land) scandals that precipitated so much populist opposition to plutocracy and eventual public regulation of major utilities, were about public land issues. Article 4 Section 3, man. The feds have the right.
I guess I’m saying all this to say that the people who bitch and moan about how NaTiOnAL fOrEsTs AcTuALLy BeLoNg To tHe StAtEs are 1) improperly reading the Constitution 2) horrendously misreading the historical precedent and 3) following the same logic as the slave lords. Make of #3 what you will.
S: Earlier this year, there were widespread terminations and budget cuts affecting the public land system. Now that it’s April, what have you heard from workers (that you know) who were laid off? And for those still on the job, what has the situation been like on the ground?
LNP: They all love it and are enjoying their vacations and praise the ultimate wisdom of the Silicon Valley futurist revolutionizers who have benevolently supported humanity etc.
I’m just kidding. And it was not just earlier this year, it was last year too– the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” will go down in conservation history as one of the greatest omens of the 21st Century, and I hope like a Manassas or a Pearl Harbor in the annals of the great fights for the lands the conservation movement has perennially endured. The NPS’s workforce is still down 25% from 2024 levels (which themselves were insufficient,) and the BLM, USFS, and FWS are similarly understaffed. The USGS and other research agencies have also been hit pretty hard. To cap it all off worst, the Secretary of the Interior has consolidated a lot of DOI staff formerly from the agencies into the Office of the Secretary (which has expanded by like 500% or something ridiculous like that) which sounds either like a stupid-ass Silicon Valley corporate strategy that doesn’t work in government, or a malicious plot to control formerly bureaucratically-dispersed agency high staff directly under the thumb of the most powerful appointees and thus suppress bureaucratic opposition to the admin’s flamethrower policies, or maybe both.
Nobody likes this. Nobody likes any of it.
I worked with folks at Philmont and know other folks in Boy Scouts who have since become rangers in the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. I know a few others who didn’t get RIF’d (Reduction in Force) but saw most of their friends get hit. I know a few GS people in the agencies in DC with some spicy thoughts as well. The RIF’d rangers all eventually got rehired, after having had their lives uprooted for a few months, their workplaces sent into chaos at the beginning of wildfires-and-tourists season, and their years of literal hard labor in public service spit on by a bunch of incels with lame gamertags who’ve never hugged a tree in their lives. (I think the punishment for DOGE Service should be a guaranteed GS-1 job in whatever agency those bastards were hollowing out, Maoist style.) Meantime former rangers told me they were shocked, not just at how bad their old friends were being treated, not just at how precious time managing the lands was lost at a crucial point in the season, but at just how much institutional knowledge was being not lost but actively purged, and people with decades’ worth of public service being left out in the cold. Sometimes it was early-retirement buyouts, other times it was pure cuts, other times it was rehires; the end result was always the same, chaos in the systems that have been developed over decades and work the way they do for a reason, fucking around with which inevitably must bring about performance consequences. (By the way, conservatism has always been about gradual change, appreciation of the absurd, and humility towards the possible virtues of systems more complex than the human understanding can comprehend. So what the fuck, guys?)
I have heard it said, “never attribute to malice what might more easily be attributed to incompetence.” But again, per Wes’s point I referenced in a previous question; what if it’s both?
S: At Yosemite National Park, during the annual “firefall”, a group hung an upside-down American flag in protest of recent staffing cuts. What are your thoughts on demonstrations like this?
LNP: Yeah that shouldn’t have happened. We have to protect and obey the law, under all circumstances. The land thieves and defilers are breaking all kinds of laws and turning the stewarded west into the wild west again. We in the public lands movement have a sacred responsibility to be the last faint glimmers of of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that once was known as America. If we do not obey the law and follow the rules that made that order (and it was in fact the overcoming of human nature by our submitting ourselves to the proper rules, not some deep ambition or democratic virtue or mystical nature-worship or republican greatness or whatever, that we civilized ourselves out of earlier American barbarism to the land) then no matter how much purer our motives might be, no matter how much greater our cause, what exactly separates us from the vandals who blew up the East Wing or took down the pride flag at Stonewall National Monument? The image of the ranger himself and herself– the comfortable American leaving their comfortable life to go live out in the more rugged more splendid parts, hack dirt and count seeds and save hikers and clean toilets that a patch of American Earth might continue to be enjoyable to millions of people who will never meet that ranger, holding themselves to Leave No Trace and the rangers’ oaths and to their responsibilities to the people, holding themselves to rules that bind them to the land, not some cowboy in the howling wilds but a steward conquering human nature’s proclivities toward destruction– is rooted in a sense of rules.
