As the size of dairy farms has steadily grown and the number of working age people in farm country has decreased, large dairies have had a unique challenge meeting their labor needs in a labor intensive industry. As a result, farm industry folks estimate that least 80% or more of the labor to operate Midwestern dairy farms today comes from immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico and Central America.

As Buffalo County dairy farmer John Rosenow once told me, “If I lost my employees because of an ICE raid, I’d first call their families to let them know what happened. My next call would be to a livestock broker, because there’s no way I can hold hundreds of lactating cows here at my farm without being able to care for them.”

The demand for immigrant labor and a dysfunctional U.S. immigration policy has a profound impact on family life and the quality of life in communities whose working age people, mostly men, routinely relocate for years at a time to work in the U.S.

I wanted to understand the reality of our immigration system better and I had the chance to do that in January when I joined a trip organized by the non-profit organization Puentes / Bridges together with a small group of Wisconsin and Minnesota dairy farmers to visit the families of their farm worker/employees in the semi-mountainous villages around Zongolica in the State of Veracruz.

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically, and in how many ways, the opportunities and the sacrifices that employment in the U.S. require has re-shaped life for workers and their families in Mexico. U.S. employment is an economic lifeline for families and entire communities that also comes at a high personal cost, and a growing risk.

Large dairy farms are essentially year-round, 24 hour milking operations that require permanent employees with much more responsibility than the labor typically required for seasonal crop harvesting. Immigrants largely fill that need today, however, because the U.S. does not provide visas for year-round agricultural workers under the H2A (temporary ag worker) visa program, it is understood that many workers on U.S. dairy farms are undocumented.

For most immigrant workers on U.S. farms, their motivations and benefits for coming to the U.S. are intensely tied to their families. The wages paid by U.S. farms (typically anywhere from $12-$18 per hour, and which usually includes on-farm housing) are so much greater than possible earnings at home, that it becomes an opportunity to dramatically change the life and prospects for your family. Motivation strong enough to lead a generation of working age people to spend anywhere from 3-10 years away from their families, while sending most of the money they earn home every month.

Here at home, we often hear “family values” thrown around as a kind of catchword, over-used to the point that it’s devoid of meaning. The lived experience of faith and family values among Mexican families we visited feels like something else entirely. Our visits often involved extended family gatherings, with 3 or 4 generations of family hugging and caring for each other. All of which makes the forced family separation created by our broken immigration system seem all the more cruel.

Somewhere along the way I lost count, but we visited the homes of at least 15 families whose (mostly male) sons/husbands/fathers were either working on U.S. farms or had recently returned. At each of those homes we were treated as honored guests, and served a meal and hot drinks - especially welcome on some cold 40F days in homes generally lacking any heat other than the wood fires of their “fogata” cooking hearths.

TV’s were on in most of the homes we visited, and news video of high-profile ICE raids along with stories from Washington seemed to continually pop up. It seems likely that Mexicans are as well or even better informed than many Americans about our current immigration policy and the chaos it is creating.

My dairy farmer companions told me that immigrants working in the U.S., even completely legal ones, are keeping the lowest profile possible to avoid exposure to federal immigration operations. That may mean avoiding doctor visits, avoiding socializing in town, and even avoiding grocery shopping. The farmers on the trip had all begun providing a weekly grocery and supply shopping run for their employees to Walmart or Woodmans - saving them the exposure of another trip to town.

So it wasn’t surprising that at just about every home we visited, mothers and wives asked about their sons and husbands in the U.S. and their welfare and safety. “What is the end result of this policy for America?” “Don’t they understand that farms need our help?”. “Is this all just political talk, or do you think our sons will be deported too?” Several of those conversations ended in tears as the weight of months of anxiety seemed to be released in our conversations.

My dairy farmer travel companions reassured the families that they are doing their best to look out for their safety and welfare. They also recognize that some things are out of their control, and that our immigration system is broken, and there are no immediate fixes in sight.

For young children whose parents are in the U.S. for extended periods, the separation can be painful. Technology at least provides the gift of connection, and it’s typical for workers to be on a video call with their loved ones back home daily. Seeing young children on our visit staring longingly at the screen of a smart phone as their father told them he loves them is both heart warming and heartbreaking. For the youngest children, asking when daddy can come home is a daily question. One child asked us, “Can you bring me home in your suitcase so I can see daddy?”

Many older children however, like 16 year old Antonio whose father is in the U.S., are already preparing for their own extended trip north, joining a growing tradition within their family and community that now goes back as much as 20 years.

I had a general idea that immigrant workers send money home to support their families. I had no idea however how great the impact of those remissions are for families and for entire communities.

Older family members like Adelaide told us that life in the villages like Texhaucan, Tlatenango, and Tlaquilpa, that we visited prior to around 2000 were cash poor communities that operated mostly on a subsistence economy. As recently as the 1990s, most food was grown locally and even clothing was made at home. Homes were traditionally wood or adobe construction using local materials. There were few if any stores because most people didn’t have cash to buy things.

Adelaide shared that in her childhood, “we never had shoes, people only wore basic woolen clothing spun from our own sheep. There were no roads or electricity. We never saw candy, and the only toys we saw were ones our mothers made from wool or our fathers carved from wood.”

If an immigrant U.S. dairy worker earns around $30,000 per year and can send more than half of that amount home each year, that’s a huge pulse of revenue, allowing families to build homes of concrete and acquire things like televisions, washing machines, and propane stoves.

One person sending paychecks home is transformative for their family. When dozens or hundreds of people from neighboring small communities send that much money home, it changes the entire economy. Stores begin to open up, consumer goods, shoes, and clothing become more available, and an entire economic sector of home building takes off. Concrete and building supply stores open up and tradesmen who didn’t travel north get family supporting jobs too. We saw all of that transformation at work in the villages we traveled through on our trip.

The families we visited were deeply appreciative that their son’s American employers made the trip to see them, with hugs, photographs, candy for the children, and kind words to share for all. Beneath the smiles and hugs however lies the ever present irony and sadness that their loved ones at home won’t be able to share those hugs, often for years at a time, largely because of an inhumane immigration policy.

The vast majority of immigrants working in America want the same thing that almost everyone wants, a life of peace, prosperity, and security for their family. And the vast majority of immigrants would gladly enter the U.S. legally to do the jobs that employers need filled, without suffering the cost and risk of an illegal entry. If only such an opportunity existed.

Government policy needs to accomplish a lot of goals, and some of them can be conflicting. But one thing we can demand of government policy is that it be based on a moral ideal, and be executed with respect for human dignity.

A year round or multi-year farm worker visa program would mean that immigrant workers could arrive legally, live and work legally, and return home at least periodically to see their children grow up. That does not seem like a lot to ask for the people who quietly work to support their families and who also support our quality of life here at home.

I thought long and hard last year before launching this campaign for Congress in Wisconsin’s 7th CD. I was fully prepared to retire last year, but the state of our democracy and the failures of our Congress seemed too important to ignore or sit back.

I asked for feedback from my friends and from colleagues who knew me and who knew my personal and political history. “Do I have the skills and ability and the stamina to run a competitive Congressional campaign and to excite enough people to challenge the political status quo in Northern Wisconsin?” Overwhelmingly the answer came back yes.

I’m running a campaign asking for truth and clarity from our elected leaders. Which means I have to conduct myself in a way that models transparency and honesty. In that spirit, I’m sharing details of a mistake I made that occurred during my previous legislative service.

In the summer of 2011, while making fund raising calls, a woman who I called (who was a previous supporter) rejected my request for a donation and said something very dismissive. Although she was fully within her rights to say what she said, I remember feeling stung by it. And when I thought I had hung up the phone and was only in the presence of my staffer, I said “I’d like to call her back and smack her around”. What I did not know was that the call had not ended and my words were recorded on her answering machine, and those recorded words were later sent to the Republican party.

I have never been violent or physically threatening to anyone in my life, ever. The thought in my head as I said those words would have been more accurately conveyed by saying something like, “I’d like to call her back and give her a piece of my mind.” But those were not the words I said - what I said implied violence.

When I learned my statement had been recorded and made public I immediately called the woman and personally apologized, and I wrote her a letter of apology, both of which she accepted. But there was no un-saying those words and I had to own responsibility for that error of judgement.

Mom always told us that our ability to recognize mistakes, own them, and learn from them is the real test of character. Today as I have entered a new campaign for Congress in Northern Wisconsin, voters deserve to know what happened and make their own judgement about what that says about me as a candidate.

And I’ve learned that wherever you are, even when we think we’re alone and even in tense moments, our words matter and the way we speak about others, whoever they are, matters very much.

I hope to represent you in Congress as someone who will work hard to represent you and be someone you can count on for ethical, honest, values-based representation. If you have comments or questions about anything I’ve shared here I invite you to contact me personally.

You can do so at fred@clarkforwi.com.

Sincerely,

Fred Clark

Candidate, Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District

If you’re a leader in a development friendly community, the prospect of a big new data center and the property tax base that comes with it can seem like a no-brainer. The companies wanting to build data centers want to build them quickly and don’t mind spending money up front. Unlike other industrial developments, data centers don’t have big smokestacks, there are no inconvenient smells or manure to get rid of, and no big holes in the ground.

So why do so many communities facing proposals for data centers so often face such immediate and fierce opposition from local residents? The large footprint of hyper-scale data centers which are often more than 500 acres, and their huge demand for electricity and water for cooling can affect neighboring property owners as well as rate payers. More on that below. It turns out however that the precarious financial stability of the tech companies developing large data centers is also a source of concern.

A Data Center Boom

As the AI boom has gathered full steam this year, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively estimate their capital expenditures into AI will reach almost $400 billion in 2025. Some analysts have predicted that AI related spending will account for nearly half of the United States’ GDP growth in the first six months of this year.

Over the last two years, optimism about AI has transformed the chip maker NVIDIA into the world’s most valuable company. Since 2023 Nvidia’s stock price has surged more than a thousand percent and it now has a market cap of $4 to $5 trillion.That’s equivalent to roughly 15% of the entire US Gross domestic product.

The economist Jason Furman noted that the United States GDP growth in the first half of 2025 would’ve been 0.1% without investment in data centers, but the economy overall grew 3% during the first half of that year, and it’s just going up.

Wall Street is investing heavily in AI, which has buoyed both the stock market and a US economy otherwise struggling with rising unemployment, inflation, and the longest government shutdown in history. In September, Deutsche Bank warned that the United States would already be in a recession without the tech industry’s AI spending spree, and cautioned that such spending cannot continue indefinitely.

Much of the capital backing data center development is moving reciprocally as chip makers like Nvidia invests in many of the tech companies that are also its largest customers. The complexity of financial relationships makes it especially challenging to gauge the true level of debt and cash flow by firms involved. The chart below from Bloomberg shows the complexity behind the financial relationships surrounding the AI sector.

Investors like Michael Burry believe the 2025 chip building frenzy is not driven by real consumer demand, but rather an arms race by tech companies to build out computing power as fast as possible, long before the inherent profitability of the AI sector is even known. There is no company in the AI sector today with revenues anywhere near what will be needed to support the current investments.

Many investors are scrambling to insure their investments in AI infrastructure against defaults and Bloomberg News recently reported that the banks lending money to build data centers are also buying credit default swaps on those tech company’s debt. This is exactly the kind of signal that preceded the 2008 market crash driven by an overvalued housing market.

