America is a National Forest

Here is a long and winding and obscure extended metaphor of the American identity as being, more than anything else, the the collaboration and compromise of multiple many things for the common good in the long term-- just like our wonderful National Forests. (And our chili bowls too, while we're at it.) So what are we all doing in this big beautiful American experiment together, and how should we think about the public land system helping us do it? Get out on the lands and find out. Happy 250th Anniversary of America, and Happy Fourth of July!

You're listening to Match My Mountains, with Luke Nathan Phillips. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

This one's the only narrative one. This one has some interesting kind of hippie stuff. This one? Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

No, no, no, no. Oh, this one? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

It says progressive on it.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

It does, but it's not the progressive that you think of it as. Although, actually, hold on, no, no, no. You should read that while I'm blurring into the microphone. And we should talk about that afterwards, because that actually opens up some really interesting stuff. Serena, everybody is uh just opening up Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. That is the um book that makes the argument. Yes, it's a great book that makes the argument that the progressive conservation movement, Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, um, Mr. Newlands, uh James Garfield Jr., all were not actually like doing this as like conservation as a nature thing. They were doing conservation as like an expression of a kind of scientific management idea of society. And this like kind of idea that society will get continually more and more self-controlled and perfect, not this like 19th-century bald taking away of everything that was good and holy about things by the expression and unleashment of freedom, but uh this kind of rational ordering of things that could take the natural resources of the country, not because they were beautiful, but because like they were there. And just as you can segment and order and rationalize society in terms of healthcare and human rights and government and administration and art and uh eugenics and whatever, that's the bad part of the progressive movement. But just as you can do it for all that, you can do it for timber and water and minerals and all that as well, too. And so it's the idea they have there that like um Teddy Roosevelt and his people might have cared about nature, but that's not why they were progressives on nature. They were applying the progressive ideal of society to nature, which is something interesting, and that is not how anybody these days thinks about nature, but we should talk about that then. Anyway, hello everyone. My name is Luke Nathan Phillips, and you are listening to the Match My Mountains podcast where we talk about conservation and history and conservation in history and the history of conservation and a uh variety of other things, but um, under this kind of early part of it, we're gonna be talking a lot about different uh histories, different traditions that go into this. Now, today, the thing that I want to get into is a concept that I've been mulling on for a little bit called the public lands radical, public lands radicalism. There are a bunch of different ways people think about conservation nowadays. Um and uh one of them, one of the most kind of common, is the environmentalist tradition. Uh and that opens up with like the 1970s Earth Day uh stuff. Um the it's largely focused on pollution, it's largely focused on sustainability in recent decades that has become more and more focused on climate change. Um, but environmentalism uh is uh it's its own distinct tradition. It's not just caring about the environment, uh, it's seeing the earth as an ecosystem and human beings as an integral part of that ecosystem and extrapolating onto uh onto nature management from there. Um then you have a couple of other traditions too. You have the resource management tradition, like what we were just talking about earlier before we just started this show, which is the idea that uh you have a bunch of different kinds of natural resources, and humanity's job is to develop them for the greater advancement of human society, right? Um this has been a way that like particularly modernizing societies have worked. Like you figure out how to extract oil, extract gas, extract timber, use rangeland, uh, use farmland for the most efficient possible way to modernize your society. And uh nature in itself is not particularly valuable, uh, but you do need to manage it well for the best benefit and the greatest good for the greatest number, as Gifford Pinchot puts it, um, over time. Now, those are two, so environmentalism, uh uh conservationism or resource management, those are two ways to approach the management of nature. Um, but there's a bunch of other ways. And in the current political context, uh there's one that I think is kind of obvious. Um I think there's a lot of people who do see it as obvious, but I don't think a lot of people in politics see it as obvious. And in the last year and a half, I've tried to articulate bits and pieces of it because now seems to be like a moment that it would be useful. That tradition or that uh framework that I'm using is called public lands radicalism. Um and the central kind of idea of public lands radicalism is that there should be a fundamental desire to preserve, manage, and uh and use for the greatest good for the greatest number, but in many different ways, the American public land system. The American public land system, and John D. Lesche, a great historian, has written some interesting stuff about it, uh, one of the most comprehensive histories of public lands ever written. In Our Common Ground, a history of America's public lands. I've learned a lot from this book. Um the American public land system includes all the lands managed by the National Park Service, the United States Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, uh, as well as a couple of other uh agencies from different other parts of the government. I think uh the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Reclamation, uh, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Geological Survey are related to all this as well, too, but more on that later. Basically, those four main agencies are the ones that uh that uh manage 640 million acres of the American land mass. And those are the central core of what I think American nature is all about, the public lands. Um it's interesting too because it's not just the public land system that is American nature. Okay, the environmentalists get this right, the conservationists get this right, that there's nature all over the place, right? Um and you can do stuff in terms of sustainability on your uh on your local farm. Um every city has a city park system, there's state park systems and uh state forests, there's also lots of nonprofits and conservancies that uh do important things with managing um managing uh local bits of nature that the public doesn't quite own. Uh so there is an American nature system that extends far beyond the domain of the U.S. uh national parks and national