Content warning: Whereas some of my recent posts were self-described as “fun and frivolous”, this piece is not. One reader described the tone as “polemical, elegiac, and darkly satirical, with an undercurrent of civic alarm”.

You be the judge.

Another backpacking season approaches! In the spirit of avoiding “willful blindness,” I would like to take stock of where we currently stand with regard to our trails and the public lands where they are found. Keep in mind that these trails also depend on shared resources that do not abide by borders, such as clean air, water, and a stable climate.

A quick refresher on some federal agencies and who is now in charge of them:

The public agencies entrusted with managing our public lands are the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service. These three agencies differ in their missions. All three provide recreational access, and all three may include designated wilderness areas within their boundaries. Wilderness represents the highest level of protection afforded to our public lands.

Traditionally, the BLM has supported mining and grazing, while the Forest Service has supported logging and multiple-use land management. The primary mission of the National Park Service is preservation, along with light recreation (no off-roading or hunting, for example).

The BLM and NPS reside within the Department of the Interior (Secretary Doug Burgum). The Forest Service resides within the Department of Agriculture (Secretary Brooke Rollins).

In short, Doug Burgum looks at a canyon the way a raccoon looks at an unattended cooler. He is also big on land swaps that favor the ultra-rich and oil leases for his cronies. Brooke Rollins helped plan the policy agenda for a second Trump administration and previously served as Rick Perry’s ethics advisor, which is a little like serving as the nutritionist aboard a Carnival cruise.

Neither speaks for the trees or the trails, The Lorax be damned.

One recent victory we can celebrate is that the Trump administration failed in installing a Delaware North executive as National Parks Director. Delaware North is one of the largest privately owned hospitality and entertainment companies in the world.

The current director of the National Park Service is an interim director from inside the National Park Service and a career bureaucrat. They are responsible for carrying out Trump’s directives to culturally sanitize the educational efforts of the National Park Service.

Tom Schultz, who now directs the National Forest Service, comes to us from the logging industry and is a man who “can’t see the forest for the trees.”

The BLM now has a new director: Steve Pearce. Pearce is a former Republican congressman from New Mexico and comes to us from the oil and gas industry, which at least saves everyone the trouble of now pretending that the BLM is concerned at all about conservation. Pearce will be using the Congressional Review Act to roll back protections for National Monuments.

The CRA is a federal law that allows Congress to overturn certain agency rules by passing a joint resolution of disapproval with a simple majority vote in both houses. If the president signs the resolution, the rule is nullified, and the agency generally cannot issue another rule that is “substantially the same” without new authorization from Congress.

The foxes are no longer merely in the henhouse. They are now conducting a market analysis of the hens. The dismantling and liquidation of our natural resources is under way. Corruption and cronyism rule the day. The end game is to concentrate as much wealth in as few hands as possible.

Regarding access to our public lands: if you need to obtain a Wilderness Permit for hiking in the woods or want to reserve a public campground, you can do so by logging onto Recreation.gov, which is run by Booz Allen Hamilton. Booz Allen Hamilton is a cybersecurity firm that partners with the DHS and DOJ to keep our borders secure and is listed as a private donor to the White House Ballroom project. Yet they don’t seem able to keep bots out of the campground reservation system. Their fee to make and/or cancel a reservation is hefty. For this reason, many people do not bother to cancel when something comes up. As a result, when you visit a popular campground, the sign always reads “campground full,” even if half the sites are actually empty. Think of it this way: somewhere in a Bay Area suburb, from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy, a proud father is gallantly protecting Site #78 from unnecessary occupation.

Edward Abbey long warned that public land agencies too often functioned as quiet partners of extraction industries. Today they appear increasingly uninterested in the quiet part.

So here is where we currently stand:

BLM staffing has fallen 20 percent since 2025. Much of that loss represents senior expertise. Funding remains flat, with proposals on the table for future budget cuts. The Public Lands Rule of 2024, which elevated conservation to equal footing with mining, is in the process of being eliminated. That rule prioritized ecosystem resilience, landscape restoration, and Indigenous knowledge in management decisions.

The Forest Service has seen a similar staffing reduction of around 20 percent. Funding here also remains flat; however, fire suppression funding has increased while support for nearly everything else has declined. In practical terms, this means more money will be spent on timber harvesting and mechanical thinning. This will be paired with expedited environmental review and is often framed as wildfire risk reduction and forest health. Less money will be spent on recreation and science.

The Forest Service’s Roadless Rule of 2001 is also in the process of being repealed. This regulation protects nearly 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest from logging, mining, and road construction. It was intended to preserve ecological, recreational, and water resources across nearly 30 percent of National Forest System land.

By far the most sweeping change to public land management in the United States right now is a major reorganization of the Forest Service.

The Forest Service’s nine regional offices will be shuttered. The Forest Service headquarters is being moved to Utah, where opposition to federal land ownership is practically a native plant species.

The Forest Service also plans to close 57 out of 77 research facilities nationwide, undermining critical science on wildfire, drought, and ecosystem health at a time when it is needed most.

These changes are part of a broader strategy to reduce capacity, push out expertise, and weaken the Forest Service’s role in national public lands policy.

Last but not least, the National Park Service has seen its staffing cut by 25 percent while funding remains flat. The 2027 budget proposal calls for an additional 25 percent reduction to park operations. The mission has shifted from stewardship to access. Science, conservation, and education programs are being eliminated. There will be fewer backcountry rangers as personnel are reassigned to front-facing roles.