Sorry, maybe that’s a lot. The other more practical thing is that there actually ARE sites in many public lands areas where protests are allowed and encouraged, and there are procedures to register protests that the NPS is required by law to follow. Think no further than the protests and rallies you often see on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the front door of the White House. These exist in other sites around the system too. I recently saw a “First Amendment Site” at a National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. This stuff is built in.
To my knowledge (and please correct me if I’m wrong) the folks behind the upside-down flag protest were out of order regarding the rules and regulations on this. Which is why I oppose it.
To be clear they are exactly right to protest, though. There are just better ways to do it. Or if you’re going to break law and code for a good cause, just please do it somewhere outside NPS jurisdiction, like hanging an upside down flag in full view of the president’s suite in a swanky hotel or something. Edward Abbey, god bless that man, gained a certain kind of credibility and lost a different kind of it (and to his credit, knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t care) when he engaged in criminal acts against the federal government in defense of his beloved Southern Utah. Monkeywrenching is wrong, even when its cause is sacred.
S: What do you think is at stake for future generations if public lands are sold/underfunded?
LNP: They would lose the ability to enjoy the pristineness of this nature and enrich their souls in that sweet clean mountain air, test their bodies in the crushing desert heat and the piercing glacier cold, run with the wolves and the bears amid the towering trees in the dark dark greens of our ancient forests, gaze upon the grand vistas the indian and the pioneer alike stood before in awe, feel the glory of our mighty rivers and walk the steps where Americans of every walk of life once walked and feel the spirits of our history and our future coursing through their veins; they’d lose the chance to put their hand on a hoe and the hoe in the dirt and pour their sweat into the trails and bridges and campsites that others could enjoy as they once enjoyed those once built by others like them, they’d lose the chance to live the stewardship and responsibility that makes true citizenship and statesmanship and civilization; they’d lose a place to be, they’d lose who they are, they’d lose who they have been and who they could be; they’d lose the chance to match their mountains.
Having had the privilege to do that ourselves, I believe our responsibility is to protect that chance for them.
S: What do you see as the biggest current threats to U.S. public lands?
LNP: I really hate to say this because it makes me ashamed to be a Republican, but at this point the single biggest threat to the public land system is the Trump Administration and the mainstream of the Republican Party more broadly. It is also among Republicans where the best work to protect the lands can be done; the longterm cultivation of public lands radicals and both elite and grassroots constituencies for land protection among Republicans, without this project being derailed by the land thieves, is a very low-hanging fruit and would hold an important balance in this fight if it succeeded.
The second-biggest threat is the specific nexus of political figures around Senator Mike Lee of Utah that keeps coming up with novel ways to undercut legal protections on the lands, destroy the institutitonal infrastructure that stewards the lands, delegitimize the management of the public lands, and actively sell off or otherwise dispose of those lands from public ownership. I cannot wait for these guys to be kicked out of politics for good.
The third-biggest threat is the tendency of extractive industry (drilling, mining, grazing, logging, etc.) to overplay its hand and lobby for more harvest than is sustainable. But I want to clarify that those agencies have been and should be key coalition allies in the proper stewardship of these lands; they have their place in it as much as conservationists, recreation groups, ecosystem services advocates, and everybody else has. They only cease to be helpful when the system itself gets out of whack, and the GOP and Lee people are doing a lot to get it out of whack.
The fourth-biggest threat is the tendency of environmentalist groups to oppose all extraction and development on public lands, to oppose access to these lands by various groups including offroad vehicle users, and to oppose the active management (in hunting regulations, prescribed burn and thinning operations for wildfire, etc.) of many of these lands. I would also add their tendency to turn public lands into a climate change issue rather than leaving it as a land issue. I believe these people mean well and have a deep and profound love of the land for its own sake; but I believe in practice they pursue environmental policy that makes proper stewardship harder, and drive apart the public lands coalition by being vitriolically uncharitable to hunters and offroaders who have just as much an interest in conservation as they do. This is a subtler kind of threat, of excessive zeal; a strange kind of “loving the lands to death.” I hope this group eventually softens out on the edges some, and enjoy engagement with them quite a lot.
There are other threats, especially the big tech oligarchs who would be most likely to buy these places, local real estate companies around every land area, and foreign resource companies with no ability to have the sense of stewardship American companies can be at least guilted into. Some argue climate change as well.
But perhaps the most insidious threat is the most mundane; apathy, not among any one person but among the public at large. If nobody cared enough to freak out when these places were under threat, those places would be gone by now. I believe God exists regardless of whether anyone believes in him, but if nobody believed in him there’d be no cathedrals and crucifixes and bibles. So it is with the value of the lands. Remember the Onceler upon his redemption, feeling guilt about the Lorax’s admonitions. The Onceler tells you:
“Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”
S: Do you support or oppose the sale or transfer of federal public lands to states or private entities? Why?