forests. Uh I am of the opinion that it is most important for conservation, for that central kind of crown jewel of American nature, the public lands, to be protected and preserved, uh, because that is the kind of proven ground and the testing ground for all the different styles of management that we have everywhere else. And far more importantly, it occupies the imagination of the American people who otherwise don't really think very much about nature or conservation for the most part, um, to create this kind of mythos of what nature is and why nature is important, and it helps that it's a kind of grand and beautiful and idealistic vision uh that kind of uh comports with how a lot of Americans think about ourselves. Uh but it's it's there, it's at the center, it's at the very core. So uh public lands radicalism, again, is the idea that the public land system needs to be protected and preserved and managed in full. Uh I basically think there are about five major tenets of this. Uh number one, no sales. Number two, full staffing. Number three, full funding. Number four, protect the laws that protect the land. And number five, uh maintain the multiple use sustained yield philosophy. Um that's it. Those are the simple things. Keep the whole system around and keep the whole system managed in a way that uh is that promotes the various interests of um and the various values that we need for the protection of it. Uh let's go down those one by one. Uh so the first tenet that I have there is uh no sales. When I say no sales, it's more complicated than that. Um I mean no reductions in the total size, the total acreage or the total number of units of the public land system. Uh and sometimes sales at a very local and very specific and targeted level actually have been very good uh for the for the for the services. Um the Forest Service and the BLM have systems where uh you'll do a token like sale of a couple parcels here uh and a couple parcels there, and the funds from that will go directly into a fund uh with which the BLM or the Forest Service will go purchase um another set of parcels of land. Uh there's also a system that I think is really, really interesting, and we should be um publicizing a lot more actually, uh called the land swap system. So uh you swap um some acreage of BLM land or some acreage of Forest Service land for uh some other pieces of private land of relatively equal value and size. Uh that's important for a lot of reasons. One of them is just that, like because of the old claims in the public domain, uh there's a lot of kind of irrational checkerboard parts, particularly in stuff that used to be owned by the railroads. And also uh it helps localities uh for federal land to be transferred over to uh local governments uh when there's kind of major infrastructure projects that should be developed and the federal government can go replace that land somewhere else. Um so but in general, those are things along the edges, right? The thing that matters here most is the integrity and the broadness of the system as a whole. And uh that system as a whole should be maintained largely as it is, I think. Um there's about 245 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, about uh 193 million million acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service, roughly like 130 million or so acres uh managed by the uh U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and then about 80 or 85 million acres managed by the National Park Service. And then other bits here and there uh minuscule in comparison to those with some of the other agencies that manage bits and pieces of that federal land. Um of all of those uh those lands, uh there the Bureau of Land Management has like a different kind of philosophy of how it does this. Uh so there's not really units in BLM land the way there is for national forests, national wildlife refuges, and national parks. Um there's over a thousand national wildlife refuges, national fish hatcheries, and other spots run by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Um I don't know this off the top of my head, but I believe there's something like uh 135 national forests. I would have to check that number somewhere else. Um, and like 15 or 20 national grasslands. Um and then there's 433 units in the National Park Service, which isn't just national parks but also includes national monuments, national historic sites, various other ones. Every single one of these units and all the acreage that these units contain needs to be maintained in the public land system. Okay. Uh so that's the first one. The second principle is the full staffing of all of these, uh, of all of these agencies or of the kind of agencies that manage these lands. Uh land doesn't just sit there, you need to uh protect it, you need to clean it up, you need to make sure that the federal law is enforced on these places, you need to make sure that visitors going to these places don't die when they're going through there based on like random accidents and stuff. You need to make sure that the wildlife populations in these places are managed. Uh, you need to make sure that the um wildfires and floods and other natural disasters are contained in a way that is both protective of human property uh but also um helps keep the ecosystems themselves uh able to bounce back with a little bit of human help. Um when you have some of these lands where resources are managed and extracted, uh, you need to do it in a sustainable and wise way so that you don't have the mass clear cuts and mass just absolute pillage of uh of the earth that you had once upon a time in the 19th century that initially caused the rise of the conservation movement. You need people to do this, okay? And uh land management, environmental management, environmental sciences are things that people spend their whole lives and their whole careers learning how to do. These are very complicated trades and skills. And in order to do that, you have to have classes of professionals who do this. Um so in all of those agencies, you have the park rangers, the forest rangers, the land managers, the game wardens, you have all kinds of um scientists who go do research uh to help with the management. You know, a lot of people think of research as being something that is meant uh in the lens to advance the understanding of biology or geology and stuff, which is true enough. Uh we do do that. But people don't realize that for like species management and forestry, you actually have to have a lot of different um different uh uh local folks on the ground who know um who are constantly doing research on how this particular plot of forest was affected by that fire and whether this policy actually made that forest more sustainable against the next wildfires or not. This is stuff that continues and continues and continues. It's a lot more uh niche than most people realize. Um it's necessary for these places to be managed responsibly, um, and you need scientists to do it, right? Um same thing with places where you have visitor services. If you have stupid hikers going alone into the mountains like me, uh then you need to have the wilderness rangers who are able to do the search and rescue stuff, the backcountry trail maintenance stuff, all of that uh in order to just make sure that these are places that you don't have like a huge death