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    Federal layoffs hit the deep-red, rural US west: ‘Our public lands are under threat’

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    Republican representative McKay Erickson walked through the halls of the Wyoming capitol with a Trump 2024 pin on the front of his suit jacket. Much of Erickson’s home district in Lincoln county falls under the jurisdiction of the Bridger-Teton national forest and Grand Teton national park.With that federal land, comes federal workers. While it appears districts in Wyoming crucial to US energy dominance have been spared the brunt of the layoffs, McKay said his forest-heavy district has not been so fortunate. He’s hearing from his constituents about the layoffs, and he’s troubled about the implications for his district’s future.“These people have a face to me,” Erickson said. “They have a face and a place in either Star Valley or Jackson that I know quite well.”Erickson is a small-government conservative, laments bureaucracy and stands by his belief that there’s a need to “cut the fat” at the federal level. But in his district, he foresees a lack of trail maintenance hurting local outfitting companies and understaffed parks with closed gates.“This way is so indiscriminate, and it doesn’t really drill down on the real issue as to where those cuts need to be,” Erickson said. “I’m afraid that probably all we’re going to lose is services.”Erickson’s district is in a bind that’s playing out across the American west.Wyoming, for the third presidential election in a row, voted for Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other state in the country. Neighboring states Idaho and Montana also swung red with mile-wide margins. All three have high proportions of federal land (Idaho – 62%, Wyoming – 48%, Montana – 29%), and thriving outdoor recreation industries dependent on public lands.Erickson, while watching cuts with apprehension, said that he is still supportive of the president, who won more than 81% of presidential votes cast in Lincoln county in 2024.“It hasn’t really shaken me. It’s concerned me, but not shaken me in my support,” Erickson said.As layoffs under Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) bleed out of the Beltway and across the country, local business owners, politicians and federal employees in the rural Mountain West told the Guardian that they feared devastating consequences for their communities.The Guardian reached out to US senators from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, some of whom have publicly praised Doge’s work, about their constituents’ concerns. None responded to a request for comment.Few towns represent the ties between small town economies and public lands better than Salmon, Idaho. With a population of just over 3,000, Salmon is cradled by a nest of federal lands, including the Salmon-Challis national forest, the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and a smattering of Bureau of Land Management holdings.Dustin Aherin calls Salmon home, and is the president of Middle Fork Outfitters Association, which represents 27 local businesses. He said that the day-to-day duties of forestry service employees, from river patrol to permitting to conservation, keep businesses like his alive. Recent layoffs put their future in jeopardy.“The team in the field that manages the Middle Fork and Main Salmon river, all but two were terminated. And the two that were left have been reassigned,” Aherin said. “We have no on-the-ground management as of right now.”The urgency caused by the layoffs sent Aherin to Capitol Hill, where he spoke with the Guardian between meetings with federal officials. He held cautious optimism that Idaho’s federal delegation would be able to help craft a solution.A hundred miles south-west of Salmon, in Stanley, Idaho, Hannah, a terminated employee from the Sawtooth national forest who requested anonymity, has a grim outlook for the future of the small mountain town. She said that about 40% of staff was cut, including the entire wilderness and trail crew. She wonders who will handle the public-facing jobs, from cleaning toilets and campgrounds to providing visitor information, and worries about the effects on Stanley, which took a major hit in the 2024 wildfire season.“In a small town like this where you only have a couple good months of a summer season, one hard year and another hard-ish year could be really bad for some local businesses,” Hannah said.Hannah said the termination cost her her health insurance just weeks before a costly surgery, and she expects to have to relocate. In the early stages of her career, she said the experience will likely sour her, and other young civil servants, on public service.“We’re losing the next generation of public land stewards,” Hannah said. “And our public lands are under threat.”Similar anxiety is creeping into communities surrounding the Mountain West’s marquee national parks, which are economic engines for the region. A 2023 report estimated that National Parks generated more than $55bn in economic impact off of a budget of $3.6bn. Many of these dollars went to gateway towns in red states, such as those framing the entrances to Grand Teton national park or Yellowstone national park.Dale Sexton, owner of Dan Bailey’s fly shop in Livingston, Montana, is helping push the revival of the Yellowstone Business Coalition, whose 400-plus members are lobbying Montana’s federal delegation to work to address the effects of federal layoffs. Sexton is pragmatic about the national political climate and is betting that an economics-based argument will move the needle.“I’m envisioning that our delegation currently doesn’t want to abandon the Doge ship,” Sexton said. “But I’m also hopeful that outcry becomes so loud that it garners their attention and affects change.”Livingston city commissioner Karrie Kahle envisions a trickle-down effect from the layoffs.“As we lose federal workers first, if one of them is lost, we’re potentially losing a whole family from our community,” Kahle said. “If that federal worker has a partner, is that partner a teacher or doing other work in our community? Are we going to lose kids out of our school systems?”Andrea Shiverdecker, an archaeologist in Montana’s Custer-Gallatin national forest, lost her job on Valentine’s Day. Along with the impact on her personal life and community, Shiverdecker dwells on potential consequences for Yellowstone.“I don’t think people understand the sheer volume and amount of people that come through our ecosystem every year and the amount of manpower it takes to keep cleaned up,” Shiverdecker said. “This is what we fear with our public lands … We need to be stewards and foster them for future generations.”Shiverdecker said the layoff process has been disorienting. She said she was terminated 25 days before the end of her probationary period, while paperwork was being run for her promotion. She said she believes in “good people” and hopes to somehow return to her job, but right now, she has a lot of frustration.“How am I getting laid off for performance issues when you were processing my promotion?” Shiverdecker said. “It’s heartbreaking as a dedicated public servant, as a disabled veteran, as somebody who loves the fact that they’ve served. That’s the biggest honor you can give.” More

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      ‘We’re being treated as grifters or terrorists’: US federal workers on the fear and chaos of their firings