There are likely millions of Nvidia’s latest H100 or Blackwell chips selling at $30,000 - $40,000 each sitting in warehouses owned by tech companies waiting to be turned on, or sitting in inventory that do not have power to turn on. The only way for the big tech companies or the subsidiaries they’re tied into to realize this huge investment in chips is to build the data centers that will allow them to operate, even when the computing demand they’ll serve has not yet proven out.

All of that means there is a very real prospect that many data centers constructed today will soon be sitting empty or may never even power up as the investments behind them fail, or the contracts for computational power they can serve are never secured.

Minimal Long-term Employment

Although data center construction can provide significant short-term employment in generally high-paying skilled trades, the more permanent jobs created from operating data centers are minimal, with some reports suggesting that an individual data center may need as few as 20-150 people to operate, a far lower number than almost any other development with a comparable footprint. Presumably the benefits of AI, increased automation and remote monitoring will continue to further reduce labor needs at data centers.

Great Lakes Water - Lots of It

According to the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a hyperscale data center can consume between 1 and 5 million gallons of water per day.

Understanding total water usage from data centers, and how much water is consumed, is difficult because “Data centers are not being transparent about their total water footprint …and may not have systems in place to accurately measure water use, because there is no requirement to do so.”

The access to large volumes of fresh water makes the Great Lakes region an attractive location for data centers. The potential for concentrated demands for groundwater pumped from high-capacity wells for cooling could impact other water users and there are currently few systems in place to assess the cumulative demands for groundwater that multiple data centers could generate.

Dramatic Increase in Electricity Demands

There are currently at least five proposed or approved AI data center projects across the state. The environmental group Clean Wisconsin recently assessed the potential energy use of two projects—the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and the Vantage data center in Port Washington. Those two facilities will require a combined 3.9 gigawatts (GW) of electric power, enough energy to power the equivalent of 1.5 times all the residential housing units in Wisconsin.

In a 2024 report, consulting firm ICF found that the cost of electricity in the United States could increase by an average of 19% by 2028 due to demand growth.

Expansion of data centers in Wisconsin is already resulting in utilities delaying planned retirement of older coal-fired generators, and planning for new generation capacity. Currently there are few mandates for renewable energy to comprise needed energy demands, and inadequate mechanisms to guarantee that increased electricity costs driven by new generation and transmission expenses won’t be borne by electricity rate-payers.

Open-ended Tax Incentives with Few Measures of Impact

Wisconsin is now one of 37 states that offer dedicated tax incentives for data centers. Wisconsin’s Data Center Sales and Use Tax Incentive was passed in the 2023-2025 State Budget. There are not yet complete reports of the value of tax incentives tech companies will realize as a result of the new sales and use tax exemptions, but given the size and scale of data centers currently proposed, that could mean $100s of millions in foregone state revenue that won’t be available for schools, roads, parks, or other state priorities.

Local Planning and Permitting Challenged

The speed and lack of transparency of many proposed data center developments adds to the risks. This is especially true for small communities which may lack the expertise to evaluate and condition approvals for hyper-scale projects with multi-billion price tags.

State laws that guide local land use in Wisconsin never anticipated data centers, and there are still few sources of expertise to help communities negotiate such intensive, rapidly proliferating developments.

Time to Pause - Wisconsin Communities Need Better Tools Now

Data centers and the AI boom that is driving them represent huge opportunities as well as significant risks with social, economic, and environmental consequences. Private developments occurring at this scale, speed, and potential impact require strong, well-informed public oversight and Wisconsin is not unusual in not having adequate policy environment for data center development.

Wisconsin Needs to Establish State Oversight and Provide Planning Tools to Local Governments Before Approving New Data Centers.

• Wisconsin needs legislation creating appropriate regulations and standards, providing tools and autonomy to local communities.

  • Passage of 2025 AB722 / SB729 which sets conditions for transparency, energy tariffs to protect consumers, and prevailing wages for contractors in order for data center developers to qualify for the Data Center Sales and Use Tax Credit. This bill would be an important first step.

  • Legislation requiring data centers to demonstrate minimum operating commitments of from 5-10 years to obtain favorable tax treatment, demonstrate financial capability, and require de-commissioning bonds to protect communities from abandonment and clean up liabilities.

  • Re-assess other conditions and limits for currently open-ended data center sales and use tax incentives that will provide hundreds of millions of tax dollars to the most profitable and well-capitalized businesses in America with few current requirements.

• We need to ensure that local communities are informed, empowered, and protected from the risks of a data center boom in an industry that is very possibly headed for significant disruption. A Governors Task Force on data centers with a broad mandate to address the issues here, and representation from state, local, and industry representatives would be a good start.

• Wisconsin currently lacks, and has no mandate for, a statewide planning effort to assess the energy and water needs of data centers. The Wisconsin Public Service Commission needs to perform comprehensive planning around data center development that includes assessment of water and energy needs and the resources available to supply them.

• The Federal Government needs to monitor and where necessary regulate tech companies to ensure against over-leverage & financial fragility, and enforce anti-trust and fair competition laws.

• Congress needs comprehensive legislation to establish a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence that establishes standards on AI use without unduly restricting state’s ability to develop their own consumer protections.

The tech industry brings important benefits to all of us, however the coming tech transformation cannot be allowed to develop without strong oversight in the public interest.

Note for Readers: This story is a revision of a piece I first published on Substack in March 2025, updated to include events and actions that have affected public health since then.

There was a time not long ago when losing a young child to disease was a common experience. Whether it was tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, measles, or one of many other childhood diseases, child and infant mortality in the U.S. around 1900 was by some estimates as high as 20% - in other words one in five children died before the age of five. Infant and child deaths were likely even higher in remote farming communities lacking access to clean water and basic medical care.

That statistic came home for me on a recent trip through rural western Wisconsin when I stopped to explore a small, hilltop Catholic cemetery that told the story of German settlers of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And as I walked around the 15 or so lonely looking headstones, I saw that more than half of them were of infants and children. Most were just a few years old and some were just months old. What tremendously hard losses those Wisconsin farm families must have experienced!

We have come a long way from the days of such widespread infant mortality. Thanks to the development of vaccines and other public health advances, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that by 2000, United States infant mortality was as low as 7 per 1000 (.7%) - that’s almost 1/30th of the level from a century ago.

What in the world would those farm families not have given to have had those children back in their arms? And how could they possibly even believe or forgive us, given all we know today, that we have begun rolling back years worth of science-based efforts to develop vaccines that protect everyone from preventable diseases.

As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. controls our nation’s public health care system, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with hand-picked advisers who were vaccine skeptics.

In late 2025, Kennedy directed the CDC to revise its website’s language on vaccines and autism, falsely stating that the claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim.”

Kennedy has also signaled changes to broader vaccine policy, including COVID-19 and childhood immunization schedules.

And on December 5th, members of the new ACIP altered recommendations to remove the universal newborn dose for the Hepatitis B vaccine and limit it only to infants whose mothers test positive or whose status is unknown — a departure from decades-old policy.

The Infectious Disease Society of America, along with 42 other public health and research organizations, put out a joint statement of opposition that concluded in part: “ACIP’s decision to downgrade the longstanding recommendation to vaccinate all newborns against hepatitis B at birth will lead to more childhood hepatitis B infections, will lead to more chronic infections that will follow patients into adulthood, and will complicate vaccine access for children. No new data was presented during the ACIP meeting to justify this change.”

The reality that most American families no longer have to endure the agony of losing their children before they’re old enough to get on a school bus did not happen by accident. It came about as a result of investments in scientific research, new technologies, and the role of the federal government to both fund needed investments and to establish effective environmental and public health standards.

We cannot afford to have anti-science sceptics turning back the clock on progress toward reducing childhood diseases and death.

Congress needs to act now to hold Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accountable for his incredibly poor leadership at HHS that rejects long established scientific consensus and puts human lives at risk. Congress also needs to restore a strong foundation and funding for science in public health.

The mothers and fathers of those farm children a century ago would demand we not erase all the progress we have made in childhood diseases, and so should we.

Good morning to subscribers to This Land. You may (or may not) have noticed that I took some time off from Substack late last summer for travel. That hiatus got extended in September as I began plans to launch a campaign for Congress here in Northern Wisconsin. It’s now official! And you can watch my announcment video here, and learn more about my Clark for Wisconsin Campaign here.

I’ll continue posting on This Land, although this will make for some changes in what I’m posting. Likely there’ll be not as many deep dives into forest policy, and not as much musing about wide ranging, humanistic topics. Instead, there’ll be more focused, more timely, and more political topics - but hopefully with the kind of heart-centered honesty that I believe we badly need to restore in our politics.

If that’s not your interest I understand if you choose to unsubscribe. If the future of our federal government and who runs it IS your interest, than please stay tuned - there’ll be much more to follow. This is going to be an intense year, and I appreciate your support.

My Best, Fred Clark

PS. The note below went to people I know on Wednesday, October 1st.

Hello Friends,

I want to share some exciting news with you. Today, I officially launched my campaign for Congress. I’m running to represent Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District. And I’m running to win.

You can watch a short video with my campaign announcement here. Please share it with your friends!

This is a big commitment and I didn’t make this decision lightly. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the road this summer talking to people throughout the 26 Northern Wisconsin counties of CD7. Those conversations helped me realize that, now more than ever before, Northern Wisconsin deserves better leadership and it’s time for a Representative in Congress who will work for us.

I would like to represent you and the people of Northern Wisconsin in Congress, and I would be honored to have your support. Check out my Clark for Wisconsin campaign page that just went live this morning.

Wisconsin CD-7 was once a long-shot race for Democrats - but I honestly believe we’re in a transformative moment. What’s happening in Washington today doesn’t reflect who we are, and it’s not what we need. We need a government that works for us.

Over the next 13 months our Clark for Wisconsin Campaign is going to mount a well organized, well-resourced, competitive, and strategic campaign that puts us in the best position to win. And I’ll be out there full time, talking with voters and making the case for better representation in Washington, and why it matters in Northern Wisconsin.

The one thing I’m most certain of, is that we’ll only be able to win in CD7 with a broad-based team effort! Can you help us out? Here are just some of the ways:

• Forward this email, and help pass the news on widely to your friends, family, colleagues, and any groups or organizations you think would want to learn more about the Clark for Wisconsin Campaign.

• Make a Donation to Clark for Wisconsin, using the Donate Links provided on our home page.

• Sign Up to be on our mailing list, and hear about news and events throughout the campaign.

• Sign up to Volunteer, and help us with events, driving, housing, letters, and helping us make contact with the people around you at home.

This is going to be one heck of a year, and I’m looking forward to all the conversations we’ll have and all the work we’ll do between now and November 2026 and beyond. Because we know the work of democracy doesn’t end at election time - it goes on all year long.

We’ll see you on the trail!

Sincerely,

Fred Clark

Clark for Wisconsin

What’s the worst incident of violent crime in Washington DC in the last five years?

That, of course, would be the riotous mob sent and instigated by Donald Trump himself that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th 2021, resulting in seven deaths and hundreds of injuries, in a coordinated and pre-planned attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after an American election that he unequivocally lost.

Donald Trump sat in the White House watching live television of what may have been the worst, most violent insurrection on American soil since the Civil War for almost 3 hours before he could be convinced by his own family and virtually everyone around him to finally send out the National Guard.

