Tack & Ink

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to nullify decades of land-use planning by the Bureau of Land Management:

Resource management plans serve as guidelines for how the BLM manages the public lands it oversees. The plans are developed through a lengthy process that combines local and tribal input with environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The goal is to create a blueprint for “multiple use” management, balancing economic activities such as grazing and oil and gas development with other concerns, including wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation and conservation.

In Montana, the disappearance of that blueprint will have immediate consequences. Ranchers face uncertainty on how many cattle they can run, when their permits will be renewed, and what will happen during a serious drought. Tribal cultural sites are likely to be left unprotected and years of tribal consultation overridden. Conservation groups warn that congressional vetoes could sideline science-based safeguards for vulnerable habitats. In Miles City, the resource management plan would have reformed coal seam leases near the Powder River Basin; without those reforms, habitat for elk, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse and pheasants could be fragmented by new energy development.

Republicans used the 1996 Congressional Review Act to strike down three Resource Management Plans BLM finalized in the past year. Montana Representative Troy Downing, who sponsored House Joint Resolution 104, accused the Biden Administration of "waging war on American energy" by locking up lands that contain coal, even though the use of coal for energy has been steadily declining for decades.

House passes bill to up Montana coal mining on BLM land

Rep. Troy Downing sponsored House Joint Resolution 104, which would nullify a Miles City Field Office RMP amendment issued on Nov. 20 and open up more than 1,745,000 acres of BLM land in eastern Montana to coal leasing.

The Missoula Current News - Daily News in Missoula MontanaMartin Kidston

Trump to open more federal land for coal mining, provide industry $625M to boost coal plants

The Trump administration said it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants.

PBS NewsMatthew Daly, Associated Press

Summary of the Resource Management Plans that could be scrapped by Congress’s CRA - North Dakota, Central Yukon (AK), PRB (MT)

A detailed review of the science backed RMPs.

The Conservation CurrentMichael Khamis

The Trump Administration has hinted at plans to close an unknown number of U.S. Forest Service offices in Alaska:

In a July memo outlining the basic details of the plan, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she intends to close the Forest Service’s nine national regional offices “over the next year” but “will maintain a reduced state office in Juneau, Alaska, and an eastern service center in Athens, Georgia.”

Research stations, like the Juneau Forestry Science Laboratory in Auke Bay, will be closed and “consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado.”

Nationally, Rollins said she intends to scatter more than half of the Agriculture Department’s 4,600 Washington, D.C.-based administrators to five regional hubs; one each in Utah, Colorado, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana.

This follows prior actions by the federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which earlier this year fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees nationally, including more than 100 in Alaska.

Public comment on this proposal remains open through the end of today.

Boosting timber harvesting in national forests while cutting public oversight won’t solve America’s wildfire problem:

So, what can Congress and the federal government do to reduce fire risk to communities? The answer starts with investing in forest management and projects that can reduce fire risk.

Joint projects involving communities and state, tribal and local agencies, like those under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, build partnerships to reduce fire riskacross large landscapes and lower the risk of fire spreading to homes and federal wildlands. The Good Neighbor Authority, created in 2001, enables federal agencies to contract with states, counties and tribes to provide forest management work on federal lands.

The Department of the Interior has proposed rolling back the Public Lands Rule, arguing that conservation isn't a "use" on Bureau of Land Management lands:

The Department of the Interior is moving to strike a Biden-era conservation rule for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). On Wednesday, September 10, Sec. Doug Burgum announced that the agency is proposing to rescind the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, saying it was impeding extractive industries on public lands.

[...]

The Federal Lands Policy Management Act, or FLPMA, is the law that gives the BLM its multiple use mission. The word "conservation" doesn't come up in FLPMA's definition of multiple use, but the law does mandate that the BLM protect ecological and environmental factors like air and water quality, and it says certain public lands should be protected in their "natural condition."

Colloquially known as the Public Lands Rule, the policy officially codifies conservation as a "use" for the BLM, like grazing, recreation, and oil and gas. It also gives the agency tools to manage conservation.

Public comments on the proposal are open until November 10.

American Prairie opened 70,000 acres in Montana:

Ambitious conservation nonprofit American Prairie has secured its second-largest land purchase and leasing arrangement to date, buying up the 70,000-acre Anchor Ranch in Montana, which had been listed for sale for $35 million. The group bought the land from two billionaire Texas brothers who’d kept the public locked out of one of the only western access roads into adjacent public land, the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, which totals almost 400,000 acres. 