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      The Trump administration has fired at least 20,000 government employees in its first month, as Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) dramatically overhauls work at federal agencies. Some economists have speculated that these terminations, which could affect nearly 300,000 workers, will be the biggest job cuts in US history.Most of the workers cut were in probationary periods and lacked job protections that come with longer terms of employment. In social media spaces, especially the r/fednews subreddit, these workers described scenes of confusion and feelings of anger directed at Musk, an unelected billionaire dubbed a “special government employee” by the White House. Last week, unions for federal workers sued the Trump administration for unlawfully using probationary periods to cut staff.The mass firings appear far from over: this weekend, Musk demanded that all remaining workers detail their day-to-day duties in bullet points or face dismissal. (Several federal agencies told their employees not to respond to Musk’s email, and unions and advocacy groups moved to prevent retaliation against employees who did not comply.)Three recently terminated probationary workers told the Guardian about the effects on their lives and job prospects, and how the consequences will “trickle down” to all Americans. They requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation and the fact that they are currently looking for new jobs.‘Do I need to think about becoming a political refugee?’Scientist who works on food sustainability issues in the north-east USI was the third person hired in our unit, almost three years ago, to look at issues of access and fairness when it comes to food. Our probationary period for government scientists is three years. I was 10 weeks away from the end of this period; one of my colleagues who was also fired was only six weeks out.I went on maternity leave in August. When Trump was elected, I knew it would mess with my job. Specifically, I thought it would mess with telework, which I did half the time after I returned from maternity leave. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to have the time to breastfeed my baby at home or to manage the postpartum separation anxiety I’ve experienced. I decided to take a deferred resignation, because then I’d get severance.Six days after my resignation, when I was into the off-boarding process, my boss told me I was going to get a termination letter. It was a huge, emotional process to resign – I feel like I was basically bullied by Trump into doing so – but at least it was my decision to make. Now, I was getting fired. It’s been an insane rollercoaster of emotions.Government workers are real people with families who dedicated their lives and expertise to service. It feels like we’re being treated as grifters or terrorists, when we’re not. A lot of us have given up options for much higher incomes in order to do the work that we thought was going to help the world. This is a huge, huge loss for science, because now government researchers are going to shift into the private sector. There’s a lot of good work that the world won’t even know to miss, because we won’t get to do it.Now I’m wondering, do I need to think about becoming a political refugee? I have a big network in Europe and Canada, though I’d like to stay in the US. It’s hard these days to know what’s catastrophizing and what’s good planning. I think people are really hesitant to go to the worst-case scenario, but we know from history that things can get really bad. Some people see it coming, and some people don’t.It’s also been really, really disappointing and enraging for me to see the lack of effective resistance to Trump and Musk from Congress. There’s a lot of talk on the left about how this is all bad, but nothing’s really getting done. I understand the numbers, the majorities and minorities, but I just think this is not the time to be playing nice with the fascists.‘I’m exploring legal options’Cultural resource specialist for the National Resources Conservation Services (NRCS), an agency of the US Department of Agriculture, in North DakotaI’m an archaeologist. Anytime the NRCS wants to provide support to private landowners such as ranchers or famers, they are legally required to have someone like me to do on-the-ground surveys and excavations of the site.I started on 30 December. I was let go on 13 February. I’d moved from California to North Dakota, and believe it or not I was given relocation expenses to help pay for my move. I came here with my wife and two dogs, and we spent a good amount of money to do so. I sold my Camry and bought a Subaru because I thought I needed a car that could handle the snow up here; now I have a new SUV and a car payment.They told me that if I didn’t work for the federal government for more than a year, I’d have to pay back those expenses. I don’t know if they’re going to come after me for that now.View image in fullscreenIt would be one thing if they’d sent me a personalized letter saying something like: “Your position is being cut.” Instead, I got this generic form letter that still said “template” in the document title. It told me I was being fired for performance-based reasons, but my boss and I were like, I haven’t even worked here long enough to get a performance review. How can they say that?I guess there’s camaraderie among the people who got cut, but more than that everyone just talks about how stupid it is. Are they really making the government more efficient if they’re getting rid of all these people who do things that are required by law? I get the impression that Musk’s treating this like he would a private company such as Twitter, where he fired a lot of people. He’s acting like a CEO, but it’s not his company. It’s the federal government.I’m exploring legal options with employment lawyers, who indicated I’ll have to go through a bigger class-action type thing. There are a couple of class-action lawsuits going around that I’ve submitted my information to. I’m also applying to jobs, and I have a couple of interviews set up. One is for a job that’s in this area, another is out of state. If something good comes up, I would take it and move. That wouldn’t be too hard – I’ve been here for such a short time that I haven’t even unpacked everything yet.‘I didn’t go into this because I wanted to make six figures’Educator at a national forest in OregonI’ve worked for the forest in one way or another since 2019, first as an intern and then in a seasonal position. I got my permanent position in July of last year. During Trump’s first week, they asked for a list of names of everyone who had been hired in the last year. That put me on edge.One day, I saw a bunch of people at the USDA posting on the subreddit for federal employees about getting fired. I was going to text my supervisor to ask: “Am I getting fired?” and then she called me to say that she didn’t have any details but it was probably going to happen. The next day, Valentine’s Day, she called with her definitive list. That was a Friday. It was not a good weekend.It’s overwhelming to know that all the work I put in during the past five years is completely wasted. I have a two-year-old, and my husband and I wanted to have another, but now we don’t know about that. Working in the natural resources field, I don’t know what positions are going to be available, and I’m not sure where my career will go. Do I just give up and go into accounting or something? It’s so uncertain.I feel like we’re being attacked. There have always been people who are anti-government, but now I feel like people see all government employees as villains. I really cared about the work I did, and I didn’t go into this because I wanted to make six figures. The forest or park services have always been very bipartisan, and it’s not something you can easily throw away.We do a lot of school field trips – those won’t happen any more without us. Kids, especially those who come from poorer communities, won’t have the opportunity to come out here and see the natural world. The forest is going to be in disarray, the bathrooms won’t be cleaned, anyone who comes here will have a terrible experience. Without people maintaining the forest, the wildlife will have a worse habitat. All of these things trickle down. The people who fired us are higher-ups who don’t work in the field; everyone who knows the day-to-day of how to take care of this place is gone. More

