Public Lands: America’s Backyard At Risk
It’s a beautiful autumn day with warm temperatures, even at 6,500 feet in the shady, heavily-forested canyon, but the breeze forewarns of another early Montana winter. My 6-year-old son enthusiastically casts a fly upstream, where we think a trout may be taking cover in a dark recess of deep clear water. I offer him pointers, and we stay alert for possible wildlife encounters. My son loves to spot the bighorns as they fearlessly teeter on the cliffs above, and I’m always ready for the hair-raising excitement of a grizzly bear sighting. We are on Hyalite Creek in the Gallatin National Forest, the most heavily recreated stream in Montana, just outside of Bozeman, but we haven’t seen a soul since we hit the trail. Public lands in Montana, and everywhere, are like that; you can get lost quick and find the things that really matter.
As the new year begins, and the national political circus rolls on, with all its attendant absurdity and maliciousness, it’s good to remind ourselves of what we are fighting for. For me and my team at Defenders of Wildlife, it is our nation’s public lands and the wildlife that depend on them.
We’ve all heard this: America’s public lands are the envy of the world because we had the foresight to set aside places where nature comes first. We are all co-owners of our national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands and more. The names and places can be iconic — Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon — but also include lands much less known and travelled: thousands of other special places like Hyalite Canyon or your own favorite, that are stunning and like no other.
It is the mission of Defenders of Wildlife to protect America’s imperiled wildlife and their habitat, and for many at-risk species — like the grizzly bears — much of that habitat is found on U.S. public lands.
For example, our National Forest System, administered by the U.S. Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture, includes my backyard of the Gallatin, plus more than 150 other national forests and grasslands that are strongholds for at-risk wildlife, supporting more than 400 animals and plants protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and over 3,000 other imperiled species. Some of those, including iconic species such as bison, Canada lynx, grizzly bears and wolverines, are found on the Gallatin. For many jeopardized species, such as snow-dependent lynx and wolverines, national forests offer the last refuges of remaining suitable habitat. There are also 200,000 miles of streams in America’s national forests– which in addition to supporting at-risk aquatic species, such as native cutthroat trout, serve as the nation’s drinking watersheds. Healthy ecosystems and riparian areas around the streams filter sediment out of the water and keep it clean, for both people and animals alike.
The National Wildlife Refuge System, administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within the Department of the Interior, encompasses more than 850 million acres of habitat dedicated to the conservation of our nation’s wildlife, making it the largest network of public lands and waters in the country. The Refuge System safeguards one of America’s last great wildlands, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, home to imperiled polar bears, muskoxen, caribou and hundreds of species of migratory birds from all fifty states. It sustains one of the most diverse and threatened ecosystems on Earth, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which protects coral reefs, green sea turtles and Hawaiian monk seals. Fifty-nine refuges were established with the primary purpose of protecting imperiled wildlife, including Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge to conserve the California condor, Pilot Knob National Wildlife Refuge in Missouri for the Indiana bat, and Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, a crucial stronghold for one of the most endangered mammals in the United States.
The National System of Public Lands managed by the BLM, also within the Interior Department, supports nearly 450 ESA-listed plants and animals and one of the most iconic birds of America’s western sagebrush sea — the greater-sage grouse. The BLM manages more than half of remaining sage-grouse habitat, and in 2015 completed an unprecedented planning effort to protect sage-grouse and their habitat across federal public lands from a myriad of threats, including oil and gas development.
As in hard political times in the past, we seem poised to lose these places that we value so much. Anti-conservation politicians supported by monied special interests have gained political influence, and are intent on using it to cash-in on public lands. The current administration, their friends on Capitol Hill, and the tremendously powerful extractive industry lobby are combining forces to open up our public lands for development and exploitation. Here’s how it works. The extractive industries — we’re talking oil and gas, coal, uranium, big timber — view any public lands and wildlife conservation-based law or regulation as a barrier to production and profit; that’s their mission. Immediately after the election the industry lobbyists approached the new administration with a wish-list of rules, regulations and laws that simply had to go. The administration took immediate action. Within weeks of taking office President Trump signed a stack of Executive Orders directing the federal government to begin the process of dismantling the laws, regulations, policies and programs that industry claim get in the way of business, including the harmful business of developing resources on federal public lands. One order directed federal agencies to find and eliminate anything they did that “burdened” the development of energy resources on public lands. Another ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review the designation of national monuments, a directive which has led to the dismantling of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, with more to follow. Yet another called for the rollback of the 2015 greater sage-grouse protections. Last week the Trump administration approved a land trade that would allow construction of a destructive and unnecessary road through the heart of the Izembek Wilderness in Alaska. And the list goes on.
This may be how the unraveling of public land and wildlife conservation protections begins, with the bad guys pulling at the threads, but certainly not how it ends. The administration has power, as does the majority in Congress, but they are not all-powerful. Not only are we a nation of laws, but we are a nation that loves our public lands, and we don’t back down. It’s our time to rise, and not just speak for the trees, but shout for them and for the rivers, grasslands, oceans, shrublands seashores and deserts.
Take the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The recently passed, and very unpopular, tax bill included a provision to allow oil drilling in the refuge’s Coastal Plain, the biological heart of this treasured landscape. Congress gave oil companies a massive, gluttonous holiday feast and not even a crumb for the a majority of Americans who oppose sacrificing the refuge and its wildlife to drilling. But the fight is not over; Congress passed one law, but they did not waive all the other laws and procedural requirements on which actual oil development is predicated. The land is still ours, and Defenders’ federal lands protection team is dedicated to challenging this attack on our natural heritage in the courts, the corporate boardrooms, the White House and on Capitol Hill, along with every other battle to protect all of America’s special places. For me the inspiration is easy, and very close to home.
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