Out to Pasture

John Deere sales slump.

The life and death of the American foodie.

Cloned and genetically modified animals are entering the market.

Beef prices hit record highs.

A potential plan for the rural vet shortage.

Why Iowa won't clean up its water.

In June, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins at the Western Governor’s Association meeting in New Mexico announced her intention to rescind a Clinton-era policy called the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. It's perhaps overshadowed by legislation like the Endangered Species Act, but the development of the U.S. Forest Service roadless rule is one of the most significant conservation achievements in American history, protecting over 58 million acres of the nation's forests.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, passed in 2001, emerged through the convergence of scientific knowledge, environmental advocacy, political dynamics, and the role of forests in clean water, wildlife habitat, and climate resiliency. The Rule was forged through the most extensive public participation process in federal rulemaking history—generating over 1.6 million public comments—that shifted forest management policy away from utilitarianism and towards ecosystem conservation that attempts to balance public land management, commodity use, biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, wildlife protection, and recreation. Simply stated, the rule prohibited road construction and timber harvest on protected national forests and grasslands.

The Trump Administration seeks to upend this dynamic, opening up areas for development and logging. A public comment period is currently open until Friday, September 19, and I would urge you to go leave a comment.

Some history may help. The roadless rule represents a century of forest policy evolution and one of America's most important conservation achievements.

From Utilitarianism to Stewardship

The nation's first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, defined the early legacy of the Forest Service's philosophy. As Chief of the Forest Service in 1905, the agency emphasized "wise use" among its forests. This philosophy dominated the Forest Service, reaching an apex following World War II as commodity development drove the construction of 386,000 miles of roads to access timber resources that helped fuel America's post-war housing boom.

In the wake of this lumber bonanza, concerns about the conservation of natural resources began to grow in the 1950s and 1960s. In response, Congress passed the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 (MUSY) that formalized equal consideration for timber, rangeland, water, recreation, and wildlife. The law explicitly stated that "some land will be used for less than all of the resources," defining multiple uses as a combination of outdoor recreation, rangeland, timber harvesting, watersheds, and wildlife and fish protection that would best serve human needs. A seemingly modest provision, MUSY established precedent for protecting public lands based on ecological rather than solely economic needs. It also changed the Forest Service professionally as new specialists in soil science and wildlife biology helped make management decisions.

The Multiple Use Act would not be the only 1960 legislation that shifted the nation's priorities for its national forests. After nearly a decade of lobbying, drafting, and networking, Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Society helped usher in passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 that, among other things, created the National Wilderness Preservation System that created an initial 9 million acres of wilderness land. The Wilderness Act formulated the legal concept of "untrammeled" lands, where humans are "a visitor who does not remain" and "shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness." The Act also authorized a systematic inventory of roadless areas that could become wilderness areas.

Road-building became an irreversible development: any place that contained roads, according to the new legal framework, disqualified it from being wilderness. As James Morton Turner notes, nearly half of the land advocates viewed as roadless the Forest Service classified as "commercial forest land." By the 1970s almost half of the National Forests were classified under this designation, a popular policy among local communities and the timber industry. Timber sales, after all, brought money into the agency while local communities saw employment, tax revenues, and a share of proceeds from timber harvests. Despite Congress insisting the Forest Service manage the land under multiple use, timber remained the primary policy.

The 1970s shifted the Forest Service towards a stewardship role. Clearcutting remained a common practice in National Forests but legal challenges found that the practice violated federal law. In response, Congress passed the National Forest Management Act in 1976 that required forest planning to consider roadless areas for their potential for wilderness designation while mandating non-timber considerations in all planning decisions. Importantly, NFMA created a systematic evaluation process that later informed comprehensive roadless inventories.

The Forest Service's Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) sought to bridge wilderness law and forest management. RARE I, begun in 1972, conducted the first inventory of National Forest roadless areas larger than 5,000 acres. This inventory, however, faced challenges of insufficient analysis. The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and other wilderness advocacy organizations criticized the agency for a rushed and limited survey, culminating in a lawsuit by the Sierra Club. A more comprehensive review, RARE II, conducted between 1977 and 1979 inventoried 62 million acres of roadless areas across the National Forests.