count coming out of. By the way, whenever the federal government shuts down and uh a lot of people get furloughed and people in the parks movement tell you that you shouldn't go into the national parks, um just listen to us when we tell you that, please, because those are the times when the wilderness rangers usually are not on the job, and if they still are on the job, they are overloaded by how few extra staff they have and how many people are getting into stupid stuff. Just don't do it, right? Uh it's because staffing is an important thing for national parks and national forests and BLM lands and fish and wildlife refugees. So uh so there's that. You need to have the staffing ready for these things. Um, you need to have full funding of all of the agencies that do this, um, that do this management. Uh not just to pay the people who do it, although that's one of the most important parts, uh, but also to uh maintain the equipment, uh maintain the just general sustainability of these practices, to get resources in there, uh, to maintain the infrastructure, the roads, the visitor centers, the campgrounds, um, sometimes the waterways, and then also you need uh funding for certain kinds of conservation work. You certainly need funding for restoration work after you've done some resource exploitation. This is something the Forest Service does all the time. So, like, you need money. Um, I mean, like, fiscal conservatives, I'm sorry to say it to you, but if you like services that the government does, you need to fund those services, right? Um, and so for those and for many other reasons, it is important that the uh public lands agencies are funded in full for all of the things that they need, just for a basic operating procedure, and also further along for uh some of the issues that they face with like deferred maintenance, which we'll talk about at some point further in the future. Uh so those are the first three no sales, full staffing, full funding. Um beyond that, there's two more important ones. Number one, protect the laws that protect the land. Uh there's a couple of them. Well, okay, so the reason why public lands are different than just like random. The reason why the American public lands are run as well as they are uh is because they are protected under certain laws that do not apply the same way on private land or on public lands that are not run by the federal government. Uh and these laws have been being have been being set up over the course of over a century uh and create an integrate path patchwork of how the laws are supp how those lands are supposed to be managed. Um there's a couple key ones that I think are most important to remember. Um one of those is the Wilderness Act. That is the law that uh allows the President of the United States to designate national monuments uh that protect sites of scientific or historical value and uh protect them basically forever under a preservation mandate, right? There is the Wilderness Act of 1964, which uh is the law that establishes Congress's ability to designate areas as wilderness areas uh that you are not allowed to bring mechanized equipment into, you're not allowed to build permanent structures in. Um they are places where uh, quote, man is but a visitor, and they're left relatively untrammeled so that people can go enjoy nature in a relatively pristine state. Um there's all kinds of controversy for very good reason over whether wilderness actually can exist in the contemporary times. Um, but the the fact of the matter is that you can make places that feel like wilderness, that you can do research in to study how the environment works, and uh people can go enjoy them for what they are, right? Um you have the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act was the first piece of legislation that um said explicitly that uh certain kinds of animals, all animals, but especially the ones that are about to be blown off the face of the earth, are valuable for their own sake as well as for the sorts of uh ecosystem services they provide and generally helping the biodiversity and sometimes doing other human needs, right? Um these are three very important laws. Uh there's a whole heck of a lot of other ones. Uh all of the services have had what's called organic acts, and organic acts are the laws that um number one establish and fund those those agencies, but number two, give them their fundamental mandates. Um these have created a patchwork of uh different ways that the lands are regulated, which basically all have the cumulative effect of uh preserving them uh in a better state than they otherwise would be, so long as they're enforced. Uh and these acts are not perfect by any means. Umyb in the Forest Service, for example, will tell you that the National Environmental Protection Act uh should be not done away with, not even overhauled significantly, but there's plenty of surgical tweaks that would be very helpful for better fire management, for example, if NEPA were reformed. Right. Uh same thing with the Endangered Species Act. I've even heard people say that the Antiquities Act should be reformed in various ways just to make it easier to manage the boundaries of national monuments and to put a higher premium on what exactly the uh the nature of a site needs to be for a national monument to be declared. These are all things that are important. But basically, the basic spirit and basic effect of these laws has to be preserved in order for the public land system to look anything like the public land system looks today. Um so there's that. The last thing is the public lands are managed at a whole of system level under a philosophy called uh multiple use sustained yield. Okay? Um multiple use sustained yield uh would seem to go the opposite direction from uh maintaining the laws that protect the land because it enforces or it it uh it creates a system where there are, as you can tell with the term multiple use, many different ways that. That land can be used. It can be used for resource management. It can be used for recreation, whether that is low-impact stuff like hiking or high-impact stuff like ATVing and motorboating. You can use it for scientific research and habitat restoration. You can use it for landscape protection. You can use it for a lot of different kinds of things. You just have to be able to balance those in a way that all of them can be can be used by different groups of people who have different reasons for having it. And so that the general integrity of that land and of those lands and those habitats and those ecosystems can be maintained even with multiple human uses being done on those lands, right? So multiple use is the basic way the system works. The Bureau of Land Management at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in particular, and between those two of them, that's let me think, 193 plus 200 uh 245. So that's what? About what, 430 million acres or so? I really needed to do that math because I'm gonna be embarrassed if I did that math wrong. Okay. Uh 193. I know, I know, but I'm gonna be mad at myself if I don't. Okay, five plus three is eight.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Oh, nice. You're hungry. I will just don't want to. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Well, I will probably go down there.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