And today, with no legitimate justification, and with rates of violent crime and property crime that have dropped in almost every category, Trump has sent in the National Guard, taken over law enforcement, and effectively declared martial law throughout Washington D.C.

Is martial law coming next to a city near you? Who will stand up for democracy when it does? Some questions we should all be asking today.

Sometime around 1980, young me was sitting in the Emergency Room at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor with a towel wrapped around my bloody hand. I had managed to insert it into a mechanical cheese grater in the restaurant where I worked as a prep cook, leaving a hunk of my finger in a tub of mozzarella. After what had to be at least 45 minutes of waiting on a bench while others got seen by an overworked medical staff on a Michigan football Saturday, the young man at the reception desk looked up, and as though he was a high-end store clerk telling me not to touch the merchandise, directed me not to bleed on the floor.

Although my bloody ER visit is not a perfect analogy for what’s happening between the U.S. and Canada in the world of fire, that experience 45 years ago was channeled for me when I read the letter that Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany and five of his colleagues sent to Canada’s Ambassador to the United States earlier this month, complaining about the inconvenience experienced by their constituents in Wisconsin and Minnesota from Canadian wildfire smoke. Like, “Hey guys, can you stop bleeding on our nice clean floor here???”

Their letter to Ambassador Kirsten Hillman, while it was at least somewhat measured in tone, was off the rails in it’s misunderstanding of wildfires, how they’re caused and how they’re prevented. Their main complaint:

“In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”

True enough. On the weekend of July 12th, wildfire smoke throughout Lake Superior region on what should have been a fine summer day had people's eyes burning, and boats using their horns to navigate safely. Air Quality Indices that exceeded 160 (very unhealthy) at times in the region, caused many people to stay indoors and aggravated life for those with existing respiratory issues. Wildfire smoke has become a regular part of summer at times across the northern U.S., as strong a signal as you could find for the impact of climate change in our day to day lives.

Rep. Tiffany and his colleagues go on to claim that, “While we know a key driver of this issue has been a lack of active forest management, we’ve also seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada. With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken.”

90% bullshit. Do they think that more Canadian Mounties patrolling the Taiga forests of Saskatchewan and Manitoba is the solution to mega fires that have ripped Canada for the last three years? These diligent truth-seekers seem to have based their claim about arson caused fires solely on false social media posts that conflate “human-caused” fires with arson. A single phone call could have straightened them out.

Although Provincial fire authorities have deemed the majority of Canada’s wildfire ignitions to be human caused (which is typically true in most fire seasons in the U.S. as well), those causes range from vehicles with defective mufflers or dragging chains, to incautious campers failing to douse cooking fires, to arcing electric lines. Arson rarely factors as a significant cause, and rarely needs to. They’d have known this if their research went anywhere beyond Truth Social.

All of those human activities that unintentionally cause ignitions are going on more or less continually during fire season - the real variable is the unprecedented extreme fire conditions that can turn any ignition into a mega fire. And it’s not just happening in Canada - it’s happening all over the world.

In a paper just released this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, authors of a global study of forest fire conclude that extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change.

John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced interviewed for the New York Times noted that “Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we’ve seen,” said “There are going to be more fires like this.”

In Canada, as of mid‑July, over 5.5 million hectares (≈ 13.6 million acres) have burned in at least 3,333 separate fires—making 2025 Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record, trailing only 2023. Over 40,000 Canadians, including many indigenous communities, have been displaced. They didn’t need a letter from us to tell them they’re having a natural disaster in Canada.

The other absurdity of Rep. Tiffany’s letter is the assertion that “lack of active forest management” is a primary cause of excessive fires, which could be “easily reversed”.

That claim betrays a deep lack of knowledge about Canada’s forests. The bulk of fires currently burning in northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are in the northern boreal forests in regions that are undeveloped, un-roaded, and dominated by sparse conifer forests, much of which are interspersed with vast wetlands.

There’s a reason these areas are roadless and inaccessible - the forests here simply don’t support the kind of timber that can be harvested and used economically. If they were they would have been.

The map below of Canadian softwood sawmills shows the trend - lots of wood industry in the coastal BC, the Canadian Rockies, and the Maritimes - but there’s simply not enough money to be made in the far northern boreal forests to stand up wood-based industries.

That makes most the kind of forest management via timber harvesting these Congressman imagine to be the easy solution to be a practical impossibility - especially in a landscape where logs cannot be moved, and where moving people in many areas still relies on boats and aircraft.

Canadians are by no means unaware of a crisis that is upending life in rural and indigenous communities and threatening the character and condition of one of the world’s greatest intact forests. In June the Canadian government announced major investments to improve resilience against wildfires.

The Canadian Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Strategy calls for a “Whole of Society” approach to managing the growing threat of wildfire, that would include more investment in fuels treatment, prescribed fire, and cultural management in remote areas, deeper engagement and partnerships with indigenous communities, more coordination across provincial and local governments, more training in Traditional Ecological Knowledge and climate-smart forest management, and a focus on community preparedness and fire-wise management around human developments.

All of this work at the scale needed to achieve results across hundreds of millions of acres in northern Canada will be astronomically expensive and will be challenging to pull off on multiple fronts.

But to sum it up, six U.S. Congressman have just told our Canadian neighbors to do what it takes to keep the smoke away from our barbeques - an achievement that would cost of many billions of dollars if it were possible at all - after just having voted here at home to gut the budgets of the U.S. Forest Service and our other natural resource agencies responsible for fire prevention and management. I’m certain that most profound irony is not a bit lost on the Canadians, even if it seems to be completely lost on our elected leaders.

An even bigger irony is the impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions on our global climate and it’s contribution to global climate stresses that include, but are in no way limited to, severe fires.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canada remains a signatory to the Paris Climate Accords, and has been and continues to be committed to reducing national greenhouse gas emissions by 45-50% below 2005 levels by 2035.

Meanwhile, on the day of his inauguration in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. Through subsequent orders and the actions of his appointees, the Trump Administration has initiated an all guns blazing effort to dismantle almost all U.S. climate programs and commitments, as well as renewable energy initiatives that were just beginning to trigger a national energy transformation.

What we seem to be witnessing here is what we could call the J.D. Vance doctrine of diplomacy. Fuck everything up at home, then go abroad to tell our neighbors what a bad job they’re doing.

Then they’ll sit back and wonder where our friends all went when we needed them. The only thing certain is that the tables will turn and we’ll be in need of the good grace of our neighbors in the north for our own climate emergencies again soon. If the one-two punches of absurd insults and pointless trade wars hasn’t ruined our relationship entirely, they still might just be there for us.

Thank you as always for your subscriptions, for sharing this with others, and for likes, comments, and suggestions for other topics! - Fred

The mission of the United States Forest Service is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations”. Managing more than 193 million acres of National Forests and Grasslands in a way that sustains those values and meets those needs for today and for the future - AKA “Caring for the Land and Serving People” - was never an easy job even in the best of times.

We don’t know all the details of what the agency may look like by 2026 yet as the re-organization plans for agencies in the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have not been revealed and their implementation has been blocked by courts.

What we do know is that the President’s proposed 2026 budget for the Forest Service and his recent Executive Orders lay out a vision for a Forest Service that will be severely reduced in scope, capacity, and funding, and with a myopically narrowed emphasis on timber production, while other parts of the mission are de-emphasized or eliminated altogether. Taken as a whole, the proposed changes will make caring for the land and serving people more difficult by an order of magnitude.

Of all the changes ordered by the White House and that are now being planned for by the USDA and the Forest Service, we can point to three which will create profound and long-lasting impacts.

• Increasing timber production on National Forest System Lands by 25% over 2020-2024 levels.

• Stripping fire management responsibilities from the Forest Service to a new Federal Wildland Fire Service agency housed in the Department of Interior.

• Closing down fundamentally important program areas including the Forest and Rangeland Research, and State, Private & Tribal Forestry functions.*

*A small number of these program functions, such as the Forest Inventory and Analysis program, will continue using carryover funds from 2025 and other previously appropriated funds.

Upping Harvest Levels

Increasing timber harvest levels by 25% is not an impossible goal - in fact that level of increase would likely be within reach and could be accomplished consistent with the existing Forest Plans guiding many of our 154 National Forests.

The National Active Forest Management Strategy document released by the Forest Service in May lays out the rationale and the methodology for achieving the goal, citing the economic benefits of timber production, and the need for forest fuels management and wildfire risk reduction. We addressed some of the potential consequences, risks, and shortcomings of a timber-focused strategy in our April piece on Increasing National Forest Harvest.

But now that the budget numbers, and the proposed 65% overall reduction in Forest Service funding (from $6.178 Billion to $2.136 Billion) have been laid out we can see a clearer picture of the constraints on getting this extra work done. The line items in the President’s Budget warranting attention include a 34% reduction in Forest Service Operations, a 21% reduction in direct funding for the National Forest System (the home to those 194 million acres), and a complete loss of Wildland Fire Management Funding (more on that later).

Overall, budget reductions of these sizes will likely mean the loss through Reductions in Force (RIFS) of thousands of additional Forest Service staff on top of the roughly 4000 employees already departed via recent retirements, departures for other jobs, and firings, along with the loss of resources for equipment and operations needed to accomplish that broad-based mission. The loss of senior leadership and fire staff with Incident Command expertise will be especially felt as we enter the heart of the 2025 fire season.

So, how to overcome that huge drain of both managers and boots on the ground employees and still get even more work done?

The National Strategy document calls on the agency to pull what are just about the only levers within reach: streamlining the rules and regs, and outsourcing more of the work. As tools, both strategies have merits, however both also present significant risks and vulnerabilities if used at the scale needed to achieve the timber volume outcome.

Streamlining

The USFS traditionally maintains high standards of training and certification for skilled duties such as silviculture, timber sale administration, timber cruising, and engineering work. However, with the loss of trained personnel and reassignment of many more into new roles, a lot of people are going to need training and certification for their new assignments. Getting thousands of employees certified in those roles will be a bottleneck. The National Strategy calls for broad based use of certification exemptions. While exemptions can create opportunities when used judiciously, broad-based weakening of current standards in the absence of capacity for training risks increasing errors and lower quality of the actual timber management work.

Before implementing forest management projects through commercial timber sales the Forest Service conducts environmental analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and in concert with other laws including the National Forest Management Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act.

Meeting these requirements typically can take months or even years of effort by hydrologists, biologists, wildlife and fish staff, archeologists, foresters, and engineers. In some parts of the country, that planning often ends up in court as the laws create litigation opportunities further slowing the planning process, sometimes grinding it to a halt for years. Reasonable people can disagree whether this level of planning complexity is a mostly necessary cost of doing business as a public agency, or whether it’s an overly burdensome set of bureaucratic actions in need of reform. Reasonable people can even believe both things are true.

The National Active Forest Management Strategy calls for use of exemptions, categorical exclusions, and emergency declarations to simplify planning and avoid the use of Environmental Assessments or Environmental Impact Statements that larger and more complex projects typically require. There are many circumstances where such exemptions make sense, however mandating the use of exemptions, CE’s and emergency declarations takes away the judgment and discretion of local line officers to develop efficient approaches to required environmental planning. It also risks more, and perhaps more successful, legal challenges.