Alongside these new laws and regulations, scientific understanding of the ecological impact of roads was also finding new purchase. The scholarly work of Robert MacArthur, Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, and others studied species diversity, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity to show how protecting large, intact forest landscapes helped flora and fauna. Roads upended this—they contributed to invasive species (deep into forests, even if roads were on the edge), restricted or fragmented habitats for wildlife, and harmed biodiversity.

Within the Forest Service, its management philosophy shifted in the 1980s and 1990s. The concepts of "new forestry" and "new perspectives" emphasized ecological relationships over commodity production. Led by Chief Dale Robertson's introduction of "Ecosystem Management," the Forest Service in 1992 began integrating biodiversity conservation and ecological integrity into its management decision-making, setting the institutional foundation for recognizing roadless areas as having conservation value independent of their wilderness designation. Alongside environmental organizations advocating for forest landscape protection, President Bill Clinton pushed the Forest Service to develop roadless protections. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck was the primary architect of this policy change, holding over 600 public hearings and receiving more than 1.6 million public comments during an 18-month period. On January 12, 2001, after three years of analysis and widespread public participation, the Forest Service adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule to protect 58.5 million acres of National Forests and National Grasslands from road construction and logging.

Passage of the roadless rule was not without its critics, especially across the American West. Idaho Governor Jim Risch filed a petition in 2006 to redesignate 85% of Idaho's 9.3 million roadless acres to allow development and logging. The state also negotiated its own state-specific rule in 2008 that protected 9 million acres while opening 400,000 acres to road construction and logging (these state-level regulations will remain in good standing, no matter what USDA decides). Colorado developed a more collaborative approach: beginning in 2005 the state solicited 310,000 public comments and, in 2012, the Colorado Roadless Rule created a two-tier system with 1.2 million acres receiving strong protections (stronger than the federal rules) while allowing ski areas, grazing, logging, and hazardous fuel treatment in other lands (these lands, also, will be unaffected by the USDA). Utah, confrontational as always, submitted an unsuccessful 2019 petition seeking the complete elimination of Utah's four million acres of roadless land, citing unhealthy forests and wildfire risks.

Alaska's Tongass National Forest became, and remains, a key battleground: 16.7 million acres of the world's largest temperate rainforest and 9.3 million roadless acres. Alaska has claimed the rule hurt the lumber industry, even as studies continue to show that hunting, fishing, and tourism employ nearly a quarter of regional workers compared to timber's one percent. On top of that, Tongass National Forest alone stores more carbon than any other U.S. National Forest, making the preservation of roadless areas an essential component in climate change resiliency. The Trump administration stripped Tongass of protections in 2020, which were restored under the Biden administration in 2023. The Trump administration is currently looking to reverse this yet again.

Overturning the roadless rule privileges short-term economic interest over long-term conservation. The achievement of the roadless rule—created through widespread democratic participation, unprecedented public input, and scientific study—is one of America's grand conservation achievements.

We learned a couple of days ago that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is attempting to illegally divert funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) in order to halt the purchase of new public lands. These lands range from large acquisitions to something as small as a boat launch or baseball field, and touch almost every county in the United States. The funding for LWCF arrives not through taxes, but from royalties from offshore drilling. The intention behind this diversion of funds is a deferred maintenance program. Maintenance, of course, that's normally taken on by federal land agencies – the same agencies that have slashed funding and personnel under this regime. It makes no sense.

I'll note, too, that LWCF was reauthorized and re-funded as recently as 2020: widely celebrated under the Great American Outdoors Act, passed by President Trump. You see the irony here.

Call your representatives: (202) 224-3121.

Trump officials aim to divert money meant for buying wilderness land (Washington Post):

The Trump administration is testing the boundaries of the 1964 law creating the fund, which dictates that the money be used for acquiring land. Congress established a separate fund for maintenance that is up for reauthorization this year but has yet to be considered.

“It’s illegal to spend LWCF funds on maintenance and they know it,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) said in a statement. “If they move forward, they will be sued and they will lose. It’s not too much to ask to follow the law.”

The administration’s effort comes after a Republican plan to sell off public land was met with widespread backlash across the political spectrum, even among ardent Trump supporters.

U.S Fish and Wildlife Service withdraws expansion Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge via Trump executive order:

The US Fish and Wildlife Service is withdrawing the final Land Protection Plan for the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge.

According to previous reporting done by MyHighPlains.com, the expansion, announced in April, was going to add over 700,000 acres. The expansion, working with willing sellers, was to expand conservation efforts through fee title and easement acquisitions. 