I don't think I'm gonna care.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

I will go down something. I appreciate that. What kind of food is this?

SPEAKER_01 23:39

I don't know. It's like a bunch of like like finger food.

unknown 23:43

Ah.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

It looks really good, but it's going bad. So think about it.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Well, uh I would rather get this podcast fully recorded first than go eat finger foods. But I'll take whatever they have off. By the way, how's this so far?

SPEAKER_01 23:56

You're doing really good. Are you sure?

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Because I it feels it feels a little bit off. But it doesn't sound off to you? Okay. Like kind of forced in the same way that some of the first ones we recorded were.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

I think that's probably a product of our discussion, but nothing.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

I understand. Well, for what it's worth, uh you're doing really good.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

I felt like I was listening to a podcast.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Yeah, literally.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

I didn't feel like I was listening to a podcast. I felt like I was doing a podcast.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Well, it sounded like a podcast. Like you know you have not.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

I'll try to say something amusing so that we have more promo material for it as well, too. Okay, I can do that. By the way, I have um some thoughts on the promo stuff too, so we'll talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah, I saw your messages about what was that. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

That sounds good. Thank you, Serena. Text me if you need anything. She's kind of the best. I adore her. Okay, so where were we? We were talking just now about uh. I was doing math. Okay, so uh the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service are sorry, the the Bureau of Land Management and the US Fish and Wildlife and the US Forest Service are both um managed with all of their parcels, uh, the entirety of those systems, uh, under uh sustained yield multiple use, right? Or multiple use sustained yield. Uh and that basically means that in uh Forest Service and BLM land, uh you will see a lot of uh timber harvest, you will see a lot of mining, you will see a lot of grazing, but you also see a lot of wilderness preservation, a lot of conservation research projects, a lot of recreation of multiple sorts, from ATVing to uh uh to hiking and fishing and camping to horseback use to um hunting, you name it. Uh BLM and Forest Service lands are used for many reasons. There's a reason why the Forest Service calls itself the land of many uses and why the original um the original uh BLM logo had many different kinds of uh worker on it in the different industries there. So uh, and that's again about 430, 440 million acres of your federal lands being used for many different kinds of things. Um in the meantime, uh you have the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that basically have mandates that uh are technically multiple use in that they're both preservation and recreation. Uh uh National Wildlife Refuges are supposed to protect habitat for wildlife, uh, to keep American game numbers and species numbers around. And then some National Wildlife Refuges allow hunting and fishing, which is um a very kind of relatively light but in some ways very intensive form of outdoor recreation. In the meantime, uh national park sites are uh primarily recreation and preservation as well. Um the kinds of recreation are they go all over the place. Some national parks are really focused on like RV camping and have uh like like boating as a pretty big thing. Um apparently Yellowstone in the wintertime lets in uh off-road vehicles, which is really controversial but kind of cool when you think about it too. Um national parks are also very famously for backpacking, hiking, uh canoeing, sometimes fishing, all that kind of stuff too. Um but then national parks also preserve and protect some of the greatest natural wonders in the United States of America: the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, uh Halfdome in Yosemite National Park, uh plenty of other spots. You have seen the famous National Park calendars, um, natural wonders are in them. Now, granted, there's natural wonders in Forest Service and BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service land as well, too, but national parks have always had this kind of like uh protect the beauty of these places sort of vibe to them. Um but I say all of this to say uh there are many things that your public lands are for. There are many things that the Fish and Wildlife Service and uh uh Forest Service, BLM, and Park Service do. Uh you can see on this map of federal lands, which by the way, this was a National Geographic map made in the 90s. Nat GO used to make the coolest maps. Um, this is one that has been called the greatest um the greatest federal lens map ever done. I think it's been superseded since then by a couple of others, but it's pretty great because it features every single Forest Service and Park Service and BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service parcel, and it also specifies some of the different designations that it has in them. There's even all the spots where they have all of the national scenic trails and a lot of the um the wild and scenic rivers listed here. It's pretty cool. You can also see some of the wilderness areas. But basically, okay, if you're looking at this on the video, you see that there's a lot of spots that are dark green, right? But those are splotched all over the place. Those dark green spots are your national parks. You can see Death Valley and Joshua Tree. Uh you can see right up there on the Canadian border, that's Glacier National Park. Over in the far um northwest corner, that's Olympic National Park. You can kind of see Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, but not very much. Oh, and then there's the Everglades. So yeah, the dark green is the national parks. And it's actually kind of surprising how little territory in America is national parks. Meantime, if you go out west towards Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, there's a lot of kind of light yellow spotches. That is Bureau of Land Management land. Uh BLM land is largely deserts and prairies and sage areas, um, although there's others. Um and BLM land is uh used for um a lot of resource extraction, but also various kinds of recreation. Uh then there's those light green spots that you can see, and those light green spots are national forests. Uh, you'll note that most of the national forests out west are in pretty high mountainous country, um, although not always. There's some in a couple different spots. But national forests are used for uh timber harvest. They actually have more grazing than timber harvest. Uh and uh they are in general a mix of um recreation and uh and uh resource extraction as well, too, uh with still some kind of conservation mandates. And then you can't really see the spots that are uh fish and wildlife refuges. I think the fish and wildlife refuges are actually those um those kind of brown-ish, no, not the brown spots, the kind of more red-looking spots. Um those are stuff managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and again, those are basically game reserves that uh are supposed to protect species habitat. So uh as you can see, about a quarter of the land in the lower 48 and a third of the land in the entire United States, because Alaska really like adds a whole heck of a lot here. Um that land is owned by the federal government, which means that it is owned by you, oh fellow American. And uh it has many different spots in it. By the way, uh it sounds kind of like crazy that uh uh 440 million acres are used for uh for resource development. Um, but if you were to take the roughly 200 million acres uh or 200, yeah, 200 million acres of um National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service land that is directly preserved. And then you were to take all of the wilderness areas, conservation study areas, uh other kind of wildlife areas in the BLM and U.S. Forest Service land, um, you would get to actually about uh about half of the entire public land system. So maybe 320 million acres or