The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh
A fork in the road for the Forest Service, and all public lands, that actually exists in objective reality
The Senate has returned from its recess celebrating Zombie Jesus Day, and they’re hungry for brains. Actually I just made that up, everyone knows Republican politicians prefer to dine on the flesh of trafficked children. See the problem with fabricating stories? It leaves you, the general public, not knowing what to believe, which erodes the very foundations of both journalism, and the democratic society it supports. This is my weekly attempt to fix that.
HB 140, The Most Visited Wilderness In America, And China’s AI Buildout
All signs are pointing towards leadership in the Senate moving towards taking up House Joint Resolution 140 sometime in the next 10 days.
Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.
That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.
I dove into all that in more detail at this link.
Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.
So, either Republican Senators vote no, save the Boundary Waters, and cross their fingers that the mess they’ve created for the BLM doesn’t impact USFS, or they vote yes, destroy the Boundary Waters, and with it also destroy the Forest Service’s ability to conduct regular business for the foreseeable future.
A Note About Journalism, And Making Shit Up
I’ve worked as a journalist since an investigation I put together in my high school paper got our principal fired during my senior year. I graduated high school in 1999. I went to college for journalism, I began my career as journalist in 2002, have worked as a journalist without a break since that time, and continue to pursue the career even now, as the industry that supports it is collapsing.
All that’s to say: I believe in the cause of journalism—informing the public—and I’d like to think I’m equipped to speak about journalism from a place of experience.
I’ve been doing journalism around public lands since the late 2000s. In that time, my work around the topic has made it onto network and cable news, major newspapers, documentary films, and congressional hearings. I have won awards for the journalism I’ve done around public lands. And my work as a journalist covering public lands was recognized by the Biden White House.
I am not the only good source of journalism around public lands, but I do have a lot of experience with the topic, and am able to speak about it authoritatively.
The claim made by the Substack newsletter More Than Just Parks that the Trump administration is “dismantling” the Forest Service is, at best, a vastly under-informed, alarmist dissimulation of fact, and at worst an outright fabrication. One that’s spread widely, and been parroted by social media accounts as large as Alt National Park Service (which has no affiliation with the actual NPS, or any of its current or former employees) and even by Patagonia.
I’ve already tackled this topic twice now (link 1, link 2), and explained why just making shit up about public lands is so problematic for the cause of protecting public lands, so I’ll stop now.
I encourage all readers to carefully consider the sources of information you rely on during these troubled times. And I’ll remind each and every one of you that you’re welcome to reach out to me directly if you ever need help determining whether something is real. That offer extends to my fellow journalists. I am here for the net cause of journalism, not my own personal gain or ego.
What Is The Forest Service Anyways?
A central thrust of that fabrication appears to be that USFS is some kind of altruistic charity which can be “dismantled,” rather than a federal agency tasked with the job of permitting industrial activity on the lands it manages, under the legal framework created by laws like the Organic Administration Act of 1897, the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the National Forest Act of 1976.
Any time you hear about multiple use or whatever, all of that takes place within the bounds of that legislation, which are works that you can read, learn from, and apply to the real world. If the administration wants to achieve its aims of logging literally everything, it needs an intact Forest Service in order to manage that process, not a “dismantled” one. USFS is not being dismantled.
That’s to say: USFS is neither good nor bad, it is simply a federal agency tasked with the job of administering laws created by Congress. As much as we in the tree hugging outdoor recreation space like to tell ourselves feel-good fictions about the importance of our contributions to the economy, the very fact that our world has mostly come into being after those above laws were written precludes our involvement in them.
There’s a larger story to be written here about the need to continue the evolution of the laws that govern our public lands as we rebuild from this particularly damaging era in American history, but I’ll save that for another day. Today I want to again point to some false perceptions, so we can all learn from them.
One of those accounts comes from none other than famed longtime environmental writer Bill McKibben in The New Yorker. Bill begins with this really good point:
The agency’s antecedents date to the nineteenth century, but it was at the beginning of the twentieth, under President Theodore Roosevelt, that it came into its own. Its first chief was Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who believed in protecting the country’s natural resources to help power its growth—he wanted there to be plenty of trees for the industrial needs of the country. “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day,” he said. In his time, however, Pinchot’s biggest confrontation was with the forces of what might be called “preservation,” saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty. The towering figure here was John Muir, and, while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two men (they were, at worst, frenemies) and their visions, the differences were nonetheless very real. Muir and Pinchot clashed, for instance, over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite, with Pinchot’s take—that it was “the best, and, within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water”—prevailing, in 1913.
Translation: The agency was created from the beginning to pursue the cause of sustainable yield. Managed correctly, USFS lands could provide timber for the American economy in perpetuity. Again, industrial use is neither good nor bad, it must simply be managed in order to achieve a goal.
Bill then moves onto this:
But, if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.”
This attribution of the merits of capital-W Wilderness to USFS itself is misleading. The concept of Wilderness areas—in which road construction, commercial enterprise, and motorized equipment are prohibited—was created by Congress (thanks Lee Metcalf!), and Wildernesses are designated by Congress, not USFS. Again, USFS is neither good nor bad, it simply follows the letter of the law. And laws are things that we elect representatives to create.
Beware False Agency
Two more pesky bits of reality: 1)There’s a big difference between telling yourself you’ve done your part, and actually doing your part. And 2) the purpose of the Republican Party is to steal from working Americans and give to billionaires.
I really hope that I am not going to be the first person to tell you this, but unless your bank account ends in nine zeroes, your Republican congressperson does not care what you have to say about anything.
For those reasons, all the supposed agency promised by the prospect of leaving a voicemail with your congressperson that, in a best case scenario no one will ever listen to, and in a worst case will be listened to only for the humor value your earnest pleas deliver these monsters, is misleading.
If you want to actually do something, you need apply pressure to things Republicans and their wealthy sponsors care about: their money.
I spelled out how to do that in this article last summer. All of that remains true:
If you disagree with anything you read here, call Senator John Kennedy on (202) 224 4623, I’m sure he can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
And Finally, Some Good News
The Trump administration today agreed to again fly pride flags outside New York’s Stonewall National Monument, just two months after they were removed from the spiritual home of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The move follows legal challenges by LGBTQ advocacy and historic preservation groups.
If we don’t distract ourselves with disinformation, learn what laws apply to the places we care about and how those laws work, then all work together from a shared reality in order to support the causes we care about, we can beat them.
A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.
This is brilliant, man!
The Boundary Waters decision seems awfully more immediate and important than USFS moving deck chairs around the Titanic. The New Yorker's not going to out and out say we need to focus on a landslide in the midterms--which is why I'm glad you're here doing this--but it'd be great if McKibben or the like would call attention to the clear & present danger to an American treasure. Your newsletter and Canada's Globe and Mail are the few main hits on a news search. Distracted, distracted . . .