As noted by the Center for Biological Diversity and in previous reports, the expansion would have served to help conservation and restoration efforts for the region’s grasslands, which serve as habitats for migratory birds and other wildlife.

Some terrific visual reporting by Reuters in Eroding Protections for Public Lands:

The U.S. Congress has passed hundreds of laws protecting federal public lands over the past century through bipartisan efforts and with the support of local governments. 

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration and some Republican lawmakers in Congress are pushing policies and legislation that upend these protections. Plans to open nearly 59 million acres of national forest land to road construction and mandate lease sales for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge prioritize energy extraction over conservation.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things they had to give place to better cattle.
—John Muir

The population collapse of plains bison, that symbolically most American mammal (Bison bison bison), is among the most well-known stories of our animal past. For thousands of years millions of these ancient animals, originating from Asia across the Bering land bridge, followed migration paths across the Great Plains in search of grass, water, shelter, and seasonal weather. For over 2,000 human generations millions of bison ranged over a great swath of North America, as far north as Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.

Commercial hunting and slaughter brought them near extinction in just thirty years.

Many readers are likely familiar with the famous grisly photograph of the mound of bison skulls, taken outside the Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville in 1892. Between 1860 and the year the photo was taken, the largest killing spree of American animals occurred (and not just bison, but wolves, coyotes, and untold millions of others through incidental poisoning). An estimated 30-60 million bison roamed the country in 1800. By 1889, William Hornaday's systematic census of bison populations counted fewer than 500 remaining. Bison populations could not overcome the market pressures placed on them.

Bison populations take time to grow. With relatively late reproductive maturity (typically around 6 years) and long gestation periods (285 days), the enormous pressure placed upon the herds by American settlers meant that, biologically, they could never have replaced their populations as quickly as they were being killed.

As a keystone species, bison greatly shape ecosystems. Their grazing, migration, and wallowing created new habitats for animals and plants. Bison feed on grasses, sedge, forbs, and woody plants, creating a more complex ecosystem than monocultures that are often fed to cattle. Their shaggy coats allowed seeds to travel and disperse, and they shed their coats in spring by rubbing against small trees. This would often kill the tree, stopping forests from moving onto the plains and encouraging other thriving habitats. Like cattle, their hooves churn and aerate soil as they travel. Unlike cattle, bison ranged over farther distances for water and food. Like farmers using modern cultivation equipment, this loosened and aerated soil provided a receptive environment for new seeds. Bison feces likewise provided environments for dispersing seeds, bacteria, and insects to recycle nutrients into the soil, and, as buffalo manure supported bug populations, this, in turn, supported bird populations.

Privatizing the Great Plains radically altered this ecosystem. As Dan Flores notes, with new human settlement east and west of the plains bison lost a place of refuge from droughts that they'd used for millennia. The market for bison—sometimes for hides, sometimes for skulls, very rarely for meat, and often for slaughter that simply left bison carcasses rotting in the heat—rapidly destroyed their populations in a way that's hard to wrap your mind around. Nineteenth-century Americans could not conceive that humans could be responsible for such destruction, instead suggesting alternatives other than themselves to explain the dwindling herds—an echo of the denials we hear now about climate change.

The demise of bison populations directly followed two key developments: the expansion of railroads, and the rise of cattle populations.

The cows came before the rail. Fifteenth century Spanish settlers introduced cattle husbandry to the Southwest. When Spain abandoned its northern mission settlements locals rounded up mostrencos, mesteños, orejanos, and cimarrón cattle across East Texas and driving them to the New Spain port of New Orleans. Cattle businesses were thriving when the borders of the United States swept over the Southwest. By 1865, Texas alone counted 5 million longhorns. Cattle drives across the Plains typically numbered between 500 to 10,000 head. By the 1880s—as bison numbers hovered around 500—an estimated 7.5 million cattle grazed the plains.

The new bovines drastically impacted the ecosystem. Like bison, cattle feces provided a similar environment for seeds, bugs, and bacteria, but their confinement tended to churn and compact the ground making it harder for grasses to reseed. Even on open ranges, the trampling and overgrazing of grasses overburdened native plants and allowed European weeds to proliferate, made worse as climatic conditions in the nineteenth century varied the carrying capacity of grasses. Cattle, in other words, did not follow the same migratory grazing patterns of bison. Nor did cattle benefit from anthropogenic fires, used by Indigenous peoples to promote healthy grasses and suppress junipers, scrub, and shrubs. This new cattlescape was fed by the same market system that led to the collapse of bison populations: the grasslands could never hope to keep up with the extreme increase of centralized animal herds that fed beef consumers and profits.