so, which includes all of the NPS and Fish and Wildlife Service lands, and significant chunks of wilderness and other things in BLM and Forest Service lands. Um all of that is managed under some sort of primarily protective kind of mandate, uh preservation and recreation, which is to say that half the public land system uh is preserved. The other half is uh used for resource exploitation, but also other uses that include recreation and some conservation projects. Which is to say, a third of the country is owned by the public, and one-sixth of the country is owned by is uh managed for preservation reasons. Which, I don't know, I guess at some level, I just think that that is a really, really good sign and a really, really important mark that America has been for at least a century and still is now while we have it, a true civilization that is willing to forego its rapacious need for economic development and conquest, um, to protect the things that were given to it and the great natural wonders that are far greater than anything a human being can build, um, and leave them in trust for uh the enjoyment of people around now and also for future generations. That is to be a civilization, in my view, um, to protect the heritage and culture you have. So uh that's part of uh part of why, no, that I think is the the entirety of what's at stake, right? Um what is it to be a public lands radical? It's to support all this. It's to believe that this is something that needs to be protected at all costs. Remember, um, no sales, no diminishment of the size of the system, full staffing so that we can actually run this stuff, full funding so that the people who run this stuff can have the resources they need, uh, protect all the laws so that the um the natural uh integrity of these places can be maintained, and multiple use sustain yields so that the combination of different kinds of uses on the land uh can uh make this land truly for everybody, um truly for all the interests of American society, and thus not only be something that's holy and sacred for us, but can also sustain the buy-in from all interests in American society for that land to stay public. Easy, simple, right? Public lands, federal lands. Doesn't that sound like what we should be doing? I think so. So did Secretary of the Interior Harold Icky's, who's a great American who not enough people know about, but he was uh the Secretary of the Interior during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, a time of immense importance for the public land system, especially the National Park Service, which became itself in the 1930s. I digress. I just mention him because I've been reading this book and finding Icky's a really relatable and really compelling character. But uh public lands radical, wilderness warrior, all that kind of thing, uh, somebody who had the common sense that the public land system is worth preserving. So why am I calling it public lands radicalism? Well, because what seems like common sense to me does not seem to be particularly common sense in today's political government class. Uh the Democrats actually, I think, basically fall into a lot of this. Uh although sometimes I question to what degree Democrats are really for multiple use sustained yield. Uh that's one of the various flaws the environmentalist movement has. So that actually winds up being counterproductive. But far more importantly, there is no both sides here. Far more importantly, my fellow Republicans find all of these things hard to get behind for whatever reason, be it free markets or fiscal responsibility or just the desire to go plunder all of the resources that we have, or this idea that all this is dumb nature stuff or whatever. Um it's bad, right? Uh so let me just like tell you a couple of ways that my fellow Republicans in the last two years, by the way, okay? I'm not even talking about the last 20 or 30 or 50 years where there has been a lot of bad stuff as well, too. I'm just talking about two years, stuff that I have seen with my own eyes that you have seen on the news uh about like things that my party is doing that are just ridiculous. So last year, 2025, in the Big Beautiful Bill, as it was called, uh Senator Mike Lee of Utah, the senior senator from Utah, went and tried to slip in a little provision into the Big Beautiful Bill uh that would mandate the sell, the sale of 3 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. Three million acres, and would also authorize the sale of anywhere between 150 million and 250 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land, right? Um so like you're already going uh you're already going pretty hard by forcing the sale of the 3 million in that first couple of years. But then you get to the question of like, well, if the 150 million to 250 million is also authorized, um why is it not a bad thing for, I don't know, Elon Musk to go and decide that he wants to own Blanca Peak in the Sangra de Cristo Mountains, you know? Uh that's the kind of stuff that this gets to. So um, you know which one that goes against is the no diminishment of the size of the public land system. I'll tell you another one. Uh Doug Bergum, Secretary of the Interior, when he was being uh interviewed by the U.S. Senate for his uh in his confirmation hearings, um, was talking about how it's important to save money uh on National Park Service lands, uh, talked about how uh there are some parts of the Park Service that are of only local interest uh and that wind up being revenue negative. That, you know, why does the federal government have to manage these? Why don't we just have the state government or perhaps even private corporations go manage Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City? Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in uh North Dakota, Lewis and Clark National Historical Site in Oregon. Uh heck, while we're at it, why not Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania? Doug, is there any particular reason why we have to hold on to those two? So uh you you see what I'm saying, right? Is that uh my fellow Republicans do not see the sacredness of the public land system, either in its natural or its historical kind of parts. Um there's always kind of proposals here and there to uh to sell off millions of acres or to diminish the size of the Park Service by like uh disposing of various of the historic sites, especially, but also some of the natural sites. It's insane. Okay, so uh that's the one thing. Um by the way, fortunately, uh Lee's land grab was uh defeated pretty badly because you know, guess what? It turns out nobody likes it. You are seeing like 85, 90, 95% polling last year um opposing that legislation, including from people who voted for Mike Lee, you know? Um and not only that, but you saw this strange alliance, and I'm shocked that this happened, and I hope to I hope it happens again if this comes up again, between preservationist kind of environmentalists on the one hand and ATV users on the other hand. Those guys are constantly like butting heads all the time, but they wound up coming together against the land grab bill, uh, or the land grab proposal for the big beautiful bill, and defeated it, and that's the kind of solidarity that we need nowadays for all this sort of stuff, too. Okay, so um, there's that. Second, full staffing, right? Uh I don't know if you guys remember a thing called the Valentine's Day Massacre, but uh the Department of Governmental Efficiency on Valentine's Day uh 2025, less than a month after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, um, went and immediately fired like a thousand national park rangers among many, many, many other thousands of federal employees. Um that kind of process and the reductions in force and the uh early kind of uh sweet deal packages that are basically trying to get senior staff out so that they are not able to oppose some of the stuff the admin is doing diminished the size of the National Park Service by 25% over the course of February 2025 towards the end of that year. Actually, let me read you some numbers. It's hard to find like the actual um it's hard to find the actual staffing numbers in uh federal agencies just because the ways that we count these are complicated. But um okay. 2024 was the last year of the Biden administration. Um that still had relatively low levels of staffing historically, um but they were like what we might think of as normal nowadays, right? 