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      in US Politics

      These people protected US forests and lands. Their jobs have now vanished due to Trump

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      Approximately 2,300 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 35m acres (14m hectares) of federal public lands in the US.These are our lands. They encompass national parks and forests, wilderness and marine protected areas, scenic rivers. They are home to campgrounds, river accesses, hiking trails and myriad other sites and facilities that more than 500 million people visit each year.The termination letters sent to employees stated that they had “not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest”. Those same people fought fires, protected sacred sites, cleared trails, cleaned campgrounds and bathrooms, educated visitors and managed wildlife. They also provided safety, including search and rescue and emergency medical treatment.All chose this career – and the low pay that comes with it – because they love the lands they worked on. The majority of them live in the small rural communities that rely on federal public lands agencies for employment. We have now lost a wealth of cumulative experience and historical knowledge; the damage to public lands, resources and livelihoods will be long-lasting. And the firings aren’t over yet.Victoria WinchUS Forest Service wilderness forestry technician
      Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, MontanaView image in fullscreenI was on trail crew, which is responsible for creating and maintaining about 1,000 miles of hiking trails, which sometimes have to be cleared three to five times in a season from downed trees.People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won’t get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.There will be no one to warn rafters and anglers about hazards in the river, no one to post about grizzlies in an area, no one to support the fire crews. No one to even help people find their lost dogs, which I’ve also done over the years. A million acres of public land will go unmanaged.We are hard-working, blue-collar manual laborers. We make under $40,000 a year. And we come back year after year just to have the privilege of caring for these places that we love so deeply, and making them accessible for the American people. I don’t know what’s more patriotic than that.Adin KotzlerUSFS packer and fire support
      Pintler ranger district and Bob Marshall wilderness, MontanaView image in fullscreenMy job was to pack in supplies to support Forest Service trail crews, rebuild backcountry cabins, plant tree seedlings and [help] wildlife biologists to do their research, among other things. To be able to sharpen a crosscut saw, safely fell a tree or pack a mule – those are all dying arts. It’ll be very hard to bring it back.I’m also qualified for fire support as a tree faller; I can also dig fire lines. When fires exploded in the summer, I tied up my mule and served alongside my fellow firefighters to protect our resources and our people. The fire crews are going to struggle without us.There’s a ton of economic benefits from outfitting, guiding, hunting and fishing. Now the access will not be there for people who have made their livelihoods in the mountains for generations. I was born and raised in small-town western Montana, and I have seen the positive effect of Forest Service employees, outfitters and recreationists on our small towns.What’s amazing to me about America is that we have these public lands – at the same time, it’s so incredibly fragile. And we’re really at risk of losing it to the billionaire agenda.Erica DirksUSFS archeologist
      Tongass national forest, AlaskaView image in fullscreenFederal archeologists don’t do our jobs for the money. I loved my job because I got to help preserve things that mean something to so many people.I’ve always wanted to work with local tribal entities and have their guidance in how they want us to interact with their heritage. My first day on this job, I consulted with our local tribal members and was immediately accepted thanks to this incredible relationship that had been fostered over 30 years by the archeology team in this part of Alaska.When the tribal entity found out people were losing their jobs, they organized what amounted to a downtown march in our little town of 2,000 people to show their support for us. They lost their tribal liaison, the people who worked with them in recreation and fisheries, at a time when Trump has indicated he wants to rescind the Roadless Rule [a federal regulation that protects roadless areas in national forests] and open up the Tongass for logging.We’re talking about incomprehensible damage lasting hundreds of years down the line. Now Indigenous matters won’t be considered any more.For that termination letter to say “you haven’t proved your employment worth in the public interest,” that this work that we do isn’t valuable to our community, is absolutely ridiculous. Our community showed right away that it was.Nick MasseyUSFS wilderness Ranger
      Pisgah national forest, North CarolinaView image in fullscreenBeing a wilderness ranger on the east coast is very different than a lot of places in the west, because we have really high visitation rates. On some of our wilderness trails, we see close to 400 visitors a day in the summertime.We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I’m also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.I think we’ll start seeing a lot more abuse of public lands, because there’s not any education out there to give people some guidance on how to behave. We’ll have so much more trash. And losing jobs is really going to impact the local communities involved in working in these places.Fenix Van TasselBureau of Land Management environmental planner
      Eastern Oregon and WashingtonView image in fullscreenEnvironmental planners basically determine any and every action taken on federal land, from resource extraction and grazing to installing signage, plus the rehabilitation and conservation of public lands.This winter season, we’ve done a lot of rehabilitating burn scars from big fires. We had one of our largest fire seasons this past year, and so we’ve been out planting sagebrush for sage grouse habitat and mule deer wintering areas.Our projects entailed issuing permits that would bring energy and broadband to rural communities out in eastern Oregon and Washington, including tribal. Part of Trump’s agenda is to push energy infrastructure, so it’s interesting that we’re getting laid off. All of these infrastructure projects, including telecommunications, just aren’t going to happen. There’s going to be a larger disparity of access to rural communities.Any pushes for green energy, green infrastructure, anything related to climate change or environmental justice will be completely silenced and wiped off the map.It’s sad that we got laid off, but it’s also sad for the good people who are still left on the inside. The only person that they kept from my team was a lands and realty specialist, whose job is to intake applications. But none of that work will get done – our funding was completely removed two weeks before I got fired.Ryan SchroederBLM rangeland management specialist
      South-west ColoradoView image in fullscreenI finally got this dream job after 11 years of school and working in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico rangelands to be qualified for this position. It’s one of the most difficult positions to fill in public lands management agencies.My job was to review, renew and update grazing permits for private ranchers to graze their livestock on public rangelands, and work to promote and sustain healthy habitats for all Americans, whether they’re hunting, recreating, going out on a side-by-side or grazing livestock.Last Friday, a rancher came in and we were talking about how excited we were to get a grazing allotment reopened. He was saying that maybe, with this administration, things would finally move forward.I was fired an hour later.In every place that I have worked in, there are impacts from 100-plus years ago that we’re still trying to remediate and recover from. And that’s in addition to the current impacts of changing weather patterns: more aridity, less water and more intense storms. This was an opportunity to help people, help landscapes, help wildlife, help our public resources adapt to change. This was my way to serve my country.There are a lot of people saying the national parks are going to be trashed. This is more than just trashed parks. This is the future of our ecosystem and our public land.Fischer GangemiUSFS river ranger
      Middle and south fork of wild and scenic Rivers, MontanaView image in fullscreenI led crews that would patrol the river corridor in the most protected watersheds in the nation.You don’t need a permit to float our rivers, so there’s everyone from outfitters and guides to rafters to anyone with an inner tube. In a five- to six-day patrol, we would take 15-20lb of trash out of the wilderness and bury an average of 20 piles of human waste. And still, I loved every minute of it.The community of people I worked with were the most passionate people I’ve ever worked with. I started working [for the USFS] a couple days after I graduated high school. We had to solve all of the problems we found in the wilderness on our own, which was really good for me.Without rangers out there, it’s going to be really bad. Trash will pile up, waste will pile up. Rivers are dynamic, and so a high water year might clean it out – but all that trash is just going downstream, and that’s just really sickening. More