Further complicating things for an agency that is about to be dramatically downsized, is that the White House Council on Environmental Quality in February announced that CEQ was rescinding its NEPA implementing regulations that guide all federal agencies, forcing agencies to go back and write new rules to comply with the NEPA law - which is perhaps the most consequential law affecting forest planning. Under this Administration those new rules are almost certain to favor production over protection, fewer opportunities for the public to engage in the planning process, and shortcuts that push the boundaries on appropriately implementing the laws protecting other resources.

In the meantime, count on more uncertainty, more delays, and, as if that seemed possible, and more lawsuits that will put even more questions about agency compliance with federal laws into the hands of judges.

Outsourcing

The other big lever that USDA and Forest Service leadership are pulling is to more completely privatize forest management operations through outsourcing.

Additional outsourcing of even more functions is an almost inevitable result of drastic downsizing, and it creates all the risks that would occur in any other large organization.

The Forest Service has long relied on logging and construction contractors to harvest timber, build roads and bridges, and other specialized work, and relied on contract timber marking to supplement FS in-house marking crews. Since 2015 a newer tool, Good Neighbor Authority, has been used to more broadly outsource timber sale setup, marking, and administration to State Forestry agencies. The National Strategy calls for increased use of Good Neighbor Authority through states, counties, and Native American tribes, as well as use of more longer term Stewardship Contracts that turnover a wider swath of project implementation and oversight to private and NGO contractors.

The career Forest Service people charged with producing more timber with fewer people and resources will do their best to achieve those goals while adhering to the law, and adhering to the FS motto of “Caring for the Land and Serving People.” What is almost certain in this environment however, is that a whole lot of important work that is not directly related to timber production or fuels management won’t be happening.

One of the directives identified in the National Strategy is to “Eliminate Scope Expansion”. Another way of saying that in this context might be, “Only do Timber”.

With limited resources and time, this approach will likely eliminate what would otherwise be efficient and cost-effective opportunities to accomplish wildlife and fish habitat improvement, restoration of non-forest habitats, recreational site activities, or much needed soil and water improvement projects in order to avoid the additional planning effort that work would require. We can expect to see much less work on the resources and values that the vast majority of American citizens want from their national forests.

Moving Fire out of the Forest Service

The President’s proposal to strip all fire management functions and funding out of the Forest Service and into a new Federal Wildland Fire Service may create some efficiencies on paper, but threatens to result in higher fire risks and reduced health on those 193 million acres of National Forest lands, and a greater burden on states and local governments and private landowners.

Currently, federal responsibility for wildland fire is spread among at least five agencies: the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs, each of which has a distinct land base to both manage for, and protect from fire. Training, logistics and response to large fires throughout the country are coordinated among the agencies and state and local partners by the National Interagency Fire Center.

As the largest federal wildfire agency, the Forest Service has thousands of employees with primary fire management assignments, and thousands more who have other primary assignments but who have fire training and can be called on to serve on fires when needed. This extra flex force actually uses people and resources pretty efficiently. It also helps assure that our National Forests have the capacity in house to conduct prescribed fires and other work needed to reduce fire risk - all outcomes called out as priorities in the recent National Strategy.

Moving all fire management and the 9000 or so wildland firefighters and their resources into a new Federal Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior will alone strip 40% ($2.4 Billion) out of the Forest Service Budget, most of which will come from reassignments of National Forest System staff. The efficiencies from those flex employees will likely be lost, and the ability of National Forests to manage their own lands for fire prevention effectively will likely be compromised as the capacity to accomplish that work will now reside in an entirely different department.

In addition to the impact on National Forests, the budget also takes a swipe at important programs supporting community fire preparedness on local government and private lands. The budget cuts $50 million in funding to the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program that supports appropriate forest management on priority landscapes across the country, many of which are in high fire risk areas. This bold and forward thinking program engages communities and gives them a greater stake in economic and environmental outcomes on nearby federal lands, and on local government, tribal, and private lands.

The War on Forest Science

If you were asked to name the world’s largest natural resources research agency, most people might guess it was some Land Grant university in the Big Ten Conference. In fact, that title, until now anyway, has long belonged to the Forest Service Research and Development Program.

Trump’s budget calls for cutting funding for the Forest Service Research Program in its entirety - ultimately causing a loss of 800 or so scientists and staff researchers who conduct important research work on forest management, wildfire prevention and management, climate change, fish, wildlife and biodiversity, recreational forest uses and and a myriad of other forest-related issues. Only the Forest Inventory and Analysis part of R&D will remain.

In their words: “The FY 2026 Budget terminates the Forest and Rangeland Research program to ensure fiscal responsibility with taxpayer dollars and appropriate alignment of resources with the Forest Service’s responsibility to appropriately steward National Forest System lands. While the Budget does not request new funding for this account, it will strategically utilize existing carryover balances to responsibly and effectively close this program.”

We can only pity the career Forest Service employee who had to write this.

Especially in an era when a rapidly changing climate and more intense and frequent fires and other natural disasters are becoming the norm, Forest Service Research represents a practical investment in applied research that supports smart forest management for the future.

Losing Forest Service research capacity would be like a submarine losing its periscope - bad for navigation, really bad for operational effectiveness, and a downright bummer for crew morale.

Leaving States, Tribes, and Private Forest Landowners Hanging

The Forest Service has long played a role outside of National Forests supporting states, tribes, and private forest owners with technical and financial assistance. The 2026 budget eliminates all new appropriations for the State, Private & Tribal Forestry programs ($283 Million in 2025).* *A small number of program functions will continue using carryover funds from 2025.

“The FY 2026 request eliminates funding for the State, Private, and Tribal Forestry account to ensure fiscal responsibility with American taxpayer dollars and to better balance the appropriate roles of federal and state governments. The Budget request anchors a return to federalism and encourages increasing state authority to fund the management of state and privately-owned forests. While the Budget does not request new funding for this account, it will strategically utilize existing carryover balances to responsibly and effectively close this program.”

Pity also for the same poor person who had to write this. Despite this grandiloquent language about the new federalism, nowhere does the current budget offer even minimally adequate resources for states, local governments, or tribes to assume the greater role envisioned for them.

Taken together, this budget looks like a chainsaw used by a blind surgeon. The scale of cuts suggests that forest health protection, technical assistance to private landowners, wood use innovation, and support of urban and community forests would all be significantly diminished or eliminated.

Not only is this Administration abandoning many of the values of federal forest land, but leaving tribes, states, and private landowners hanging by drying up much of the federal assistance of money, technical expertise, and staff time. If Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt could roll over in their graves, they’d be dizzy.

What’s Next

Taken together, the 2026 Forest Service under this budget will be an agency that in many places will be unrecognizable - less capable of effectively managing its own land base, less prepared to serve the public during emergencies, less supportive of tribes, states, and private landowners, and unable to be visionary or influential in a time of increasing disturbance and uncertainty for forests.

Although the current proposals in Congress to tee up large scale federal land sales appear dead for now, the President’s budget opens the door with a “land transfer initiative” to states and tribes. Getting rid of federal lands has long been a rallying cry for many Western conservatives and there are now enough people in the President’s orbit who have been thinking about that golden possibility for years that it remains a strong threat and possibility without sustained opposition.

It’s clear that the Trump Administration has no forward vision for our forests. Among all the directives being given to the Forest Service, it seems that the few that can actually be measured are to “Cut the Budget,” “Cut the Workforce,” “Cut the Paperwork,” and “Cut More Timber”. Doing what it takes to achieve those goals will result in forests that are less healthy, less diverse, and less resilient, and will offer many fewer opportunities for meaningful public engagement.

The Forest Service has roots that go back more than 150 years deep in our federal government. But this agency, with its long, proud history and dedicated, competent, and ethical employees, will not be able to adequately serve the present and future needs of all Americans if this budget and the vision it represents is adopted. There are many ways to improve the outcomes the Forest Service is responsible for, including enacting reforms where they are needed, but doing so will require a more strategic vision and more voices at the table.

Now is a good time to tell your elected representatives in Congress that you oppose the changes that prioritize timber production over other resource values, weaken environmental standards, cripple the capacity to manage forest lands, eliminate critical programs in research, and eliminate support to tribes and states.

The Nature Conservancy, The Wilderness Alliance, and the Trust for Public Lands all have advocacy pages where you can learn more and take action.

Fred Clark and Paul Strong

June 24th, 2025

This whole provision, which is intentionally made obscure by being buried in the Big Billionaire Bomb which will be passed as a budget reconciliation with little to no debate, only mandates that the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service quickly sell between 2 and 3 million acres of land as soon as the bill passes. Just a few % of our public estate that no one will miss, right?

However, here's the sleight of hand: analysts at the Wilderness Society have concluded the amendment introduced by Senators Steve Daines (R-Montana) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) also ALLOWS for the expedited sale of other western BLM and USFS lands that meet certain criteria in 11 western states (notably excluding Montana) over the next 5 years - an area that TWS estimates at more than 258 million acres. (Wes Siler has a post showing more recent estimates near 294 Million acres - the differing estimates are a result of different analysis of federal land databases using the intentionally imprecise criteria in the bill).

Because of the bizarre accounting that underlies the bill, the revenue from these new land sales is counted as base revenue going forward, helping justify and count toward the revenue needed to pay for the massive Billionaires tax cuts. This weird math gets even weirder due to the provision already passed into law in January that prevents the significant revenue generated from public land uses (e.g. timber, oil and gas, grazing, recreation fees) from being counted as a net loss to revenue when lands are considered for sale. So, after this passes, the cash from sale of these lands will appear as all upside, with no down side, and would become an essential part of the formula to keep the now perpetual tax cuts funded (in addition to the $3.4 trillion of new debt).

If this passes it would essentially be like selling off the family furniture and most of the back yard just to pay for dad's heavy drinking cause he's taken to liking top shelf booze and he's sick and tired of mowing the lawn.

Land sales of this scale would ultimately decimate most of our western public lands. Currently, National Park Units, National Monuments, and Federal Wilderness areas are excepted, as long as they remain designated, however the President's claim of authority to un-designate National Monuments already threatens to void parts of that guarantee.

Wes Siler, who is one of the best public lands experts on Substack, and smart folks at The Wilderness Society have been analyzing this disastrous Trojan horse of a bill over the last 48 hours.

The Lee-Daines amendment is also full of other provisions that will force increased mineral extraction, timber harvests, and more privatization of public lands management. That will be a subject for another day.

Our public lands are our National treasure. Selling them off without debate is the worst abdication of trust imaginable. You have more reasons than ever to call your U.S. Senator today and demand they oppose ALL sales of America’s public estate. Standing up today would make Woody Guthrie proud.

“Lies, profiteering and selfish indulgence went hand in hand. Externally, the country appeared the same as usual; street cars and autos continued to run. Shops, restaurants and theatres continued to operate. The newspapers all had the same headlines and used the same type. But internally, the country grew more barbarous, more poverty stricken, more corrupt, and more demoralized. It reeked with lies and brutality; life was fast becoming nothing but a rotten sham”.

- Lion Feuchtwanger

As a boy in the 1960’s I was fascinated with the Second World War. “WWII” was the war in which most of the parents of my generation served in some capacity. I read everything I could get my hands on about the war, mostly about the big battles, and the particulars of the tanks, planes, and ships, which I built endless plastic models of and which most of the boys my age knew all about. I couldn’t have told you much then however about why we had to use them in the first place.