2026 is the year that we are in right now. And let me just read you the differences between these staffings, right? So 2024, uh the National Park Service uh had something like 20,000 staff full-time, uh plus 7,000 seasonal staff for the summer times. We're now in 2026. The National Park Service has about 14,000 staff, and the recent um uh funding proposal that the administration put out would have reduced that 14,000 down to 8,500. Okay. From 20,000, that's so right now there's been over a 25% cut. If you were to go further, that'd be over a 50% cut, okay? Um and again, remember the Park Service needs staff. Uh U.S. Forest Service, 2024, ended the Biden administration, 40,000 staff across that whole system. Um in 2026, there are 30,000 staff in the U.S. Forest Service. Um, gee, I wonder where they went. Uh by the way, I had friends who are forest rangers and park rangers who got hit on Valentine's Day Massacre and got rehired shortly after because, like, pretty soon the administration realized that it needed to bring some of these people back because they're critical. Uh, but you can see where the trend is going. You know, it's not good. Uh Bureau of Land Management, 2024, end of the Biden administration, uh, 10,000 employees. 2026, halfway through the Trump administration, uh, 9,000 employees, and there's a proposal right now to move it down to 7,000. Uh Fish and Wildlife Service, end of the Biden administration, 2024, 10,000 employees, 2026, 8,000 employees. Give or take all of those. Um the numbers are kind of weird to look at, but basically what you're seeing there is that there was there's been a roughly 25% decrease in staffing, um, give or take some in the public land management agencies. And remember, the public land management agencies are the ones that manage the public lands. Okay. Uh so that's one thing. Now let's go to budgets. Um, and it's a similar thing out there. And first off, let me just say ahead of time. The federal land agencies have not been properly funded since 2010. 2010 is the last year that the national Park Service budget matched both its needs for operating in that fiscal year and in maintaining its uh maintenance that it had to do every year, right? Uh it has not been funded properly since then. The deferred maintenance backlog is like $35 billion right now. Um, and meantime the Park Service budget has not been adjusted for inflation. So uh even though the Park Service budget in 2010 was roughly $3 billion and in 2024 um was roughly $3 billion, that is not taking into account uh the fact that things cost more nowadays than they did at that point, but you're still only giving it the um the flat line level $3 billion, right? Uh and there's a similar dynamic across the other land agencies. Forest Service is complicated because its budget fluctuates up and down with fire season stuff, but we'll go into that later on. So uh 2024, budget of the National Park Service, three and touching four billion dollars. Um 2026, that number is back down to three billion, and it was gonna go down to two billion um both last year and this year, but Congress had the um had the smarts and the common sense and the common decency, which is shocking because this Republican Congress has been horrible in so many other ways, um, to keep it from going all the way down to that two billion dollars. Okay. Uh the administration's been proposing that it gets cut down to that level, and again, you need money to manage these places. Um US Forest Service in 2024, somewhere between six billion and nine billion dollars, depending on what you count. Um, 2026, and this shocked me to figure it out. And if uh if you can like uh if anybody out there knows the details on this, please let me know. Um it's still six billion right now, but there's a proposal to move it down to two billion. That doesn't sound right, but if it's true, that's crazy. Um again, Congress has the discretion on there because Congress is the one that passes appropriations. Bureau of Land Management, uh 2024, $1.5 billion. Um, 2026, $1 billion. That's cutting it down by a third. And then uh Fish and Wildlife Service, uh 2024 budget, $1.7 billion, 2026 uh budget, $1.1 billion. You see what's happening here, right? These are huge, crazy, insane cuts. And again, fortunately, like this is not a mere executive decision. Um, Congress has a say in this too, and when Congress passes a spending bill, the executive branch is obliged to spend that money. Um, so some of this might be not that bad. Uh, the fact that Congress has to fund the Park Service and Forest Services here means that there's probably a pretty good chance that the draconian cuts the administration is trying to put onto those aren't going to come, but it still is pretty bad, and you see where the intention is here, too. Um and again, remember, the Park Service's deferred maintenance budget alone is $35 billion, right? I don't know what deferred maintenance is for the Forest Service or the BLM, but just remember, um, like Forest Rangers are not happy with where their maintenance stuff is right now either, too. Um and yeah, I mean you get all these kind of business conservatives talking about how, like, well, these places aren't making enough money to sustain themselves. We should increase the prices on international visitors, we should max out on timber harvest and on oil and gas leasing so that these places can pay for themselves. No, no, that's not how we're doing it. These are places that need to be fully funded first, and then whatever extra revenues they can make from stuff like that is fine. But they should not be dependent on uh profit motives to be able to exist because again, these are the property of the American uh nation, and like as I hate the word taxpayer, but as a taxpayer, people have rights to these places, you know? Um and that is something that we can go into at some point later on. So that's the funding question, okay? Uh all this stuff is being driven by my party. Granted, the Democrats should have been fighting for uh fuller staffing and fuller funding over the last 16 years, so it's partly their fault too, but they're not the ones who are in the process of actively trying to destroy this stuff. Okay, so there's that. Then we get to protecting the laws. Uh the administration has been actively doing things that are meant to bring the Wilderness Act uh to a Supreme Court ruling. Uh some people are whispering that, like, if the stuff with Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument or Barazir's National Monument uh were to get all the way up to the Supreme Court, there might be a chance that the Supreme Court would render, uh would rule the Wilder or the Antiquities Act of 1906 of is it 06 or 07? In the Teddy Roosevelt administration, um, that the Supreme Court now would rule the Antiquities Act uh unconstitutional and thus uh open up the question: are any national monuments allowed to be protected and preserved? Right. Um meantime, uh Senator Lee put up a bill to uh put all kinds of um uh border surveillance stuff and walls through wilderness areas in southern Arizona, and there's this proposal to build uh a border wall through Big Bend National Park, which is crazy. Um all this kind of stuff uh is stuff that goes directly against the the provisions of the Wilderness Act, right? Excuse me. Um stuff that goes directly against the provisions of the Wilderness Act, and uh you know where that goes. The Wilderness Act is one of the things that protects more pristine areas in the United States than almost any other single piece of legislation. Uh Endangered Species Act is currently under attack. Um there's always different lawsuits trying to destroy this part of it or that part of it. Um there was a recent convening of the God Squad to go remove protections in the Gulf of Mexico from uh certain species subspecies of right whale, uh, as well as various species of turtles to allow deeper gas and oil development in the Gulf. Um stuff like this. Stuff that like subtly chips away piece after piece, time after time, minute after minute, from uh the management of these lands under the laws that we've had for them. Uh but the um the processes there um uh uh that that we've managed them, but the processes there uh just go into that. So, okay. Uh these are the laws that protect these places um and they are like being flouted as we speak. Lastly, the protection of multiple use sustained yield. Uh there were two laws passed in 1976 that put multiple use sustained yield as the law of the land on or the fundamental governing philosophy on Forest Service and BLM lands. Those were respectively the National Forest Management Act of 1976 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 as well, too. Um those are the laws that protect the uh use of many