We can also expect to see increased industrial activity near national park borders. For example, Trump’s Endangered Species Committee, commonly known as the “God Squad,” voted unanimously on March 31, 2026, to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act. This decision effectively allows expanded drilling operations in waters home to ten National Park sites, including the Gulf Islands National Seashore and Everglades National Park. The federal panel has given the oil industry a path to bypass wildlife protections near these areas.

Upon returning from a recent trip to Yosemite, I noticed that the entrance gates were not fully staffed, allowing visitors to come and go without paying entrance fees. Meanwhile, the historic Wawona Hotel and its complex of historic buildings (totaling seven structures) have been closed indefinitely. It will cost between fifty and one hundred million dollars to fully refurbish the site. That’s around 25 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Memorial Day weekend was a stress test for Yosemite National Park as the reservation system was eliminated by the Trump administration. Without any limit to how many people could enter the park on any given day, Yosemite Valley was quickly flooded with people illegally parking their cars on meadows and overwhelming the trails and facilities.

Broadly speaking, federal protections for clean air and water are being rolled back.

Our climate is becoming far more unstable. Just last month, the western United States experienced a record-shattering high-pressure system (a “heat dome”) that lasted for over a week. This intense, stagnant ridge set new temperature records across the West. Much of our Sierra Nevada snowpack melted. California’s coastal waters warmed.

Each morning, the conscientious reader encounters a litany of truly alarming ideas that, within the current political climate, are presented as reasonable. Here are just a few examples:

• A plan to build a massive underground copper-nickel sulfide mine in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota
• A federal judge in Los Angeles denying the California Department of Parks and Recreation’s request for a preliminary injunction to stop Sable Offshore Corp. from pumping crude oil through a controversial pipeline beneath Gaviota State Park
• The Interior Department using $1 billion in taxpayer funds to bribe a foreign oil company into stopping development of cheap offshore wind in the U.S.
• A $120 million Trump deal with Golden State Wind to abandon its planned offshore wind project near Morro Bay in exchange for investing an equivalent amount in fossil fuel projects along the U.S. Gulf Coast
• A plan to pipe groundwater from near Great Basin National Park to Cedar City, Utah
• A proposed 211-mile gravel road to nowhere that would reach the southern Brooks Range, crossing state, federal, and Native lands while cutting across 26 miles of Gates of the Arctic National Preserve in Alaska
• Removing bison from federal lands
• Allowing guns and hunting in some National Parks
• The Department of the Interior ordering 76 national recreation areas to lift restrictions that prohibited hunters from cleaning or processing their kills in public restrooms
• Legalizing the use of cyanide bombs in predator control
• An approval in Utah of a hyperscale AI data center campus that will require double the electricity the entire state of Utah currently uses and that will also impact the threatened Great Salt Lake
• 4,000 acres of logging in the Custer Gallatin National Forest just outside Yellowstone National Park
• A Canadian mining company putting a plan back into motion – despite it being struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 – that calls for 24-hour, 365-day-per-year mining operations at the Hot Creek Geologic Site, located near Mammoth Lakes
• A proposed $10 billion, 1-gigawatt data center near Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona—one mile from this:

Sidenote: Early in 2025, President Trump revoked President Biden’s 2023 AI executive order, which had required extensive safety reporting and testing for advanced AI systems. The replacement policy emphasizes accelerating AI development, reducing regulatory barriers, and expanding data-center construction. The current administration has some interest in controlling AI, but not for the purposes of safety and sustainability.

Remember what I said earlier about how public lands represent the core of our democracy? It was on the frontiers of this nation that many of our uniquely American characteristics were formed, for better or worse.

Have you noticed the recurring figure of 20 to 25 percent staffing and funding losses across all three agencies? Funding for public lands is not the only thing that is eroding.

Our U.S. democracy has experienced a similar rapid decline.

At this rate, it may only survive as a historic interpretive exhibit staffed by volunteers on alternate weekends.

As part of this multi-pronged attack, science and education are also being phased out. They are both increasingly viewed as threats because they have a habit of distributing knowledge more broadly than concentrated wealth.

Even so, I do feel confident that the Wilderness Act will remain intact and that our existing wilderness areas will maintain their borders. The same goes for our National Parks. National Monument boundaries, unlike National Parks, remain vulnerable to executive action.

The trails ahead remain open. The question is what kind of country they will pass through. I know one thing: I don’t need to hike through a new ballroom, nor hike under a new golden arch, and I don’t care if the reflecting pool is blue or green.

I look forward to checking back in with you one year from now to once again take stock.

In the meanwhile, I will continue to seek kindness, beauty, and humor wherever I venture. I hope you do as well.

One additional note worth holding alongside all of this: public lands have never been only the product of federal policy. They are also sustained – often quietly – by tribal stewards, volunteer trail crews, local land trusts, and the millions of people who return to them season after season, doing the ordinary work of care without announcement or authority.

Granite does not respond to administrative cycles. It does not read budgets or wait for appropriations. Glaciers worry it into valleys over deep time, rivers take their measure grain by grain, but it remains stubbornly itself, indifferent to our reorganizations.

There is comfort in that. The world being described above is not the one I expect to encounter this summer. Upon venturing out, I always return feeling hopeful and optimistic. 

I don’t want us to succumb to despair, nor to the easier habit of indifference. The better stance is something more difficult to sustain: alertness without surrender.