Technology helped push these changes further. Railroads had a close relationship to the cattle kingdoms, first as avenues for people, goods, and livestock to travel faster into the American West and, then, as avenues for market commodities for eastern consumers. As rail lines expanded across the Midwest and West, cattle drives became less useful. Instead, cattle (or, after refrigeration, their carcasses) could be transported by rail to stockyards in Chicago or Omaha or St. Louis then to markets along the east coast.

The railroads themselves saw bison as an impediment. The animals interfered with their expansion plans, slowing construction or crossing tracks in front of locomotives. Hunters killed bison for all manner of reasons: to feed railroad workers, to chase the animal from construction areas, or, pathetically, for entertainment from their railcars. Harpers Weekly described a typical unsporting scene:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is "slowed" to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

Bison recovery efforts in the twentieth century have helped restore some of their populations. The bison has gone from a source of food and clothing, to a market and a sport, to something we conserve. Thirty years of market pressures between 1850 and 1880 destroyed what had existed for millennia, fundamentally changing the Great Plains in ways less sustainable and biodiverse. This effort proceeded from the idea that this shift was "progress"—supplanting native flora, fauna, and people from the Plains with new animals, new cultures, and white people.

Many nineteenth century Americans could not imagine maintaining bison herds alongside this shift, just as we today struggle to imagine agriculture, technology, development, and industrialization that works with the natural world rather than against it. The same market logic that drove bison to near extinction now struggles to account for carbon sequestration, soil health, and climate resilience—something restored prairies, for example, can provide. But the health of the prairies, the health of ecosystems broadly, requires working with ecosystems rather than replacing them.

Readings

In addition to the links above, I would encourage checking out the following that I also consulted. A shoutout specifically to Dan Flores for prompting me to think about this.

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains

Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains

University of Oklahoma PressUniversity of Oklahoma Press

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

W. W. Norton & CompanyW. W. Norton & Company

The Destruction of the Bison

Check out The Destruction of the Bison - For the last twenty years, The Destruction of the Bison has been an essential work in environmental history. Andrew C. Isenberg offers a concise analysis of the near-extinction of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 1000 a century later. His wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study carefully considers the multiple causes, cultural and ecological, of the destruction of the species. The twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword connecting this seminal work to developments in the field - notably new perspectives in Native American history and the rise of transnational history - and placing the story of the bison in global context. A new afterword extends the study to the twenty-first century, underlining the continued importance of this ground-breaking text for current, and future, students and scholars. by Andrew C Isenberg on Bookshop.org US!

Cambridge University PressCambridge University Press

American Bison: A Natural History

A Natural History

University of California PressUniversity of California Press

Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Bison BooksBison Books

Let the Cowboy Ride

The dime novel and dude ranch, the barbecue and rodeo, the suburban ranch house and the urban cowboy—all are a direct legacy of nineteenth-century cowboy life that still enlivens American popular culture. Yet at the same time, reports of environmental destruction or economic inefficiency have motivated calls for restricted livestock grazing on public lands or even for an end to ranching altogether. In Let the Cowboy Ride, Starrs offers a detailed and comprehensive look at one of America’s most enduring institutions. Richly illustrated with more than 130 photographs and maps, the book combines the authentic detail of an insider’s view (Starrs spent six years working cattle on the high desert Great Basin range) with a scholar’s keen eye for objective analysis.

Google Books

Some news and reading about the public lands for your Monday morning.

In late 2024, the residents of Mancos, Colorado, tore down miles of illegally constructed barbed wire fencing put up by a religious sect in San Juan National Forest that blocked grazing, recreation, and logging activities. Known as the Free Land Holder Committee led by Patrick Pipkin and Bryan Hammon, the group claimed a tract of land they insisted was sold to an illegitimate government. The federal government sued the group in November 2024. The suit is still ongoing:

 A magistrate judge on Thursday recommended a federal judge deny several challenges to the court’s jurisdiction filed by a group facing trespassing claims for their occupation of land in the San Juan National Forest in southwest Colorado.