different types of um of uh extraction alongside conservation on these lands, but again, they mandate that there is a balance of uses. There is no single use in forest service or bail on lands that supersedes all the others. The way this administration is behaving, the things with this timber dominance, this mineral dominance, this energy dominance, um things that, by the way, may well be reasonable in the context of uh responsible stewardship and responsible management, suddenly you see resource extraction being driven to the top and the pinnacle of how this administration wants to manage the lands, running roughshod over many of those environmental laws that I was just talking about while we were talking about the other point. And uh the like when you go and push for gas and oil drilling um leases to be permitted so fast that you go beyond the normal processes, when you go and you allow gas and oil uh uh leases to go right up into the parts of BLM land that were under a protection because they were right next to a national monument that needs a buffer zone around it to be protected, right? And you just flout the law and go build those right there. When Congress goes and removes protections uh in national forest land that are directly up from the boundary waters wilderness, so that a Chilean mining conglomerate can go and uh and uh can go and uh build a copper mine that's going to pollute the boundary waters and render that ecosystem uninhabitable, right? Uh the the roadless rule being repealed in the Forest Service isn't as bad as anybody thinks. But that being said, when you repeal the roadless rule and you shift the management in the Tongas National Forest from multiple use uh to something that focuses primarily on timber harvest of the ancient sitka spruce old growth forests, there, um then you are definitely moving uh that particular piece of land into a certain kind of policy management that you shouldn't be doing. Right? This administration keeps pushing resource extraction to the pinnacle of where it's is helping to manage the lands. And that is wrong, that goes against uh where things should be. There should always be a balance of conservation and extraction. Um I've heard a compelling case that uh the that the the mandates of BLM and Forest Service should be flopped around so that conservation is the chief thing and resource extraction is the secondary thing. There's a good case for that, um, but the important thing is that resource extraction would not be uh gotten rid of. It would just be adapted into a time when we realize that the land is more benefits as a natural environment than as a resource farm. But we can talk about that more later on. Anyways, all this to say, with those kind of five sets of attacks, does it sound like my party is particularly good on the public lands issues? It's not. It's not. There is not a single member of my party in Congress who is uh fighting for the public land system on all five of these things. Um there are lots of them who have been complicit with the worst things that Bergum and Lee and Trump have done. Um there are a couple of them who have stood up here and there for various ones. In particular, uh, I believe it was Susan Collins and uh what's his name, North Carolina, Tom Tillis, uh, who voted um to save the boundary waters, not to destroy it, the way the rest of the Republican Senate uh caucus did. Um but in general, like there hasn't been a lot of stuff from my party. So I'm here to tell my fellow conservatives in the public lands movement um that the reason we need to be public lands radicals is because our party is so reactionary on this issue that it is actively destroying everything that we love about the Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinch Show, George Bird Rennell, John Muir legacy. Okay? Um the Republican Party as it stands right now is not even moderate. It is reactionary on this stuff. We cannot be public lands moderates, we have to be public lands radicals because we cannot tolerate a world where our party is causing every single major problem uh for the protection and stewardship of the public lands. That's why we have to call it public lands radicalism, um, which, by the way, it is a very moderate, very common sense uh view among the American people. Again, you see it in the polling that nobody wants these places to be sold off, nobody wants the Rangers to be fired. And if our party does not get that at the level of proactive policy, not just at the level of save your job in re-election things, um, but in terms of active public policy. If we do not value the stewardship of that, then we have to be radical to get them into that. Um and I know there's a lot of conservatives these days who are working with different parts of the Republican Party in the administration, in the Interior Department and the Forest Service, um, in the uh the House Natural Resources Committee, the Senate Energy and Resources Committee, um, sorry, Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. Um I'll remember it soon. Uh and it's this idea that, like, well, if you're able to um work with them here and there, then you can gradually pull them up into uh into being um more conservationist than they were the last time, and it will be a net utilitarian benefit for the lands movement or whatever. How has that worked? How has that worked? I I I think a lot of these conservationist conservatives have had the best intentions in doing this. I don't think there's any malice on their parts. I don't even think there's particular dishonesty on their parts. But when we have seen with the Make America Beautiful again initiative, the administration has been doing over this last year or so, uh, when we see the absolute failure of the Republicans on the Senate stewardship caucus to do anything whatsoever to block the sale of the Boundary Waters or the um or the nominations of very, very, very anti-conservation uh people to BLM and to other spots. To be fair, Tom Tillis did vote against the Boundary Waters destruction, and he is on the stewardship caucus. So there is that. But that's not a very good track record, right? Um the uh the Republican Party right now is frankly not worth working with on public land issues. Yeah, we need to have the embassies on it, but I think any attempt to seriously believe that the GOP institutionally is um capable of protecting the public lands uh is just wrong. Is just straight wrong. There are a couple of things where Republicans are actually more likely to be useful on than Democrats. Um I think there's actually been a lot of good wildlife management stuff that's come out of the current Congress and even parts of the administration. But those things are so uh uh few and far between that it is like just um uh it's laughable how how much attention those get in conservative conservation circles when you're looking at all the other 800-pound grizzly bears in the campground. Okay. Uh it's it's wrong. So uh I think the best thing that anybody who is genuinely conservative and genuinely conservationist can do is to write off the losers in government right now. Just write it off and go put your head down and try to start building something new and try to start helping with uh getting a uh public and institutional constituency for the public land system as a whole at a radical level for our party built up over time. And it'll take a while. It's not going to be something that you can do in a policy-relevant time frame, um, but it is something that uh over time will bear fruit. Back in the 1930s, when Bob Marshall and Adam Leopold were saying that we should be uh getting a wilderness um system set up so that uh places with incredible beauty and biodiversity were not plowed over by well-intentioned civilian conservation corps boys. Um everybody said they were crazy. But they founded the Wilderness Society, uh, they did their activism, they worked in government, um, and most importantly, they didn't compromise with the uh with the forces that were trying to plow everything over. Um you gave it a couple decades. 