As a young adult, I read more about the politics leading up to the war and the holocaust that spun up out of it. I often wondered how it was possible that a prosperous, well-educated, civil society like Germany could have transformed so quickly into the nation that sent six million European Jews to their deaths, along with the deaths of millions of others, with the apparent consent of the rest of the nation. Why didn’t they just rise up to stop it?

I didn’t really put much effort into answering, or even better understanding that question however, in part because it seemed I didn’t really need to. Never again! would the civilized world allow such a thing to happen. And for sure that would never happen in America, because after all our parents were the world’s heroes who stormed the beaches at Normandy and put a stop to the whole bloody Nazi business. Surely, we were never going to forget THAT lesson!

So rather than pursuing a PhD in the mass psychology of fascism, it was on to the more pressing, real-time issue of saving the environment for me.

And here we are in 2025. It may be too early to either name or define the political / social era we’ve entered into today, or when it started. But most of the people I know are still shaking themselves out of some level of dis-belief over how American culture and our government has shifted so dramatically, and so quickly. How far?

It seems to me that when US citizens and legal residents with no criminal record are being hauled off of our streets and out of their homes by federalized military or people in masks, never to see the inside of a court or due process, and flown out of the country to face indefinite imprisonment in places like El Salvador or Libya, then there is no fundamental guarantee of our Constitution or American civil society that can’t be broken. If they can come for them, they can just as easily come for you and me.

So a few years ago when I stumbled on Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, The Oppermanns, I found what seemed like a graduate level course in fascist psychology that helped answer some of the questions I’d been curious about years ago, and that seem more acutely relevant than ever today.

Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish writer living near Marseilles, France in the 1930’s. He began The Oppermanns in the spring of 1933, just as Hitler rose to power in January as Chancellor of the Reichstag, and he finished the book in October. In March, after the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis had already begun to suspend civil liberties and eliminate political opposition and Hitler consolidated complete power under an emergency Enabling Act that gave him the dictatorial powers he would retain until his death in 1945.

What historians like Hannah Arendt documented in 1951 with Origins of Totalitarianism, Feuchtwanger manages to capture in a story written in real time and with what now seems like almost incredible foresight. Feuchtwanger wrote later that, “I wanted to enlighten the readers of the world as soon as possible about the true face of the Nazi regime and its dangers.”

Given that Feuchtwanger was writing within months of Hitler’s rise to power, it's astonishing how accurately and eerily he was able to foretell both the character and the specifics of Germany’s descent into fascism.

The book centers on the lives of the Oppermanns, a family of prosperous and well-educated Jews in Berlin. Three brothers are heirs of a family owned furniture manufacturing business, and enjoy a seemingly enviable life of work, literature, culture, and socializing. A good life, well-earned. As the National Socialists come to power, the rights and dignity of Jews throughout the country begins to change incrementally at first, but in stages that become increasingly severe and rapid.

We’ve all learned something about that period, the lists, the persecutions, the forced relocations to ghettos, the camps, and all the horrors that followed. Here, the power of a novel, as opposed to a history, to illustrate the personal and collective ways in which people chose to respond to those events as they unfolded is brilliant.

Imagine that your life is pretty good, until you hear about a speech in which your people (or even YOU) were called vermin, or you see a notice in the paper that you’ll have to report your location to authorities, or a neighbor whispers to you that another neighbor was taken away overnight. The intense desire for normalcy that motivates most of us can be a powerful driver of disbelief, especially in times of great uncertainty.

After one such incident, the brother Gustav, a physician, says to his older brother, the business manager Martin, “I do not understand why all of a sudden you have the jitters. What has happened? A popular blockhead has been given an important office and has had a check-rein put on him by the appointment of able men as his colleagues. Do you really believe that because a few thousand young, armed ruffians roam about in the streets, this is an end of Germany?”

“Do you believe they will forbid our customers to buy from us? Do you believe your capital will be confiscated just because we are Jews? Do you believe a whole nation of 65 million people has ceased to be a cultured people because it has conferred freedom of speech to a few fools and scoundrels? I don’t believe it!”

The rationalizations of non-Jews, friends, neighbors, and co-workers, who gradually accept their own part in the system of oppression, is also insightful.

Some have clearly waited for and savored the moment when they might, for example, walk through the more desirable apartment of their Jewish neighbors and lay claim to it as their own. But most people complicit in a moral wrong find reasons to justify their correctness. “Nothing to worry about. There would be a great outward show of melodrama, but behind the scenes business would go on as usual.”

Even the growing violence, and disappearances of citizens are explainable. Yes people whispered quietly, there were a few rough doings, but in fact, things needed a little shake up and a message needed to be sent. But things would be back to normal pretty soon.

But of course, Germany was on a trajectory for which there was no going back. Which is where Feuchtwanger’s prophet-like description of Germany as it was to become in the following years is so haunting.

“There was no worse crime than the profession of reason, peace, and honorable sentiments.”

I wondered if Feuchtwanger (who died in 1958) could just as easily have written this sentence after watching Fox news, or listening to AM radio when driving through rural areas anywhere in the United States anytime during the 21st Century.

“They proclaimed that men were not equal in the eyes of the law. They locked up their adversaries, treating them worse than beasts. They banished able people from the government and the country, or locked them up in order to make room for their own incompetent adherents.”

Or could he have written this passage after having read Project 2025, and following the news from Washington for the last four months, where every one of these foretellings has been realized, not as isolated incidents but as the consistent execution of a well-planned playbook.

One of the most salient and timeless lesson from The Oppermanns, echoed by other students of autocracies like Hanna Arendt, Timothy Snyder, or Ann Applebaum, is that they don’t require the active participation of most people to succeed - they only need most people to fail to speak out and actively oppose the new regime.

Feuchtwanger was convinced that at least 2/3rds of Germans disliked the Nazis and what they stood for. But fear, lies, threats, and, for some, a promise of access to power or wealth, are enough to keep good people silent, or at least powerfully confused.

So, what would that majority of good Germans of 1933 have said to us about America today? I don’t know exactly. But if I think about times in my life that I would most like to have over again, most of them would be times when I had the opportunity to stand up and call out oppression or a wrong - whether it was in a public forum or at a hallway high-school locker - and for whatever reason I didn’t. I’m guessing their message might be along those themes, but with much higher stakes.

J.D. Vance’s recent proclamation that Christian love does not actually have to be universal, but need only extend to those closest to you, like your white Christian family, is more than an abstract idea. Legitimizing the twisted belief that Christians (or adherents to any faith) need not care for everyone, is actually necessary for an autocracy dedicated to denying the humanity or rights of a whole segment of society to succeed. Was there ever a more bankrupt idea trying to fly under the flag of Christianity?

Well, apparently yes. It shouldn’t be surprising that Vance’s effort to distort the most basic precepts of Christian theology also echoes efforts of the Nazi’s to distort Catholic and Protestant teachings to justify a belief that Jews were not capable of spirituality, and by extension, not worthy of God’s care.

The story does not end well for the Oppermann family members, who are a proxy for millions of real people like them whose lives ended in similar ways over the next decade. How could he have described this outcome so accurately? But, as the family wrestles with a horrible new reality that was scarcely believable for them just a short time before, they each confront their circumstances with a wisdom and dignity that is at least satisfying.

Maybe its time for those questions about Germany that lingered for me years ago to get restated in the now. How willing am I to be uncomfortable and how much am I personally willing to give up to protect the American democracy and the freedoms and rights our constitution guarantees? Will I be ready to stand up when the people in ICE uniforms and masks show up at my neighbor’s home? How about driving to support a neighbor 10 miles away? How about a fellow citizen, a legal resident, or an immigrant seeking asylum in another state? These don’t seem like abstract questions any longer, but they might be the questions the Germans of 1933 would ask us if they could.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Take them, and they’ll see; show them, and they’ll understand; share with them, and they’ll care.

- From the Mission Statement of Puentes / Bridges

John Rosenow operates a 5th generation dairy farm in Buffalo County, Wisconsin. Rosenholm Farms is one of thousands of farms in the U.S. whose primary labor force is immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America. I was able to visit John and some of his employees at their farm in Waumandee (Pop. 472) last March.

As John explained it to me, “If I were to lose the workers from Mexico who make up my labor force, for whatever reason, one of my first calls would be to their families at home, who have been like a family to me. One of my next calls would be to a livestock broker. I simply cannot hire the work force here at home that I would need to operate this farm, and I cannot humanely house 650 head of dairy cattle here if I don’t have the people to care for them.”

Rosenow believes he is far from alone. He has spent years championing the cause of the immigrant workers who have become the backbone of Wisconsin’s dairy industry. As the size of dairy operations grows, so does the size and importance of the immigrant workforce. It’s a fact of life for America’s dairy state - the iconic industry most identified with Wisconsin and its iconic product, fluid milk, is only possible because of working people from Mexico and Central America.

Immigrant workers have long experienced hardships that create a parallel and far more difficult experience than that of the U.S. citizens they often live and work next to. For many immigrants working on farms, in factories, or for contractors, they are here because of their desire to support their families and communities at home where those opportunities are lacking. Most would love to work here legally with visa’s, but the current H-2A Visa program for agricultural workers are only for seasonal workers and are completely unavailable for year-round workers needed for dairy farms.

For most immigrant workers, much of the money they’ll earn will get wired home to their families each month. But as a result of our broken immigration and visa system, those here without valid documentation won’t have the opportunity to share a human touch with their wives, families, or their growing children for years, or often more than a decade.

Today, John and other farmers reliant on immigrant labor throughout the region are waiting as the federal government continues to turn its back on immigrants, and wonder if the crackdown on immigration, and the raids and mass deportations promised by Donald Trump is just more talk, or if it will finally come to rounding up immigrants at the most all-American places, like rural dairy farms.

After 1:00 AM on Thursday morning (less than 12 hours after I am writing this), the House of Representatives passed a budget reconciliation bill which, if passed into law, will make the fate and experience of immigrants in America much harder and far more uncertain. In fact, Congress appears to be poised to fund, legislate, and institutionalize a substantially larger and more powerful version of what has already been described as a new American gulag.

It’s often correctly said about legislation that budgets are in fact statements of values. Here are some of the value statements in the budget reconciliation that will affect immigrants:

• $45 Billion for expansion of ICE detention facilities, more than 365% more than ICE’s current detention budget of $3.5 Billion. This will at least quadruple the capacity for ICE to detain immigrants in what are effectively prisons, and includes the horrifying provision allowing children to be detained indefinitely. If enacted, the budget for funding ICE prisons will be about 50% larger than the budget for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, for a system that will hold a comparable number of people, but including many who have never committed a crime and have never seen a court.

• $8.3 Billion for more Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staffing and vehicles, and $8 Billion for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffing. While weather forecasters, park rangers, and scientists are being fired or pushed out en masse to save costs, it’s going to be a go-go era for what is essentially a new immigration police who will increasingly become a presence in our communities.

• The bill includes a small but wholly inadequate increase in funding for immigration courts. This helps assure that the immigration court backlog for things like asylum claims will only continue to grow, assuring that thousands of more migrants will spend longer time in detention prisons, without any access to due process.

• The bill includes $46.5 Billion for expansion of border walls. That’s about 2.5 times the amount spent in the first Trump administration, enough to wall off every environmentally sensitive area in the U.S. Southwest and the basin of the Rio Grande Valley, including walls built through cities that do not want them on their riverfront, like Laredo, Texas.