“The court finds that the United States has alleged facts sufficient to show it owns the land and that Mr. Pipkin and Mr. Hammon violated the Unlawful Inclosures Act,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter in a 10-page report.

Ultimately, Donald Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico will decide whether to adopt Neureiter’s recommendation.

Neureiter said he found the defendants' challenges to the court's jurisdiction difficult to untangle from the bible verses and maxims cited in the briefs he interpreted as motions to dismiss.

Ryan Booth, Remembering What the Parks Forgot:

When I began working as an intern and later as a National Park Service ranger in the 1990s, the remnants of this history found in old museum exhibits and other interpretive materials was beginning to disappear. The old line “Indians were here once but have moved on” was on its own journey into oblivion. With the impetus for government-to-government consultation between tribes and the NPS, the agency shifted the official perspective as they listened to the tribes.

Historic lodge destroyed in Grand Canyon blaze:

A raging wildfire near the Grand Canyon in the US has destroyed dozens of buildings - including a historic lodge that was the only accommodation available within the surrounding national park's North Rim. 

The fire that destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge is one of two that has swept across tens of thousands of acres in the area. 

The blazes have also forced the closure of the North Rim for the remainder of the 2025 tourist season.

Mass layoffs can move forward, with devastating impacts for conservation and science:

“The Trump administration is pushing fast forward on the extinction crisis,” Noah Greenwald, the Center for Biological Diversity’s endangered species director, said about the plans in May. “If we get rid of the science that shows (environmental) problems, we won’t have to think about it, but that won’t make them go away.”

How conservatives beat back a Republican sell-off of public lands:

To his surprise, Patrick Payne had ended up in a group text with Mike Lee.

Payne is a conservative Idaho outdoorsman who voted for President Donald Trump. Lee is a Republican senator from Utah. The group was organized by an acquaintance Payne made online, and the topic was home schooling.

But Payne saw an opportunity to directly challenge Lee on his proposal to sell up to 3.3 million acres of federal land in 11 Western states for the construction of affordable housing. He texted the senator that Washington was “better than BlackRock,” the global investment firm. Lee’s response — that he’d “trust anyone owning that land more than the U.S. government” — floored Payne. Several days later, he posted a screenshot of the exchange on X.

“I thought it was important to let people know where he really stood,” said Payne, who spends much of his free time camping and hunting on federal backcountry in Idaho.

Trump pitches public lands commission, higher entry fees for foreign visitors:

One day before signing his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which contains a handful of measures boosting resource extraction and impacting national park funding, President Donald Trump signed two public lands-oriented executive orders.

One order would increase entry fees for foreign visitors to national parks, a move proposed last month by the Department of the Interior. The other would establish a “Make America Beautiful Again” commission to advise Trump on how to “responsibly conserve” America’s natural resources.

. . .

The ”One Big Beautiful Bill” orders the U.S. Forest Service to increase logging, calls for more drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, requires quarterly lease sales for onshore oil and gas, and rescinds a moratorium on new coal leasing. It also rescinds about $300 million in Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act funding for National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management conservation projects and staffing. The bill does, however, appropriate $150 million to the Park Service for next year’s celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

. . .

They also come a week after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the end of the Roadless Rule, a Clinton-era law that prohibited road construction and timber harvest on 58.5 million acres of federal lands.

Here's a collection of books I'm reading relevant to what I'm writing.

        <script src="https://bookshop.org/widgets.js" data-type="list" data-list-slug="america-s-public-lands"></script>

Spend any amount of time among hunting, recreation, or agriculture communities right now and you'll be confronted with countless urgings to contact your Congressperson to protect the federal lands. The public lands, primarily thanks to Utah Senator Mike Lee, are once again at threat of being sold as part of the budget bill. This time, according to the Wilderness Society, a total of 250 million acres could be put up for sale.

Call your senators and demand that they protect the public lands. And while you're doing that, here's some background history around the public lands and the Republican Party's interest in disposing them to private hands.

A Short History of the Long History of Land Disposal

I just returned from a research trip to the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming, to go through a number of archival records relating to the Sagebrush Rebellion and its precursors for the next book I'm writing. Let's talk about a few of the things I'm looking at and thinking about.