LNP: Oppose lol. You need major resources to manage large landscapes and ecosystems under multiple-use/sustained-yield policy and you’d still need lots of resources even if you were only managing them for a single use like conservation. Only the federal government has the capacity to marshal those kinds of resources, and to deploy them for a longterm unprofitable project based on regularity rather than agility. The personnel and institutions who have executed this work for decades have gotten very, very good at it, both by intention and by trial and error; that is something that simply cannot be replaced.
It is not just that the states and private entities don’t have this backdrop of experience, though. It is also that they are under very different constraints than the federal government. Remember– the U.S. government is sovereign. Its holdings are not assets on a balance sheet; they are integral components of its living small-c constitution. They are parts of it, and thus birthrights of those who own that government, ie the American people. The federal government can go broke and not be forced out of its property. Not so with states, which typically have constitutional responsibilities to balance their budgets, and which have historically had to dispose of much of the land granted them by the federal government and sell them to private owners when they hit fiscal crisis. Which is a goddamn shame, isn’t it? A single bad year for the social construct that is money, and a great and treasured landscape everybody can touch and feel and love and live and die on vanished forever behind the barbed-wire fences, beneath the bright and terrible lamps of the data center empires?
All the moreso for private and nonprofit entities, which can go bankrupt or otherwise have to be sold. And moreover, private and nonprofit entities possess immense discretion and power over what they are allowed to do with their holdings– build on it? Conserve it? Drill it? Turn it into a different kind of ecosystem?– and, just as importantly, who is allowed to go onto them. Once a piece of public land is no longer public, there is no longer any real chance the public will be able to go onto it, simply because the public no longer has a right to go onto it. It’s private.
I live in great terror that Philmont Scout Ranch might eventually go bankrupt, or that the BSA’s continuing payments for its lawsuits will have to result in the disposal of the ranch and its closure as Scouting’s Paradise. If that disaster scenario were to happen, I’m sure the Philmont Staff Association or some major donors would move whip-quick to save it under some form, as the place really does change people; I like to imagine it might be declared a National Monument, and run in partnership between the nonprofit and the federal government both for public access and a specific institution’s purpose, as many national monuments dedicated to historical preservation are. But the very fact I have to think that about a nonprofit-run place I love should say something about the public places I love, too.
It is often said that once public land is gone, it’s gone forever. That is not ENTIRELY true. Most of the public land east of the Mississippi River, for example, has actually been donated to or bought back by the federal government, from private owners, and amost all of it has been rewilded to some degree or another. Several states, notably Texas, whose histories precluded major public land ownership, have made a point of purchasing private lands to set up their own public land systems. And there have been a few cases where something treasured went into private hands for a while, but eventually came back. There is hope. But hope is not a policy, and in any case those cases all took decades and immense amounts of environmental devastation to work out in the long run. Functionally, when land is gone, it should be thought of as gone forever.
And yeah yeah, conservation easements and environmental laws and everything. Yes– agree that those are there and that those are crucial to all of this, and that they take the project of preservation far into private lands, most importantly with the willing consent of private landowners. That is good. That is no substitute whatsoever for public land ownership. There is currently a promising movement to reimagine conservation as something that takes place across jurisdictional borders, featuring not only federal public lands but state lands, nonprofit conservancies, private landholdings, county and city and local lands, etc. etc. etc., with some bottom-up collaborative management philosophy rather than the existing top-down philosophy. This looks at the public lands as an extended system, which I support.
…But this simply cannot elide the necessity for the core of the public land system– the 640 million acres of BLM, USFS, FWS, and NPS lands alongside the small holdings of a few other agencies– to be protected, managed, and cherished as the core of American nature. For without that core being well-managed, the expertise, the research, the practice, the public imagination, and the very spirit of American conservation would not be there, not be able to lead and sustain the much less-well-funded less-well-known less-well-protected further non-federal parts of the American land system. Just as Yellowstone is the crown of the national parks, and the national parks are the crown of the public lands, so the public lands are the crown of America; they must be protected centrally if the whole is to be protected at all.
(By the way, I personally think the crown should be the wilderness areas in the National Forests, for remoteness, ruggedness, and diversity of activity, and the fact that soooo many glorious peaks are in that system rather than in the national parks. But that’s just like my opinion man. I’d add the NPS historic sites as the parallel for historic heritage.)
S: Can you name a policy proposal from your party that you disagree with on public lands?
LNP: Yeah, lots lol. Name pretty much anything.