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      in US Politics

      US Forest Service and National Park Service to fire thousands of workers

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      The US Forest Service is firing about 3,400 recent hires while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000 workers under Donald Trump’s push to cut federal spending and bureaucracy, according to a report on Friday.The terminations target employees who are in their probationary employment periods, which includes anyone hired less than a year ago, according to Reuters, and will affect sites such as the Appalachian trail, Yellowstone, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr and the Sequoia national forest.The cuts represent about 10% of the Forest Service workforce and about 5% of National Park Service employees, but excludes firefighters, law enforcement and certain meteorologists, as well as 5,000 seasonal workers, from the cutbacks.“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities,” the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) president, Theresa Pierno, said in a statement.The association warned in a statement this month that staffing levels were not keeping pace with increasing demands on the national park system, which saw 325m visits in 2023 alone – an increase of 13m from 2022.Kristen Brengel, the NPCA’s senior vice-president of government affairs, warned that visitors from around the world expecting a once-in-a-lifetime experience could now be faced with “overflowing trash, uncleaned bathrooms and fewer rangers to provide guidance”.Like other government agencies, the National Park Service was taken by surprise by a late January order from the White House office of management and budget pausing federal grants. The administration rescinded the order two days later and is re-evaluating it.Across the federal government, about 280,000 employees out of the 2.3 million-member civilian federal workforce were hired in the last two years, with most still on probation and easier to fire, according to government data.In addition to the visits to national parks, about 159 million people visit national forests annually. The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said it could not comment on personnel matters.The agriculture department said in a statement that protecting people and communities, as well as infrastructure, businesses and resources, remains “a top priority”.“Our wildland firefighter and other public safety positions are of the utmost priority,” it added.However, the federal funding freeze is affecting programs meant to mitigate wildfire risk in western states as well as freezing the hiring of seasonal firefighters.The reduction in resources for wildfire prevention comes a month after devastating blazes in Los Angeles that are expected to be the costliest in US history.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Oregon-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project non-profit said its contracts with federal agencies, including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, to reduce hazardous fuels in Oregon, California and Idaho have been frozen.“The funding freeze has impacted more than 30 separate grants and agreements that Lomakatsi has with federal agencies, including pending awards as well as active agreements that are already putting work on the ground,” the project’s executive director, Marko Bey, said in a letter to the senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon.A spokesperson for the interior department, the parent agency of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, said it was reviewing funding decisions.Senate Democrats have called on the administration to unlock fire-mitigation funding, and separately have asked interior and agriculture department leadership to exempt seasonal firefighters from a broad federal hiring freeze.Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group for federal firefighters, said its members have been unable to hire the hundreds of firefighters that are typically brought on at this time of year to gear up for the summer fire season.“The agencies already have had a recruitment and retention problem,” Riva Duncan, vice-president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said in an interview. “This just exacerbates that problem.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump names oil and gas advocate to lead agency that manages federal lands

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      Donald Trump has nominated a longtime oil and gas industry representative to oversee an agency that manages a quarter-billion acres of public land concentrated in western states.Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Colorado-based oil industry trade group Western Energy Alliance, was named Bureau of Land Management director, a position with wide influence over lands used for energy production, grazing, recreation and other purposes. An MIT graduate, Sgamma has been a leading voice for the fossil fuel industry, calling for fewer drilling restrictions on public lands that produce about 10% of US oil and gas.If confirmed by the Senate, she would be a key architect of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda alongside the interior secretary Doug Burgum, who leads the newly formed National Energy Council that Trump says will establish US “energy dominance” around the world. Trump has vowed to boost US oil and gas drilling and move away from Joe Biden’s focus on the climate crisis.The former interior secretary David Bernhardt relocated the land bureau’s headquarters to Colorado during Trump’s first term, leading to a spike in employee resignations. The bureau went four years under Trump without a confirmed director.The headquarters for the 10,000-person agency was moved back to Washington DC under Biden, who installed the Montana conservationist Tracy Stone-Manning at the bureau to lead his administration’s efforts to curb oil and gas production in the name of fighting the climate crisis.Sgamma will be charged with reversing those policies, by putting into effect a series of orders issued last week by Burgum as part of Trump’s plan to sharply expand fossil fuel production.Burgum ordered reviews of many of Stone-Manning’s signature efforts, including fewer oil and gas lease sales, an end to coal leasing in the country’s biggest coal fields, a greater emphasis on conservation and drilling and renewable energy restrictions meant to protect a wide-ranging western bird, the greater sage grouse. Burgum also ordered federal officials to review and consider redrawing the boundaries of national monuments that were created under Biden and other presidents to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.Sgamma said on social media she was honored to be nominated.She said she greatly respects the agency’s work to balance multiple uses for public lands – including energy, recreation, grazing and mining — with stewardship of the land. “I look forward to leading an agency that is key to the agenda of unleashing American energy while protecting the environment,” she wrote on LinkedIn.But environmentalists warned that Sgamma would elevate corporate interests over protections for public land. “Kathleen Sgamma would be an unmitigated disaster for our public lands,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding that Sgamma has “breathtaking disdain for environmental laws, endangered species, recreation, or anything other than industry profit”.The Wyoming governor, Mark Gordon, said Sgamma’s nomination was an “excellent choice”.“I know she is well-qualified and knowledgeable when it comes to Wyoming, the West, and multiple use of public lands,” Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement.Trump nominated Brian Nesvik to lead the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which also is under the interior department and helps recover imperiled species and protect their habitat.Nesvik until last year led the Wyoming game and fish department, where he pushed to remove federal protections for grizzly bears. That would open the door to public hunting for the first time in decades after the animals bounced back from near-extinction last century in the northern US Rocky Mountains.The Biden administration in its last days extended protections for more than 2,000 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, a move that was blasted by Republican officials in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. More