• The bill includes $14.4 Billion for ICE transportation and removal operations - an almost 500% increase from current funding to fly people, sometimes in chains, to places like El Salvador and Libya, often without due process.

• In a cruel attempt at making due process an impossible process (that is after all the acknowledged goal), the bill includes an absurd set of new or increased fees to be exacted from people, many of whom have lost everything or spent everything just to arrive here.

  Among new “fees” that immigrants will be forced to pay, the country once best-known for the Statue of Liberty would now charge people a non-waivable $1,000 minimum fee just to make an asylum claim. This would effectively eliminate asylum as an option for unaccompanied children and asylum seekers held in detention who have no money or access to work opportunities. Asylum seekers able to make that payment won’t be finished however, as they’ll have to pay an additional $550 every six months just to be allowed to work. Presumably, every one of these fees is like a back to jail card for anyone who can’t come up with the money in time.

A number of analyses of the Trump Administration’s first 100 days have noted that, notwithstanding the high-profile and unconstitutional removal of people lawfully in this country without due process, the actual number of deportations conducted under Trump 2.0 has been significantly less than under the Biden Administration. So do they not really mean what they say about mass deportation, or were there simply not enough people and not enough cages to make this promise real?

If this budget and the spending proposed in it means anything, then it looks like we know the answer. As Adam Isaksen of the Washington Office on Latin America writes: “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill. The House version would provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with over $160 billion in new border and immigration enforcement resources over the next four and a half years. The spending is likely to change the face of U.S. migration enforcement in ways that the United States may feel for decades.”

Mark Twain said that “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”. The world has seen stories like this before in places like the camps of Nazi Germany, the gulags of Stalinist Russia, or South African Apartheid.

Whatever valid differences exist between ICE detention facilities and a Russian gulag, and the claims for exceptionalism we still feel compelled to make about America today, the rhyming here may simply be the horrendous amount of additional and unnecessary suffering that will be paid for and inflicted by our government onto men, women, and their children, most of whom simply want to survive, and many of whom have already suffered a great deal at home and on their journey here.

But, as wise people are also fond of reminding us, history is not our destiny.

John Rosenow helped found the non-profit Puentes / Bridges in 2001 to help build cross-cultural understanding between American farm communities and the home communities of farm workers in Mexico. He is one of millions of people in a position to welcome and to help defend the rights of immigrants to dignity and humane treatment, the kind of treatment that should be a human birthright, and worthy of any faith or culture.

Farmers, civic leaders, journalists, and citizens like all of us, can exercise our own courage to speak out and make every effort to stop and reverse the construction of this un-Christian and inhuman institution.

The Budget Reconciliation Bill of course includes many more provisions that are equally worthy of our attention and opposition. It increases the federal deficit by more than $3.1 Trillion, while slashing programs like Medicaid and gutting environment and natural resource agencies.

The bill now moves onto the Senate. Regardless of whether you’re concerned about the future price of milk, or you’re more concerned about the future of our shared humanity, there are lifetimes of reasons to oppose this bill and everything it stands for.

- Fred Clark

-Robert Peary

For the past two weeks I had the chance to experience a long anticipated sailing adventure. What I didn't expect was the beginning of an education about the Arctic and its people, culture, and environment.

I'll note for full disclosure that I ate a piece of minke whale sushi on this trip. I didn't like it, and decided it would be my last.

I'll also note that I of course took a million pictures, possibly a few good ones, that you can check out in multiple posts on my Facebook page.

The trip itself was a bucket list crossing courtesy of the sailing outfit 59 North. The 743 mile route we took on the 48’ sloop Isbjorn, left the port of Torshavn in the Faroe Islands to begin a 650 mile crossing of the Norwegian Sea, into the Arctic Circle, arriving at Bodo, Norway about 4:00 AM on our fourth day out. After some rest, Jon and our crew of Jessie, Roger, Micheal, Lori and I went on to explore Norway's Lofoten Islands and fjords, before ending in Svolvaer, coordinates 68.2353°N 14.5636°E.

You can also check out our actual track here.

The first two days of the passage were partly sunny, warm-ish 42F, and light 8-12 knot winds. Pods of dolphins and groups of at least a dozen pilot whales followed us at times. Pleasant enough sure, but honestly, not what I had been planning for. Fortunately in the next two days the Norse gods delivered. The clouds moved in, bringing with them 20-25 knot winds, 1-2 meter waves, and a steady rain that felt like cold needles when it hit you. Maybe not comfortable weather for people, but ideal weather for a classic ocean racer like Isbjorn. The last 300 miles of that crossing were 48 hours of the best sailing I've ever experienced.

All of that was enjoyable, and not dreadful, thanks to our highly capable Norwegian captain Jon (/Yoon/) Amtrup. Jon is an experienced mariner with a long history sailing the Arctic. He is the kind of captain who puts you at ease with a relaxed, self-effacing style, so it took some asking to learn about his history, including amomg other things the fact that he is a friend and sailing companion to H. M. King Harald V of Norway, who is himself a lifelong mariner. And as I came to learn, he's also an author, journalist, podcaster, and dedicated conservationist for the Arctic region.

In the week that followed we gunkholed around the spectacular Lofoten Islands, stopping in small ports and anchoring in fjords. Visits by families of Orca whales, occasional sea eagles, and periodic conversations with locals all added color.

I can't avoid noting however that any conversation long enough to involve naming my nationality almost invariably involved questions, and my apologies, for the insanity of re-electing Donald Trump. Walking back to town from a climb up a nearby 700' hilltop in the village of Henningsvaer, I hitched a ride with a local lifelong resident. Upon learning I was an American, she pretty quickly got down to the business of asking me what I thought about our President. She wanted to be sure I understood that "Trump and his other man Elon" were causing big problems for people all over the world. I told her I'd relay the message to my friends at home. I also told her how impressed I am with her country and how people live so well here in such a beautiful place.

As someone who has thought about terrestrial ecosystems in temperate climates for my entire life, the novelty of experiencing ocean and coastal ecosystems in the Arctic was refreshing. I was also surprised by the number of parallels. Including the confirmation that no place on earth, no matter how apparently pristine, is without 21st Century challenges.

Let's start with the coasts. In the Midwestern U.S., we’re familiar with agricultural industries centered on corn, soybeans, dairy cattle, and pigs. In Norway, the Faroes, and other coastal communities around the Norwegian coast, the dominant agricultural industry is sea-farmed Atlantic salmon. No other product, not even the traditional wild caught cod dried on wood racks in small towns along the coast in the old tradition, even comes close in terms of scale or economic value.

Protected waters in coastal communities everywhere are dotted with salmon rearing pens, into which are dumped young salmon fry reared in tanks on shore, followed by a steady stream of soybean meal, predominantly sourced from Brazil. The average coastal fish farm might have 6-10 pens of about 50M diameter, each holding as many as 200,000 fish. The share of water for a single salmon in each pen is about what would fill your home bathtub. Jon refers to farmed salmon as “pigs of the sea” and in most respects he's not wrong.

A 2022 report on the status of wild Atlantic salmon estimated a population of just about 403,000 wild Atlantic salmon in Norwegian waters, compared to an estimated 450 million farmed salmon at any given time in pens along the Norwegian coast. That's more than a thousand times more farmed fish than wild fish.

Anyone familiar with Confined Animal Feeding Operations in rural areas can relate to the outsized amount of shit produced by industrial animal production, and the resulting environmental impact. Where fish farms predominate in northern Norway, the nutrient loading from phosphorus and nitrogen released into coastal waters is a far larger source of nutrients than the sewage effluent produced from the human communities around them, and in many places, more than from all other sources combined.

In the cold waters of the Arctic, that means increased growth of uncommon algae and phytoplankton, and reduced growth of native seaweed and organisms dependent on clean water. Proximity to all that farmed salmon and the large number of farmed fish that escape their pens also place native salmon stocks under increasing pressure from parasites and genetic mixing. All these changes going on under water are difficult or impossible for a first time visitor to see, but are well understood by fishermen and others who spend their lives on the water.

In the open Arctic however, the well documented, rapid warming of water temperatures and reduction of sea ice creates myriad, easily observed impacts. In addition to reduced summer ice extent, wasting glaciers leave dramatic visual evidence in the nearby mountains that are obvious even to first time visitors.

For marine animals, especially the whales, dolphins, and porpoises that dominate the ocean food chain, less ice and warmer waters means rapid changes in favorable habitat, creating both winners and losers.

If you live on land the textbook (and grossly simplified) response to gradual warming for many organisms is a shift in favorable habitat to either higher latitude, or higher elevation. That can be good news for warm loving critters which find new suitable habitat to explore, but bad news for alpine plants or wildlife, which eventually run out of suitable habitat to expand into or mountaintop elevation to climb up to.

In the warming oceans of the Arctic that phenomenon (also grossly simplified) of less ice and warmer water may mean at least temporarily better conditions for some more common marine species such as Bottle-nosed dolphins and at least some sub-arctic species like Hump-backed whale or Fin whales. But it also means almost certain continued decline for true Arctic species like Bowhead whales, Beluga whales, and Narwhals. For them the North Pole is their last refuge, their top of the mountain, and it may effectively become their dead end. Predicting the future for many other species however, in my admittedly limited understanding, is at best an educated guess.

A longstanding problem with Arctic conservation efforts is the lack of basic biological information about key species - information which was until recently, too difficult, expensive, or simply not possible to obtain. The recent opening of access to the Arctic as a result of rapid ice loss however has set off a scurry of activity among Arctic nations, commercial fishing and mining interests, and a growing number of private explorers, and that has created an increased urgency to understand what's at risk.

Norway has been one of the first nations to advance proposals for deep sea mining for precious metals such as nickel and cobalt - the stuff I need to run the device I'm typing this on and that you are probably reading this on. After advancing mining development plans in 2024, the Norwegian government recently put a pause on permit development for deep sea mining due to widespread opposition both within and outside of Norway, founded in part on lack of information on environmental impacts.

There is no amount of environmental assessment that would convince many people of the merits of dropping robots more than a mile to the ocean floor to dig up mineral rich nodules from the Arctic Ocean in order to make more phones. But the push for doing it may at least create an opportunity to add to the world knowledge and conservation efforts for Arctic ecosystems.

For at least 20 days this summer, Jon Amtrup will captain the 70’ Greenpeace sailing ship Witness with scientists leading submerged acoustic and visual surveys for whales in the Norwegian Sea between the islands of Jan Mayen, Bear Island, and Svalbard. In a previous trip he led for Greenpeace in 2024 in areas proposed for mining exploration, the team detected four different family groups of sperm whales, as well as fin whales, minke whales, orcas, and white-beaked dolphins.

As Jon described his next trip for me on his battered paper marine chart showing the waters up to 80 degrees North Latitude, I couldn't help but be mesmerized by the idea of sailing that close to the Pole while enjoying the magic of listening to ongoing conversations among some of the world's most majestic and sentient animals in the depths far below. No more whale sushi for me.

Whether the knowledge Jon and others can gain in a short time will help forestall deep sea mining in the Arctic, it's clear that there isn't a place in the world that's not under pressure from some form of resource extraction and all the risks that can entail.

It's at least hopeful to know that these places are also home to people who are fierce champions for their conservation.