The efforts to privatize the public lands are not new. As early as 1952, the Republican Party platform urged a "restoration to the States of their rights to all lands and resources beneath navigable inland and offshore waters within their historic boundaries" that would provide an "opportunity for ownership by citizens to promote the highest land use." The property rights and economic value of the land has remained a principle view among GOP policymakers over the past fifty years. This view, however, become ever more strident after the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. Ranchers, farmers, and other commodity users of the public lands especially chaffed at the policy's declaration that the lands would "be retained in federal ownership." No longer would that land be available for single use, or so it seemed; the federal government, now seemingly in league with environmentalists, appeared poised to make the final decision about their economic livelihoods. Reductions in grazing permits in the 1950s and increases in grazing fees throughout this period had already generated tensions among Western ranchers and federal policymakers. FLPMA tipped the scale.

The legal and legislative attempts to sell the public lands to private interests coalesced into its most organized effort in the 1970s. This initially centered around the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), founded in 1977 with funding provided by Joseph Coors and the National Legal Center for the Public Interest. MSLF is a through-line in these efforts: James Watt served as its first president, and later Ronald Reagan's controversial Secretary of the Interior; Gale Norton, a senior attorney, served as Interior Secretary under George H. W. Bush; and William Perry Pendley, Donald Trump's Interior Secretary, was a long-time MSLF president. Their presence at the helm of government policy illustrates the continuity between these early efforts of the 1970s to our present-day.

In 1979, states in the Mountain West sparked the Sagebrush Rebellion: the first major effort to transfer federal lands to state control. That year, the Nevada legislature passed Assembly Bill 413 seeking to challenge federal land ownership by arguing that the federal government never actually acquired ownership from Nevada but only held the land in trust and, thus, the land rightfully belonged to the state. Several states across the American West sought to, or did, pass similar legislation. These state-level efforts were paired with federal legislative efforts, spearheaded by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch who introduced the Western Lands Distribution and Regional Equalization Act in 1979 that sought to transfer 175 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land to the states.

Sound familiar?

The election of Ronald Reagan further galvanized the movement and, seemingly, provided the Rebels with a victory. A fellow westerner, Reagan proudly declared himself a supporter of the Rebellion and, with the nomination of James Watt as Interior Secretary, the Rebels seemed poised to achieve what they desired. Watt, however, did not usher in the wholesale land transfer they expected. Watt instead saw the problem as one of "arrogant management" in the Interior Department, and promised closer collaboration between locals and federal policymakers while rolling back regulatory policies.

The efforts led by Mike Lee are part of a long-time policy outlook. The movement has repeatedly reemerged since the 1970s, with the Wise Use Movement in the 1980s and 1990s, regulatory rollbacks and expanded resource extraction in the 1990s, and a revival of land transfer demands with the Tea Party in the late 2000s. The reelection of Donald Trump is probably the most favorable political conditions for public land disposal since the Reagan administration.

Tack & Ink is the newsletter of Jason Heppler, a historian of the North American West, Great Plains, and Canadian Prairies.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. —Wallace Stegner

If there is a singular animating feature about the American West, it's the land.

Hello and welcome to Tack & Ink. This newsletter is primarily devoted to the history of public lands in the North American West and Great Plains. I am starting work on a new book project about the Sagebrush Rebellion and its impact not only on the Interior West but on the Northern Plains: how its ideology, legislative and legal efforts, and cultural facets came to express themselves in this region. This newsletter, then, will explore this movement broadly across public lands, the activities that take place on them, and, more broadly, agricultural history.

Along the way, we'll be exploring definitions of place and landscapes, questions that anchored my book on Silicon Valley and continues to shape how I understand historical currents at work across the region and that are grounded in environmental history.

What to Expect

There will be many topics and themes here. I'm not a journalist, so don't expect investigative pieces (that's not to say there won't be commentary about current events—we are, after all, interested in knowing the past's place in the present). But there will be histories, commentary, essays, photos, and fact-checking. I'll also often note things I'm reading. Unsurprisingly, I read a lot and I hope to model here the kind of reading, analyzing, and synthesizing historians do with texts. Sometimes that might just be a quick "here's something I read and you might like it, too," other times it will be a more in-depth reflection.

For the moment, the goal is to write once a month. I'll revisit this at some point.

About Jason

I am a lifelong resident of the American West and Great Plains and currently live on a 1914 homestead on the tall grass prairies of Nebraska. I am an award-winning historian with a focus on environmental and political history. Day-to-day I am the developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where we're building the history web. I'm the author of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2024), co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Univ. of Cincinnati Press, 2020), and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. My writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and Perspectives on History.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. —Wallace Stegner

If there is a singular animating feature about the American West, it's the land.