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      in US Politics

      Doug Burgum could soon be driving Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ promises on public lands

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      View image in fullscreenOf all Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees so far, Doug Burgum has stood out for appearing to be one of the most conventional.The billionaire governor of North Dakota – like most picks to lead the Department of the Interior, the largest landowner in the US west – comes from a western state. He is not a conspiracy theorist, he hasn’t been investigated for sex trafficking. Unlike the president-elect’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, he is not a fracking CEO.“He’s not a lunatic,” said Patrick Donnelly, the great basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s not someone wholly inappropriate for the job. But I fear the way his extractive agenda will play out in public lands.”Over the next four years, Burgum is poised to radically remake the agency that oversees 500m acres (200m hectares) of public lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges. A former software executive and one-time climate pragmatist, Burgum has become closely enmeshed with oil and gas industry executives.Burgum led the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy. After Trump asked oil executives to steer $1bn toward his campaign, Burgum promised them Trump would halt Joe Biden’s “attack” on fossil fuels. As Trump makes good on his promise to “drill, baby, drill”, Burgum will be overseeing the department that expedites those drilling permits.“There’s going to be an effort to get every ounce of fuel out of the ground and burn it,” said Daniel R Patterson, a former environmental protection specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a division of interior, who filed a whistleblower complaint during the first Trump administration. “And if we do that, we’re burning ourselves.”Burgum had long had an affinity for Teddy Roosevelt, the US president who established the national parks system and was a champion of the outdoors. Roosevelt was from New York, but had a special connection to the Dakotas, seeking solace in the region’s sweeping badlands.The 26th president was also known for his machiavellian political philosophy. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum said at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.”In addition to managing the interior department, Trump has also tasked Burgum with serving as an “energy czar”, overseeing energy policy across the federal government at the helm of a new “national energy council”.He will be, in essence, a fox guarding the henhouse – in a position to tear down environmental regulations, and ramp up extraction. “We’re going to see a hard turn, to almost complete hostility to conservation interests,” said Patterson.With Burgum at the head of the department, Patterson added, “the direction from DC is going to be to permit as much resource exploitation as possible. And interior employees are going to be asked to push the boundaries of the law more.”Burgum’s zeal for extraction – and his focus on ramping up oil and gas production – could make him more efficient and effective than Trump’s previous interior secretaries. Trump’s first interior leader, Ryan Zinke, racked up 18 ethics investigations in just under two years. His replacement David Bernhardt was also dogged by allegations of ethics violations – and was investigated for carrying on his work as an oil industry lobbyist even after he joined the administration.Burgum’s relatively short political career has not been without scandal. During his short-lived presidential bid, he drew attention for offering $20 gift cards to people who would donate $1 to his campaign, so he would have enough individual donors to make the Republican primary debate stage. But until quite recently, Burgum was viewed as a relative moderate.Initially, he was known for his bipartisanship and pragmatism. Tribal leaders in North Dakota have credited him with smoothing tenuous relationships between tribal and state governments, and though he urged the federal government to take quicker action to clear out protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline, he advocated against using force after taking over as governor toward the end of the standoff.He was never a progressive champion of climate action – but he promoted the same “all of the above” approach to energy that Democratic administration have supported, backing North Dakota’s powerful oil and gas industry while also encouraging the development of renewable energy infrastructure. In 2021, he set a goal that North Dakota would stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, becoming “carbon neutral” – advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions. At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.But in the past year and a half, Burgum underwent a Maga conversion, becoming one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers on energy policy, coordinating closely with oil industry executives.At a now infamous meeting between Trump and oil executives were Burgum and Harold Hamm – the head of Oklahoma-based energy company Continental Resources. The two men are close allies in politics and business.Hamm has donated to Burgum’s political campaigns ($250,000 to his presidential bid), and help finance his pet projects (giving $50m to fund the Theodore Roosevelt library in North Carolina). His Continental Resources, which is the largest oil and gas leaseholder in North Dakota, also leases land from Burgum’s family for oil and gas extraction.And their chumminess blossomed as Hamm, who has become one of Trump’s biggest benefactors and advisers, reportedly helped talk up Burgum at Mar-a-Lago. As a profile of Hamm in the industry publication Hart Energy asserts: “When Harold Hamm talks US energy, President-Elect Donald Trump listens.”Burgum and Hamm worked in tandem to shore up support for Trump among industry executives. And a now infamous meeting with executives where Trump asked for $1bn in support, Burgum promised that if elected, Trump would “stop the hostile attack against all American energy” on “day one”, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.In his dual role as energy czar and interior secretary, environmentalists are bracing for him to gut regulations and speed-up permitting in ecologically vulnerable regions – further opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska for oil and gas exploration, or welcoming uranium and coal development in areas bordering the Grand Canyon.Trump has given Burgum one diktat: drill. Conservationists fear Burgum is likely to oblige not with sweeping action, but by way of a thousand cuts to environmental rules and regulations, allowing not only oil and gas companies, but also mining companies and other businesses unencumbered access to public lands.“The reality is, BLM approves everything that comes in front of them, and that’s true no matter who is present in the White House,” said Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. Of greater concern, he said, is how that permitting happens.“That’s something I really fear, because the ramifications of the first Trump administration are still extremely present in our lives,” he said.During his first administration, Trump oversaw the rollback of more than 125 environmental rules, many with the aid of the interior department, whose secretary will wield vast power over how environmental regulations are interpreted and implemented.For example, the BLM created new rules to roll back restrictions on methane releases from oil and gas wells. A US district court eventually found the rule to be flawed, but then a Wyoming court struck down Obama-era restrictions on methane that preceded the Trump rule. All the while, companies were allowed to release methane unfettered.Burgum could also help Trump gut the interior department, reducing staff at key offices that oversee vast areas of public land – undermining the department’s ability to monitor public lands and enforce regulations. Career interior employees may also choose to retire or leave.“Public employees largely do these jobs because they believe in the public interest,” said Patterson. “If a new political boss comes in and tries to turn the agency into a giant bulldozer to pave the way for moneyed interests, they may not want to be a part of that.”There were 4,900 fewer employees at the interior department at the end of Trump’s first term compared to the beginning. “We know there’s a big emphasis and thrust of the incoming administration on reducing the size of the federal government, and we worry that BLM will once again be in the crosshairs,” said Robert Dewey, vice-president for government relations with the non-profit group Defenders of Wildlife. “If it is targeted, that would have an impact on their ability to balance conservation along with their other objectives. And we worry that wildlife would suffer as a consequence.”The administration faced several complaints and lawsuits over its rushed or inadequate environmental reviews, including over its environmental impact statement (EIS) for an oil and gas leasing program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that environmentalists called “slapdash”. In 2020, Patterson filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the BLM district office ignored requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, in one case allowing a gold mining operation to create toxic pit lake, rather than requiring it to build a more expensive and less polluting system for wastewater. Patterson also alleged retaliation, and the complaint was eventually dismissed in a legal settlement.“Right now, one of the only things standing in the way between this extractive boom, you know, ruining our public lands and driving species to extinction, are bedrock environmental laws,” said Donnelly. “And groups like ours, who are willing to stop these things.”If Burgum and the incoming Trump administration are able to dismantle those laws, he said, it could have consequences that persist well beyond the next administration. “This could be extremely devastating for the future,” he said. More