References

59 North

Jon Amtrup Explore North

Environmental Impact of Salmon Farming

Norway Approves Deep Sea Mining Plan

Greenpeace Report on Deep Sea Mining

Greenpeace Report on 2024 Cetacean Survey

Norway suspends controversial deep sea mining plan

Greenpeace Ship Witness

Report on Arctic Biodiversity In Marine Mammals

“Authoritarianism is a political system built on a logic of betrayals: betrayals of others and betrayals of self. It cultivates, and rewards, a state I call moral deregulation: a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled”. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, March, 2025.

First, if you are a new subscriber to This Land, thank you! (With special thanks to those of you who generously offered paid subscriptions). Having written thousands of pages of impersonal environmental consulting reports over the years, I started This Land a few months back to fulfill a long time goal to write more personally and creatively about the world. As I sometimes tell friends, I’ve spent far more of my life fooling around with trees than I ever imagined. That writing goal however had gotten sidelined over the years by politics, various missions for doing other good works, etc. Being mostly retired today there were no good reasons left, other than learning to play the mandolin, which may need to wait it's turn a bit longer.

Part of what I expect to be perennial discernment about writing a thing with a theme like this is what mix of stuff I know something about, and stuff I care about or am otherwise curious about should count as valid topics, and whether both have to be true about a thing before I could write about it.

Like a good piece of authorizing legislation, I cleverly gave myself permission to write about whatever I wanted with the This Land header of “Land, Water, People, Places, and Politics”. And without leaving any interest in trees and everything associated with them behind, there are so many things to learn, and so many things today that demand our attention as humans, that it makes sense to me to swim in this pool without lanes, and trust that the experience for writer and reader will both be richer for it. And besides, there's urgent shit going down today that needs our attention.

What feels increasingly and importantly urgent today, five alarm fire urgent, is the future of American democracy and civil society.

We're all I expect still in a bit of shock over the scope, speed, and brazenness of the dismantling of our entire federal government and so many of the institutions associated with civil society. The normally buttoned up, incremental thinker David Brooks, climbs to treetop height last week to observe that: “These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilization along order that restrain (the President's) acquisition of power.” “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement.”

I believe Brooks is right.

While it's perhaps not as tangible and easy to capture in aggregate, theres also a parallel assault on our moral order. What writer Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others have referred to as a “moral deregulation: a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others.” In authoritarian takeovers such norms are discredited and dismantled. I tried to write about that a few months ago, but didnt have a name for it. But in important spaces in American civil discourse and governance, we have made a disturbing shift to celebration of lying, cruelty, and barbarity, and a abject lack of empathy or compassion for suffering. The very people whose job it is to understand and model our best values are instead acting out of our very worst instincts.

And, if you read the New York Times, or other major media, you’ve gotten used to weasle-worded headlines like “White House's blatant lying and refusal to adhere to unanimous Supreme Court ruling to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia may possibly create sketchy constitutional issues in the future”. Yes, I made that one up, but you can read a real headline like that every day. Just keep in mind that major media companies all have liability attorneys getting their hooks into every one of those headlines.

We have all the evidence we need today to conclude that we are in a constitutional crisis right now, and American democracy has been hijacked and is being replaced by a new regime that is distinctly autocratic and oligarchic.

Autocracy, authoritarian regime, oligarchy, kleptocracy, kaki… - we can spend a lot of time arguing about labels, but that seems like arguing about which subspecies to call the bird that's being hunted to extinction. The take home is that American democracy is being hijacked.

The collective civic uprising that Brooks and others are calling for is a break the glass kind of response. This is not a normal time, and most people, including many people in all kinds of positions of authority, are in their own personal discernment of how to respond at a time when norms of behavior and institutional procedures are in transformation and in many cases up for grabs.

To resist what is happening in front of us, people and institutions of every stripe who in normal times are fiercely non-partisan are going to have to take stands, and to speak out, or be rolled over. It's true that taking a stand may be painful and may not even save you from being rolled over, at least in the short term. But if you are going to be rolled over, would you rather be standing or lying down? What would your children or grandchildren have wanted you to do? Those questions might seem overly dramatic, but in light of how many people have done just that at great personal cost in the last three months, it seems pertinent to all of us.

Which is not to say that any of the decisions we each have to make are easy, or without limits or consequences. If you are a federal employer or in an organization affected by the federal goverment, you have special considerations, including you and your family's financial security. For you, speaking out in the context of your employment may well mean reassignment, resignation, or firing. Perhaps you can still do some good in your current role.

Perhaps you can stand up and show up in other spaces outside of your work. Perhaps you should consider now where the bright lines are that you would not be willing to cross. In the meantime, those of us who know you can withold our own judgement, while offering our support.

If you are in the, for this purpose, fortunate position of being free to stand up, you can stand up and speak out as often and as forcefully as you have the opportunity in whatever public or private spaces where your voice will be heard. If you feel fear about that prospect it probably means you have something worthwhile to say. If you give voice to your truth, you may well give needed courage to someone else, and together you may have the ability to get people in positions of power to change their decisions in ways that will be better for others.

If you lead an organization whether as a business owner, executive, or a board member, you have a special opportunity (and I would argue an obligation) to demonstrate principled, ethical leadership by speaking out, reclaiming truth and honest language, and opposing immoral and anti- democratic actions wherever they occur. People and other organizations will see and be informed by your actions, or possibly by your inaction.

Harvard University telling the White House and Cabinet Secretaries to fuck off was hugely inspiring! When major law firms like Paul Weiss agreed to settle for millions in free legal services because they had the temerity to represent people the Trump administration was at war with, the sound of millions of attorneys groaning could be heard around the country. But for Paul Weiss and others, the mafiosa demands just kept on coming once it became clear they could be played. That's how it will go - no one comes out whole or with dignity by rolling over. No one.

At this point, I've gotten as far away from trees as it might be possible to get. But it occurs to me that now might be a good time to plant some, or plant more. For all of us, managing personal risk at a time of uncertainty seems increasingly important. I think it's defensible to say that the risk of almost everything we hope won't happen - like diseases, civic violence, recession, personnel financial setbacks, and widening wars - has gotten greater since January.

Preparing for those possibilities, however remote they might be, could entail reconsidering personal investments, your physical and emotionsl health, income and spending, preparedness for emergencys without services, and the sustainability and resiliency of your home, your family, and your community.

Rather than having that seem like a doomsday prepper message, I'm thinking about that as a huge opportunity for something we all benefit from any time - stronger more resilient communities built on real time and real life relationships with the people who live nearest to us.

Ironically perhaps, I'm writing this from a hotel in the city of Torshavn in the Faroe Islands about to embark on a sailing trip. Inspiring photos included here. And as soon as I get home I plan to continue strengthening bonds of trust with friends and neighbors (aka civic gardening), working up my actual garden, and planting some more trees. I hope your spring is off to a similar positive start.

With hope and all the best,

Fred

“Start in the west, make your circle by taking only the sick and mature trees, yet, keep in mind by taking care of the other creatures and leaving it as you first came, as so when you make your circle to the point of the start, you then will again have another stand ready for you on your next circle. For it is truly this circle, if we take care of her, Mother Earth, for it is true that she will always be there to take care of you!”

- Chief Oshkosh of the Menominee, around 1850.

None of the dozen or so pieces of legislation enacted between 1897 and 2012 that guide the work of the U.S. Forest Service are nearly as inspirational, or as intuitively simple, as the oft-repeated words of Chief Oshkosh, whose vision drives the Menominee Tribe’s management of the 230,000 acre Menominee Forest, one of the most well known examples of sustainable forestry in America.

But laws like the National Forest Organic Act of 1897, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the National Forest Management Act of 1976, all reflect a century-long commitment to forest conservation, an emerging understanding of ecosystem science, robust public involvement and societal support for managing forests for an expanding range of values and uses.

The U.S. Forest Service, with its 35,000 employees and 193 million acre National Forest System, is an agency you can either love or hate, and many people alternate between both.

If you want more low cost timber for your mill, you’ll find the years-long process of planning and environmental review needed before trees get cut on National Forests to be a maddening exercise in needless bureaucracy.

If you’re an advocate for more wilderness or old growth forests or undisturbed places for mushroom picking, you’ve likely been heart-sick more than once by seeing logging change the look of one of your favorite places for at least the rest of your lifetime.

Regardless of where you sit on that spectrum however, if you’ve been involved with the Forest Service, odds are you’ve met career public servants who are committed to the agency mission of sustainable forest management, many of whom would have been right at home with Chief Oshkosh.

Now, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE team, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, and newly appointed Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz have all announced new plans intended to BOTH dramatically shrink staffing and completely reorganize the U.S. Forest Service, AND, increase timber harvest volumes by 25% across the National Forest System over the next five years.

Anyone who knows anything about managing forests right now is saying, “You want to do what??”. Would you fire one third of your restaurant’s line cooks and wait staff and put the ones who are left in new jobs, and expect the restaurant to serve 25% more people the next night and win the James Beard Award? There isn’t a business in the world where that strategy would make sense, but that’s what’s going down in a huge swath of our nation’s public lands.

Before we talk about the real chainsaws that will be required to make more timber production happen and the problems and unintended consequences that goal will trigger, let’s talk about the chainsaws being taken to the organization under the direction of Elon Musk and the DOGE team.

Although the agency-wide reorganizations that most federal agencies have been directed to plan for have not yet been announced as of April 10th, reports indicate that as many as 7000 USFS staff may be lost through buyouts, early retirements, and firings carried out using the Office of Management and Budget’s directives to agencies to conduct Reductions in Force. Similar hollowing out is occurring within the USDA, Department of Interior, and other domestic federal agencies.

According to reporter Eric Katz writing in Government Executive,

“The U.S. Forest Service is planning to consolidate its nine regional offices into as few as three, according to a source briefed on the matter, while also eliminating some of its five Research Stations. The nation’s 154 National Forests are expected to be consolidated and the plan is to move the Wildland Fire division into another part of the government. Like much of USDA, USFS’ Washington headquarters is slated to be “hollowed out,” the source said.”

The direct loss of people from buyouts, early retirements and firings is already having a dramatic effect in senior leadership. At least three of nine Regional Foresters have left the agency since January and others are speculated to be headed out. Numerous forest supervisors and senior agency staff have also taken early retirement.

Layered on top of direct loss of staff will be demotions affected by use of a Trump Administration tool known as Schedule F that will make thousands of formerly career civil service positions into loyalty-tested political appointees who can be fired “at-will”.

It is clear that the Trump team is attempting to put a tighter grip on Forest Service. The new Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz is a former timber industry executive from Idaho who has never worn the Forest Service uniform - the first time in it’s history the agency is not being not led by a career employee. Other Senior Executive Service employees who were traditionally career positions, like the Deputy Chiefs, National Directors, Regional Foresters and Research Station Directors may join that list. In addition, Schedule F conversions will likely also affect Regional Directors, Forest Supervisors and other line officers.

In other words it appears that a deep level of politicization will be burrowed into the ranks of agency management, upending the merit-based civil service system that has served federal agencies well for decades.

We can hope that the remaining career people in USFS will work to mitigate the worst possible outcomes. But the combined effects of loss of as much as half of USFS senior employees and all their institutional knowledge, loss of key field staff, together with the disruption of a massive reorganization, consolidation of functions, and closure of offices, all directed by newly hired political appointees, will be like much of the rest of the Trump Administration’s playbook, a recipe for chaos. It’s also likely to reduce public support for an agency that will be even less able to carry out its full mission

Beyond chaos, whatever the even remotely plausible outcomes that might occur from such a reorganization, producing 25% more timber on top of the 3 Billion Board Feet of timber the USFS produces in an average year is most certainly not one of them.