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Wilderness Act into law, and voila, we have a great new part of the public lands legacy. I think Republican public lands radicals really need to be doing that right now. And again, it's gonna be something where we need to spend some time creating the argument, we need to spend the time persuading people, we need to spend the time um doing this in a genuinely Republican way, and as well as a bipartisan way, but a genuinely Republican way is what is not happening right now. We need to do that. Um there is goodwill. Uh I know people who do public lands policy who are more conservative than I am, who do basically follow the tenets that I'm talking about here with public lands radicalism. Uh and uh I know plenty of people in the conservative conservation movement who are very disappointed with where the conservative conservation movement has been going in letting this administration get greenwashed and call itself a great conservation administration. Okay. Uh so the thing that we need to do really is just like show that the Republican Party right now is not worthy of the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt, it keeps claiming. And we need to articulate and start to build people in the Republican Party who are worthy of that mantle. And if our leaders aren't going to do it, then it has to be us. Um so I think that's uh, you know, uh it'll be a while, but it'll be a fun process once we get there. And this isn't a hippy-dippy thing, okay? Um I know all those five proposals that I talked about are things that uh your like kind of tree hugger who goes and ties himself to uh red wood to keep it from getting chopped down would agree with. Um that doesn't particularly bother me because that is a sign that these are things that public lands radical conservatives can have in common with our fellow Americans who are otherwise very, very different from us. Um and there is a conservative conservationism that we can and we should try to do ourselves, okay? Uh there's a really trite way that people talk about why we should be stewards of nature. Um it's trite. Uh it's said so often that I think a lot of people who say it don't really either understand or sometimes mean what they're saying. But it's true. It's completely true. Uh and there's a couple of things that they say on it. Number one, the public lands are our common ground. They're the things that unite us all as Americans. Clearly they don't right now, because clearly there are some people who don't care about them enough to stand up and protect them. Um but it is true that they are the common property of all Americans and they're places that everybody is allowed to go, and are kind of a birthright of American citizenship and a piece of American nationhood. Second off, the public lands are our heritage. The public lands are our patrimony. The public lands are a thing that has been here before us, they will exist after us, um, because they are here and because there is a sublime beauty in nature that we did not create, we just found, and uh it's ours. It is worth preserving for its own sake, um, regardless of what it could do for us or what it couldn't do for us. Um, thirdly, and this is one that I see a lot of people talking about, and I doubt many of them actually get out there and do it. Um the public lands are a place where manliness and like not just manliness but like vigor, women can do it too, um, is practiced. It's a place where like you have this great American frontier and wilderness and adventure heritage that has helped create the American spirit. Everybody says that. And then they go and don't say anything about the fact that 250 million acres of those lands, including all the mountains that I've climbed for the last five years, may well be made inaccessible to people who are trying to have that uh great American experience of uh vigor. An experience, by the way, that is more important in the 21st century than it ever has been before, especially given that millions of of our fellow citizens are living lives that are not physical enough, they don't get to touch enough grass, they don't get to touch enough trees, they live in despair, they have uh all kinds of addictions that we as a society should not be uh letting ourselves devolve into a state where so many people are so hopeless and see so few prospects in a society that gives them no prospects that they go into despair. Well, I've got an idea on how you can help people out of that, okay? Um every kind of workshop that I've ever sat in on on masculinity studies has basically said the same thing. Get people out of their rooms and out doing service uh in various places, including in nature, right? Um and also not just that, but having adventures in nature. So uh, and then lastly, uh the there is a virtue that all true conservatives, if they mean anything at all about being conservative, if conservative means anything at all, you will practice value of stewardship. And what is stewardship? It is when you are given something that you've inherited and over the course of your time uh you respect it, you treat it well, you become a responsible person, and you manage it well, and by the end of your life, you hand it off to uh the next generation and give them. That same job that you had and that your ancestors had and that will go on for a long time because you are not a civilization if you do not have people who are willing and able to preserve everything that's good and holy about that civilization. It's a virtue. Wouldn't it be great if we had more people in government who actively and publicly did that? By the way, there's more people in government who do that than most people realize. But people don't think of our politics as being full of that these days, you know. So that's something that uh the public lands are good for, also. And yeah, we can talk about how like they increase American GDP and they give us the great resources that we need to fuel our new industrial economy to be competitive in the international competition with the People's Republic of China. All of that is true as well. None of those are conservative reasons for being a public lands radical. The conservative reason for being a public lands radical is because the public lands is American heritage. The public lands is a great asset to America, not because of what it can do for a balance sheet, Doug Bergum, but because of what it can do for us and what it can do for our spirits and our souls. Um that's why they're important. That's why we have a responsibility to them. That's why anybody who considers themselves to be even a little bit conservative at all needs to be a public lands radical. And that's why my fellow conservatives who want to do this conservation thing, we have a lot of work to do. I'm going to keep doing my best to convince a few more of you every time that this is what we should be doing. And it's going to be long, hard work, not just me convincing you, but all of us trying to convince others of this. Uh, but I think it's gonna be worthwhile work. I'm wearing a belt buckle right now, by the way, that I got from the Philmont Scott Ranch Conservation Department, of which I had a great honor of serving, and which I still volunteer in every summer that I can. And on this belt buckle, there's a um uh it has the kind of motto of the Philmont Scott Ranch Conservation Department. With right comes responsibility. With right comes responsibility. And if there ever were a more conservationist phrase and a more conservative phrase, I couldn't think of one. So uh I think we all know what our task is. I think we all know what we're supposed to do. Uh I look forward to finding more of my fellow public lands radicals on the right, but also in the center and on the left, uh, to go help um build something that does not currently exist and awaken those parts of it uh and awaken those who have it deep down but don't know it yet. Because that's the other thing, is that despite the institutional Republican Party not having a clue on this or not having a care on it, the American people do. You see it all the time in polls, you see it all the time in uh statements, but most importantly, you see it all the time in people's spirits. And uh if we have to be radicals to serve that, then there is nothing more worth being a radical for. Uh I will look forward to chatting with you all more. May you never run out of mountains, and I'll see you on the trail. Alrighty, Serena. Um, I think I went a little bit too far in this. I think there's probably a lot of fluff on this. I think there's a lot of spots here that probably should be at least cut down, um, maybe some of them eliminated. Uh I think in general, I'm happy with the direction of this. I'm not entirely happy with my delivery of it. Uh part of me kind of wonders if me writing down some notes made it less good this time. Um but I don't know, we'll see. We'll see. So. Uh yeah. Yeah. There are also less amusing moments in this one, too. I assume this will probably be a longer episode, closer to 40 or 45 minutes. Um, but let me know what you think on that, and uh I guess we'll go from there.