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      Revealed: Trump administration forced Joshua Tree to stay open during last US shutdown

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      By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on 7 January 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources.To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.Bernhardt’s decision and its aftermath are chronicled in hundreds of pages of emails between park officials, which the Guardian obtained through a records request. The correspondence sheds light on the pressure national parks faced during the shutdown, as well as how political considerations influenced decisions about their maintenance and protection.Another possible government shutdown looms, raising fresh questions about whether the National Park Service (NPS), the federal agency that oversees the parks, will follow the precedent set by the previous administration.“The situation right now is deeply concerning on many levels, including the potential threat to resources and visitors,” said John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit that advocates for park preservation. “It is difficult for the parks service to do their jobs when Congress doesn’t give them the resources they need.”‘Parks are struggling’There have long been tensions over the interpretation of the NPS mission, with an uneasy balance of conservation and recreation. As politicians switch priorities, priorities in the parks can switch with them, and at the end of 2018 the NPS found itself in the crosshairs.On 21 December that year, Mick Mulvaney, who headed the office of management and budget for the Trump administration, announced the shutdown in a memorandum to agency leaders across the country, advising them that all talking points should reflect that the “national parks will remain as accessible as possible”. Communications staff for NPS’s Pacific west regional office followed up with instructions: “Keep the message positive, avoid saying limited access.”Regional NPS leaders meanwhile told superintendents in close-of-day emails they were aware of the potential for damage to delicate ecosystems and park infrastructure if parks stayed open without the necessary resources, and possible danger to largely unsupervised visitors. The timing of the shutdown, which left employees furloughed or working without pay during the busy holiday season, only added to the challenges, Sarah Creachbaum, the acting deputy regional director, wrote in an email on 23 December.“If the shutdown does persist for more than a few days it will be increasingly important to keep an eye out for signs and symptoms of stress among your teams,” she said. “Uncertainty and stress are legitimate health and safety issues that can affect everyone.”There would be weeks to go.As the shutdown progressed, and the situation at some national parks turned increasingly dire, the NPS leaders told park superintendents they would support decisions to shut parks down, especially in situations where staff and visitors could not be kept safe.“We’ve heard from many parks across the region that they are struggling more and more with trash accumulation, human waste, traffic congestion, fatigued employees etc,” wrote Stephanie Burkhart, the associate regional director of the Pacific west region on 28 December. “As the shutdown continues, these challenges will get harder. So please continue to evaluate your capacity and resources, rotate staff to provide rest and implement area closures as needed.”Two days later, Smith, the Joshua Tree superintendent, reached out to Creachbaum, Burkhart and communications staff to say he had decided to close campgrounds and a day-use area at the park after the start of the new year. The holidays were peak visiting times for the California site. With just nine working staff members, a disaster seemed imminent, he warned. Already, he reported, two search-and-rescue operations had been needed the week before, both requiring helicopters because the park hadn’t been able to adequately respond.Staff had told him that visitors were resisting direction, telling law enforcement rangers they could do whatever they wanted during the shutdown. Staff members were increasingly concerned about their own safety, especially as incidents of intoxication and physical assaults in the park began to rise.The interior department intervenesStaff who worked at Joshua Tree national park at the time said the experience was among the most difficult in their careers. “What I witnessed at the park was chaos and destruction,” said one park employee who, like others quoted in this story, asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution for speaking out.From the start of the shutdown, the majority of the park staff had been opposed to keeping Joshua Tree open, they said, describing long days of work and feeling despondent as some visitors abused their unfettered access.Another employee said decision-makers seemed out of touch with the reality on the ground: “In the lower rungs nothing made sense to us – you are just executing these orders that make no sense for the park, no sense for the visitor, and no sense for the employees.”National parks are required to be ready for events like a shutdown with a contingency plan. But the controversial directions from the Trump administration forced the agency and the parks to make in-the-moment adjustments.Four days before Smith informed NPS leaders of his intention to fully close Joshua Tree, the Pacific west regional NPS team were maintaining in staff emails that they would support park closures for heath and hygiene reasons, to protect visitor safety or due to staff fatigue. “As we come to the end of our second week of the closure, and with no end in sight, it is clear that keeping all park areas accessible is not feasible,” Creachbaum wrote to superintendents on 3 January. “Now is the time to determine if the NPS contingency plan triggers for closures apply to your circumstances.