Hello and welcome to Tack & Ink. This newsletter is primarily devoted to the history of public lands in the North American West and Great Plains. I am starting work on a new book project about the Sagebrush Rebellion and its impact not only on the Interior West but on the Northern Plains: how its ideology, legislative and legal efforts, and cultural facets came to express themselves in this region. This newsletter, then, will explore this movement broadly across public lands, the activities that take place on them, and, more broadly, agricultural history.

Along the way, we'll be exploring definitions of place and landscapes, questions that anchored my book on Silicon Valley and continues to shape how I understand historical currents at work across the region and that are grounded in environmental history.

What to Expect

There will be many topics and themes here. I'm not a journalist, so don't expect investigative pieces (that's not to say there won't be commentary about current events—we are, after all, interested in knowing the past's place in the present). But there will be histories, commentary, essays, photos, and fact-checking. I'll also often note things I'm reading. Unsurprisingly, I read a lot and I hope to model here the kind of reading, analyzing, and synthesizing historians do with texts. Sometimes that might just be a quick "here's something I read and you might like it, too," other times it will be a more in-depth reflection.

For the moment, the goal is to write once a month. I'll eventually revisit this.

About Jason

I am a lifelong resident of the American West and Great Plains and currently live on a 1914 homestead on the tall grass prairies of Nebraska. I am an award-winning historian with a focus on environmental and political history. Day-to-day I am the developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where we're building the history web. I'm the author of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2024), co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy(Univ. of Cincinnati Press, 2020), and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. My writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and Perspectives on History.

Following up on the previous newsletter, the House Rules Committee removed an amendment in the Republican budget bill aimed at selling public lands. While the bill has moved to the Senate, it’s possible this will be brought up again. In any case, this won't be the last fight over the public lands.

Here’s a roundup of some writing about the Northern Plains that intersect with things I'm writing about.

Congress almost sold off 500,000 acres of Western public lands. What could that mean for Colorado?

The majority of federal public land in Colorado is managed by three agencies: 16 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, 8.3 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and about 456,000 acres managed by the National Park Service. The lands include iconic landscapes such as the Maroon Bells, Rocky Mountain National Park and the Browns Canyon National Monument.

Less than a quarter of voters in the Rocky Mountain West support selling federal public lands for housing, according to a 2025 survey of 3,316 voters across eight Rocky Mountain states conducted by Colorado College. In Colorado, only 10% of survey respondents supported the idea. Nearly 90% of survey respondents visited federal public lands at least once a year, the survey found.

Why public lands should stay public and protected

Federal management of the public lands thus came about as a consequence of the relentless pursuit of wealth that devastated so many ancient American ecosystems. As early scientist George Perkins Marsh argued, “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.”

By 1900, the myth of inexhaustibly gave way to the reality of diminished forests, waterways and wildlife populations. Unfettered capitalism, it turned out, caused real environmental harm.

Remote Wyoming vacation lodge emerges as haven for US ‘dissident’ right

A vacation lodge known as the Wagon Box Inn in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming, has emerged as an unlikely hub of rightwing ambitions to reorient US politics and culture.

Events held there since it opened, and others planned for this spring, have brought together figures from the so-called “dissident right”, political figures backed by reactionary currents in Silicon Valley, and proponents of the “network state” movement.

The dissident right is a term that describes rightwing intellectual currents that go beyond and even attack mainstream conservatives for their perceived concessions to liberals on issues like race, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Network state proponents envision a network of extra-national communities that exist beyond the control of nation-states.

When Trump Was the One Taking Land From Farmers

At the root of Trump’s claims of discrimination is a law Ramaphosa signed this year that allows the government to seize privately held land — without providing compensation — when it’s in the public interest. The law is part of the South African government’s efforts to chip away at the racial inequities shaped by decades of apartheid rule.

Legal experts say the seizures are likely to be rare. And the law provides for judicial review, giving property owners an opportunity to challenge any effort to take their land. That has not stopped Trump from falsely accusing South Africa of “confiscating land” as he cut off foreign aid to the nation this year.

But Trump himself used government-sanctioned land grabs in recent years to build his promised wall along the United States-Mexico border, albeit through a system that works differently from South Africa’s.

“Take the land,” Trump told his aides in 2019, as he pushed them to accelerate construction — years before he would accuse the African National Congress of confiscating land.