But most recently there’s a bill going around called the Patriot Parks Act, which would codify current Interior Department policy into law and jack up the cost of park entry fees to foreign tourists by $100 or something. (This alongside increasing the cost of the America the Beautiful Pass (access to all public land units for a whole year) by a heck of a lot for foreign visitors.) It would increase revenue for the parks charging it, giving them more dedicated funds for operations and maintanence, and work to make more parks “self-sufficient.”
The justifications of it as not being xenophobic or classist are weaselly greenwashings in my view, but that isn’t even the worst of it. If you tie park budgets to park visitation, you’re putting a band-aid on the 800-pound grizzly bear in the campground– the fact that the NPS budget has not been anywhere near sufficient since 2010, that the current NPS maintanence backlog is something like $35 BILLION, and the nefarious reality that the Trump Administration in particular and the Republican Party in general continues to cut NPS’s quaint $3 billion in a budget somewhere around $7 trillion out of a worship of FiScAL ReSpOnSiBiLiTy or whatever. And EVEN worse, if you tie park budgets to park visitation, you start to set a norm where the value of the park is based on its profitability. Aside from that being literal blasphemy, it also puts hundreds of NPS sites that do not (and could not) charge visitor fees on the list as being “revenue-negative” on the famed “balance sheet” our wise benevolent omnipotent Secretary of the Interior so magnanimously stewards. I don’t know the specifics but I would bet that no more than 200, and probably closer to 100, NPS sites charge entry fees (usually $20 per vehicle or something to that effect.) There are 433 sites in the system, around 250 of which are small history-protecting sites. Should it be decided by a FiScALLy ReSpOnSiBLe Interior Department that some “assets” ought to be “disposed of” to “balance the budget,” which spots do you think are getting iced first? So the whole precedent PPA sets unravels even more than just the immediate insult of checking passports at the entry stations. And that’s another thing– passports, birth certificates at park entry stations? Have you ever sat in the line at Arches National Park in August to get in? And you weren’t thinking of deploying ICE alongside a park ranger, were you?
But I guess the admin’s recent rule change smoothing the process for park superintendents to hire locals outside of the standard national application process is good, and at U.S. Grant National Historic Site and Fort Union National Monument I did notice that the rangers on duty were kids younger than me who’d grown up in the area. So sometimes the GOP’s efficiency/home-first mindset does something good or other. It’s just that is not usually the case.
S: Why did you decide to focus your congressional campaign on conservation and public lands? How is it relevant to the people in VA 8?
LNP: Well, for all the reasons above! And more specifically, I figured an energetic campaign by a young and patriotic outdoorsman right on the doorstep of the nation’s capital in the 250th anniversary of the America the public land system celebrates and serves, would be a good person to call sense into his party and bring the issue to the forefront in the policy class. The folks around here work in government and many like the rangers have been laid off; they travel through NPS sites on the GW Parkway and the National Mall every day. The land is real here, in ways that are subtle, and subtle is good. I believed if there ever was a time and a place and a person to do this, it was me and here and now, and I’d always regret not trying.
Well, it turns out a campaign is NOT a good way to bring attention to an issue– Andrew Yang was a very strange and unique case. But I don’t regret it one bit.
S: What should individuals holding public office be doing to protect public lands?
LNP: They should read my response to how young people should advocate for public lands and start doing those themselves.
From their aeries of power they should support the legislation and executive actions that a public lands radical would support, and in a nutshell that is:
-no sales of public lands / no reduction in size of system or number of units
-full funding of the agencies and programs stewarding this
-full staffing of the agencies and programs stewarding this
-protection, surgical reform, and strengthening of the major legislation protecting the lands
and that is just a start.
But I think most importantly under the present moment, they should do something much simpler. My fellow Republicans, I beseech you– condemn in no uncertain terms your friends and fellow partisans who are actively destroying the lands. Condemn Lee, condemn Burgum, condemn Rollins, condemn Vought and Miller, and condemn Trump. Condemn everyone who is doing anything to destroy the integrity, the existence, and the spirit of the public land system, most importantly those who are doing that while greenwashing their perfidy and daring to wrap themselves in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt. Condemn them, even if you get hurt for it. Grow a fucking spine and do the right thing. If you’re not willing to put your career on the line for the national parks– how am I even saying that?– you do not deserve to be anywhere near office, anywhere near the trust of the American people. Just say something and condemn the bastards.
And if you need a little bit of inspiration, go out to Saint Louis and visit U.S. Grant’s house, a site protected by the National Park Service. That’s one of the spots Grant lived in his early days, and if you’re not aware, he had an early life full of horrible shame and failure. He got hit for doing the right thing, but he endured. But he kept his spine and never stopped serving, and never fell for the evil sirens around him as the crisis rose. And then he saved the union.
That park doesn’t charge an entrance fee. And on its grounds a sign reads:
“This place belongs to,
and is preserved by,
the American people”
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