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut on 5 January, Bernhardt intervened, issuing a memorandum to the deputy director of the NPS instructing him to modify the contingency plan so parks would rely on Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act funds to stay open. FLREA funds, which come from park fees, are designated by law to be used to improve the parks, including hacking away at a large maintenance backlog, estimated at roughly $12bn across all parks at the time.Bernhardt ordered that they be used for maintaining operations “until such funds have reached zero balance”.The Government Accountability Office would later deem Bernhardt’s move to be a violation of the law. In a scathing report issued in 2019, the GAO concluded that Bernhardt’s decree had undermined congressional power of the purse and sidestepped laws outlining shutdown procedures. The interior department maintains Bernhardt’s decision was legal, and in 2020 the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) laid out a legal argument supporting Bernhardt and his decision.“The decision to utilize FLREA funds in 2019 was entirely lawful,” Cole Rojewski, a lawyer speaking on behalf of Bernhardt, said, pointing to the OMB analysis. He added that if the action had been initiated from the beginning of the shutdown, the destruction of the park and dangers posed to both staff and visitors could have been avoided “while also allowing for continued public access and ensuring dedicated employees were paid throughout the duration of the shutdown”.Raúl Grijalva, a congressman from Arizona, disagreed. As chair of the committee on natural resources in 2019, he wrote to Bernhardt admonishing him for the decision to use FLREA funds and questioned whether he had complied with the law outlining their use. Casting the former secretary’s act as a way to help “obfuscate the real costs of the shutdown”, Grijalva said the Department of the Interior’s actions “sidestepped Congress and used these park funds for political purposes”.A call from the Trump administrationBy 6 January, superintendents across the system were rushing to carve out new plans to bring back furloughed staff using FLREA funds. Smith, meanwhile, still tried to quickly close Joshua Tree. On 7 January he requested a temporary closure from regional park leaders, highlighting the “considerable damage to park resources”. Creachbaum, the deputy regional director, responded: “I am so sorry about the damage to your park. It’s heartbreaking. We support the closure.” It would be her last email serving in the leadership role, and she stepped down soon after. A press release was drafted from Joshua Tree national park announcing a plan to close.But the very next day, Smith wrote to Creachbaum’s successor, Katariina Tuovinen, alerting her that he’d been contacted by the director of the NPS, who had advised him Bernhardt would call him later that day. “The Secretary will be calling to order that the park stays open and that we use FLREA funds to do it,” Smith wrote in an email on 8 January.Communications officials at the national office scrambled to reframe the eyebrow-raising shift, issuing a new press release that cast the decision more favorably. “National Park Service officials have been able to avert a temporary closure of Joshua Tree National Park,” the release read, highlighting how revenue generated by recreation fees would be used to support the reopened campgrounds and entrance stations.At the time, the NPS didn’t return calls and emails from the Guardian requesting comment on how this decision had been made. (The emails show they did connect with some reporters, asking the Los Angeles Times to make revisions to their reporting.)A cautionary tale – or a precedent?Amid a growing likelihood the US government is headed for another shutdown on 1 October, it’s unclear how the NPS is planning to respond.In August, agencies across the federal government were expected to submit contingency plans. But the NPS has yet to confirm whether a new plan has been drafted and whether national parks will again be expected to remain accessible during the funding stalemate.Repeated requests for information and comment went unanswered from both the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service.The park service operating budget is also under threat from budget cuts. As record numbers of visitors continue to flood in, the depletion of funds for maintenance and improvement could lead to more disastrous results, Garder argued. The maintenance backlog has only ballooned in recent years, growing from $11.6bn during the last shutdown to more than $22bn in 2022.Jonathan Jarvis, a retired NPS director who served under the Obama administration and oversaw a 2013 shutdown, agrees. “When I was director, there was no question – you shut ’em down,” he said.Jarvis, who spent four decades in the park service, said he hopes for a future where public lands aren’t put at risk by shifts in political whim, and advocates for the agency to be removed from the Department of the Interior.Ultimately, he said, the future of US national parks will be linked to funding. “The good news is that in the US the parks are highly supported by the American people,” he said. “But they expect them to be taken care of.” More

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      Revealed: the full extent of Trump’s ‘meat cleaver’ assault on US wilderness

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      For thousands of years, Native nations of the US south-west lived in the majestic canyons of Bears Ears.

      But it was land that conservative politicians and corporate interests also sought to control.

      So in late 2016, the Hopi celebrated when the Obama administration protected Bears Ears by declaring it a national monument, sheltering it from development and extraction.

      Just one year later, after Donald Trump took office, he drastically reduced the size of the monument by 85%.

      The administration justified the rollback by pointing to some local residents who opposed the monument. In truth it was also responding to a push by groups with deep ties to major GOP donors and the extractive industries.

      As the industry grew, the breaking point for Rogers was when a drilling pad was installed across the street from the home of a church family. Noxious fumes, nonstop industrial noise and dead birds followed, as Rogers tells it.

      The family reported headaches, nosebleeds and respiratory problems. Earlier this year, a pipe broke in the middle of the night and spewed a fluid drilling byproduct over the family’s home and livestock.

      The town is located in the middle of vast oil and gas fields, much of which are public lands.

      The Trump administration has opened up significant swaths of land around Carlsbad for oil and gas drilling.

      Scientists at the University of Wyoming discovered the Red Desert was the starting point of a wondrous large-mammal migration.

      Each year, hundreds of mule deer – a struggling species unique to the west – travel a 300-mile round trip from the Red Desert to forests south of Jackson Hole and back to feast on fresh greenery and bulk up in anticipation of winter.

      “It is the longest migration so far recorded for the species,” says Dr Matt Kauffman, a scientist with the US Geological Survey and the leader of the Wyoming Migration Initiative that maps migration corridors across Wyoming and the west. Each animal learns the route from its herd and follows the path “for the rest of its life”, he said.

      But around and within the corridor, land being leased for oil and gas drilling is on the rise. This magnificent migration depends on the region’s relatively undisturbed landscape, which includes private land as well as vast tracts of public land. More

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      Republicans want to open pristine Alaska wilderness to logging. This is a tragedy | Kim Heacox

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      Forests are the lungs of the Earth.Around the world, every minute of every day, trees perform magic. They inhale vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and exhale oxygen, the stuff of life. They keep things in balance. And no single forest does this better – contains more living plant life per area, or stores more carbon – than the 17m-acre Tongass national forest in coastal Alaska.Take a deep breath. The oxygen you just pulled into your lungs that entered your bloodstream and nourished your mind was once in a tree.The Amazon of North America, the Tongass is mostly a roadless, wilderness kingdom of mosses, lichens, salmon, deer, bald eagles and bears – all beneath ice-capped mountains, ribboned with blue glaciers, blanketed with green, shaggy stands of Sitka spruce, western red cedar and western hemlock. Trees up to 10 feet in diameter, 200 feet tall, and 800 years old. But while the Amazon is a tropical rainforest, the Tongass, found at the mid-latitudes, is a temperate rainforest, one of the rarest biomes on Earth (found only in coastal Alaska and British Columbia, the Pacific north-west, the southern coast of Chile, and the South Island of New Zealand).A true old-growth forest, the Tongass represents a council of ancients. Indigenous Tlingit elders say it is rich with answers – even wisdom – if we ask the right questions and show proper restraint.And what does the Trump administration intend to do with it?Open it up for business.Their plan, more than two years in the making and spearheaded by the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, and Alaska governor, Mike Dunleavy – all Republicans bereft of a science education and an ecological conscience – is simple and wrongheaded: put the Tongass back to work as a so-called “healthy” forest, according to Mr Perdue. How? By re-introducing large-scale clearcut logging and extensive road building on 9.3m acres. To do this, they must exempt Alaska from the 2001 US Forest Service “Roadless Rule”, an enlightened conservation initiative that applies to 39 states. In short, the Tongass would no longer be protected.A final decision is likely to be released later this month.Never mind that 96% of thousands of recent public comments say the Tongass should remain roadless to protect clean water, salmon streams, wildlife habitat and old-growth trees. Never mind as well that logging the Tongass would create few jobs while adding to an already bloated federal deficit.Logging in Alaska is heavily subsidized.Back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, taxpaying Americans anted up an average of $30m a year. One deficit sale offered every 1,000 board feet of timber for less money than the cost of a cheeseburger. All while many of the trees were shipped “in the round” (as whole logs) to Asia to become rayon, cellophane and other throwaway consumer goods. Another sale generated only 2.5 cents on every dollar the Forest Service spent building roads and preparing paperwork.And today? To build roads in the Tongass would cost taxpayers up to $500,000 a mile.The wholesale destruction of our imperiled planet’s most life-sustaining forests has to stopAnthropologist and former Alaska writer laureate Richard Nelson, who lived in Sitka, on the edge of the Tongass, once said he wasn’t bothered when he found a stump in the forest. What broke his heart was when he came upon a “forest of stumps”. Entire mountainsides, valleys and islands shorn of trees.Yes, parts of the Tongass can be responsibly cut, and are. Many local Alaska economies use second-growth stands to harvest good building materials.And yes, a ravaged forest will return, but not for a long time. The Alaska department of fish and game estimates that large, industrial-scale Tongass clearcuts need more than 200 years to “acquire the uneven-aged tree structure and understory characteristic of old growth”. That is, to be truly healthy and robust again. This according to scientists, not politicians.The wholesale destruction of our imperiled planet’s most life-sustaining forests has to stop. How? A good first step: vote for politicians who make decisions based on solid science.Between 2001 and 2017, 800m acres of tree cover (an area nearly 50 times larger than the Tongass) disappeared worldwide, all while global temperatures climbed, wild birds and mammals perished by the billions, and fires, hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts intensified. And since 2017? Witness Australia and California.What few large, primal forests remain intact today, such the Tongass, become increasingly valuable for their ability to mitigate climate change. Scientists call this “pro-forestation”: the practice of leaving mature forests intact to reach their full ecological potential. The Tongass alone sequesters 3m tons of C02 annually, the equivalent of removing 650,000 gas-burning cars off the roads of the US every year.The better we understand science and indigenous wisdom, the better we’ll recognize the living Earth as a great teacher that’s fast becoming our ailing dependent. We each get three minutes without oxygen, and we’re not the only ones. It’s a matter of having a deep and abiding regard for all life.Call it respect.“What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart,” Nelson wrote in his memoir, The Island Within. “[N]ot whether it’s flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.”Kim Heacox is the author of books including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, the only novel to ever win the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska, on the edge of the Tongass More