The USDA Secretary’s order of April 3rd, along with a subsequent directive from USFS Acting Associate Chief Chris French, use authority in the 2021 Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to make an Emergency Situation Designation (ESD) on 112 Million acres of National Forest Lands (59% of all NFS lands). On some national forests there is an apparent “emergency situation” on almost every forested acre, a few have no places, and most are in between. From a resource need standpoint, that variability makes little sense.

The ESD allows relaxation of many of the environmental analysis requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act to facilitate increasing timber output from National Forests by 25% over the next five years in order to “reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen the American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive”.

The ESD and expedited NEPA processes together can be a well-sharpened double-bitted axe, which wielded thoughtfully and with good rationale and ground-truthed circumstances might be appropriate. But without transparency around how these acres were designated, and without any public consultation, there’s no basis to trust that outcomes here will do more than cherry pick places where more timber production would be beneficial to industry - a perennial perception for Forest Service skeptics that progressive leaders in the agency have attempted to avoid and less progressive leaders have fed into throughout the agency’s history.

Before we start to unpack the practical barriers to the timber increase goal, and the unintended consequences it is almost certain to create, it’s worth examining what problem more timber cutting is intended to solve.

The administration is naming three: 1) Reducing risks from forest fires; 2) Improving forest health and addressing areas where insects and diseases are a problem; and 3) increasing production of timber to benefit the American forest products economy.

All of these are significant, interrelated issues for which National Forests play an important role and need to address. None of these issues however are easily or fully addressed by simply cutting more timber in the absence of other investments. And it’s clear in this administration that, at least for now, there will be no significant new investments. In fact, budgets are being cut as fast as Elon and his DOGE kids can get hold of the line items in federal spending.

Even with these constraints, the goal of cutting more trees on National Forests would be at least more achievable if every tree in the woods had value. For large areas of forested America however that is no longer true.

Today, forested regions like the southern Rocky Mountains, southern Sierra’s, Central Appalachia, and Southern New England, that as recently as 20 years ago supported robust timber economies have seen mills close and the demand for timber go with them. Even regions with long-standing forest products sectors like the Great Lake States and Pacific Northwest are seeing erosion of their forest products sectors, and resulting loss of timber demand.

The downstream result of that market loss is the independent loggers who typically purchase National Forest timber can’t offer competitive bids or bid at all on timber sales. And when markets are gone, when trees do need to get cut, the dollar flow reverses and instead of paying to buy timber, forest contractors get paid to cut the trees - what foresters call non-commercial treatments.

For taxpayers, that non-commercial work can be an added expense of as much as $1000 per acre or more, and we’re talking about a lot of acres -millions - where that kind of work is needed. But nowhere in the various orders directing Forest Service to increase timber supply is there new funding for non-commercial treatments.

In areas of the country where wildfire risk is acute, or where insects and diseases are significant problems, reducing tree density by thinning is one of several important tools in the risk reduction toolkit and the science behind fuel reduction is well established.

In most cases however, and in a growing number of regions where wood markets are weak, effectively reducing those risks means commercial harvesting work MUST be accompanied by non-commercial cutting of smaller non-merchantable trees, and ongoing management such as prescribed fire, or supplemental planting, that can maintain optimal densities and species composition.

A December 2021 paper by the National Association of Forest Service Retirees concluded:

“In many of the critical at-risk areas in the West, two to five times more area needs to be treated than currently are treated, about 70% of some landscapes. This would involve forest thinning followed by or in conjunction with prescribed fires. Increases in forest fuel treatments will require a commensurate increase in funding and in tools. In many parts of the West, the infrastructure necessary to carry out the projects in the forest and process the wood products coming from those projects has been closed or mothballed or never existed.”

What that mis-match suggests is that meeting that 25% goal without new money will mean more of the kind of logging that removes only the largest most valuable trees and leaves behind the smaller lower value or zero value trees (zero value to a logger when no market exists that is) which in many cases are the trees you’d actually want to remove in a thinning.

Foresters call this high-grading - and it’s not a complement. High-graded forests often lose their biggest and best trees, and with them often many of the other important conservation values that make native forests important sources of bio-diversity. No good forester wants to set up a high grade harvest. The new timber mandates of the Trump administration, coupled with cold hard market realities, may nevertheless make that outcome unavoidable.

Forests in the U.S. offset as much as 15% of all carbon emissions. More harvesting on National Forests on an emergency basis, without better long-term planning, also risks compromising the critical role National Forests play as carbon sinks.

Likewise, although the Biden Administration rescinded their own order to USFS for identifying and protecting old-growth forests before Trump took office, the new emergency directive for more harvesting risks compromising areas where some of the best potential for thoughtful old-growth designation would enhance future forest values that are under increasing threats.

The Administration’s business case for more harvesting - increasing National Forest timber production to stimulate the American forest products sectors - also rests on several mis-perceptions about the economics of wood fiber and the forests that provide it.

First, there’s the idea that those crafty Canadians have been ripping us off for years by dumping softwood lumber in U.S. markets, hurting our domestic markets for building products. Can’t we fix that with a combination of high tariffs on all Canadian stuff, while cutting more of our own trees to build our own houses? Well - nobody except possibly Donald Trump and his tariff Czar Peter Navarro think it would be that simple.

In fact, Canadians have unfairly sold subsidized softwood lumber into U.S. lumber markets since at least the 1980s, and that complex, long-standing dispute has been adjudicated in trade courts over those years resulting in settlements favoring both countries, along with various agreements for duties and export limits. These settlements have already resulted in an increase in softwood lumber production, mostly from the Pacific Northwest and Southern United States.

Regarding the larger issue of how this order will benefit the American forest-based economy however, the facts on the ground make it clear that ordering more trees cut on National Forests won’t do much more for the economy than Trump’s ordering the dumping of 2.2 billion of gallons of water from central California reservoirs would do to put out the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. And we know how well that worked out.

• None of the orders provided by the Trump Administration acknowledge the overall limited role National Forests play in the overall American forest base. Forest veterans like Andy Stahl have noted that, “Even a 25 percent increase from national forests would be little more than a rounding error in the national wood supply”.

• Many of the National Forests in the Western United States where the need for reducing fire risk is most acute have weak or non-existent markets for small diameter trees that need to be removed. There is little guidance in the current orders to identify the funds or resources needed to perform badly needed non-commercial work that has historically been backlogged even when USFS was fully staffed.

• The US forest products industry is much more than 2x4s and softwood lumber, and only a few regions of the U.S. produce the kind of softwood lumber that goes into buildings. Hardwood sawtimber and veneer, pulp and paper, plywood, and wood for fuel pellets are just a few examples of forest products sectors that each have their own economics and market dynamics.

• Most forest regions in the U.S., including just about all National Forests in the northeastern U.S., won’t benefit from or be affected by increased demand for softwood construction lumber. Forests in the Great Lake States will be much more affected by weak demand for pulp and paper. Forests throughout the eastern U.S. overall are much more dependent on markets for hardwood sawtimber and veneer that come from large trees like maples and oaks.

• Although markets remain strong for some forest products, a push for more harvesting in excess of timber harvest levels already established in National Forest’s long-term plans risks mining timber stocks at levels that are unsustainable and may do little to address forest health or fire risk.

• Independent logging operators and forest contractors who purchase and harvest National Forest timber, and are a critical link in sustainable forest management, are aging and leaving the woods. Shortage of qualified loggers available and willing to purchase timber stumpage is an increasing bottleneck on all forest management and in all regions. Likewise, semi-skilled and skilled labor in forest products manufacturing is also a bottleneck. The Trump Administration’s imperative of rounding up and deporting immigrants will only make labor shortages among forestry contractors more acute.

• Climate change, although scrubbed from the minds and memos of many politicians, continues to influence forestry activities. Shorter and less predictable frozen ground and shoulder seasons and more severe weather events are upending the typical sequencing of seasonal timber activities that loggers rely on.

• A recession brought on by President Trump’s global tariff war is likely to weaken demand for housing and further weaken markets for potentially all forest products. A new supply of National Forest timber will do little or nothing to address weak demand, but may result in further lowering timber prices, with knock-on effects that will impact private forest landowners who rely on their own timber income.

• With all the uncertainty and chaos surrounding almost every action of the Trump Administration today, solid predictions about the future are almost impossible. The forest businesses these orders are intended to support will be very unlikely to make significant new multi-year investments in new production in such a chaotic, ever-changing environment.

Federal employees charged with managing our National Forests will spend months and years dealing with turmoil and uncertainty as the Musk chainsaw cuts its way through people and programs, leaving a mess in its wake. Genuine efficiency won’t happen until real people are allowed to plan and make good decisions with some certainty of stability.

Short-term emergencies driven by politics makes the kind of long-term, well-planned conservation our National Forests need impossible to achieve. And none of the laudable goals for increasing forest health and reducing fire risk will be possible unless and until resources are made available to provide minimally appropriate forest stewardship, not just timber harvesting.

The descendants of Chief Oshkosh are still walking that big circle more than 175 years later (about seven generations) on the Menominee Reservation. We can still learn a lot from them.

• Fred Clark, Paul Strong, April 10th, 2025

There does not appear to be a single economist of any ideology who can defend, or even make a coherent explanation for the steep, across the board tariffs imposed by Donald Trump on all of our most important trading partners on Wednesday.

The quotes below were captured by Heather Cox Richardson on Thursday, March 3rd.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers: “It’s now clear that the [Trump] Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or "RFK thought" is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”

David Dayen, Editor of American Prospect: "Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world." "His behavior is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.”

Foreign affairs journalist David Rothkopf: “These aren’t tariffs,” he wrote. “They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.”

That seems like a perfect comparison.

Republicans in Congress (and Republicans everywhere who understand economics,) and millions of successful business people who supported Trump had, just a few months ago, invested in the strongest economy in the world. Many of them, (like all the rest of us) have lost as much as 10% or perhaps more of their personal wealth within just the last 72 hours.

Most of those folks are sitting home tonight wondering how the hell the orange guy who they didn't like personally but were sure knew how to run the country and goose the economy could be this insanely stupid.

There is no long term fiscal or economic policy at work - not even a pretense. The President's most slavishly loyal advisors did not advise and did not know about this action, until it happened and they’ve been caught short trying to defend it.

So, as Dayen, Rothkopf and others are pointing out, the only logical answer - at least the best solution to the puzzle of what this carnage is all about - is one that many don't yet want to acknowledge.

What appears to be at work here is Donald Trump's playacting the American mob boss. Just as he's shaken down the man-baby who owns Facebook, major US law firms, and our best universities, the bat-shit crazy tariffs will now allow Trump to personally shake down every leader in the free world. Everything in this convicted felon's history points to this as the only coherent strategy that explains his willingness to drop a neutron bomb of economic destruction on every single American.

More than 50 world leaders (whose citizens are now subject to crippling tariffs) will be making the trip to Mara Lago in the weeks ahead, and most of them will offer to bend over for some kind of capitulated settlement. And in every one of those agreements, Trump is likely to ask for, and may receive, something that enriches or otherwise benefits him and his family personally.

In other words, every one of the agreements he is likely to make or agree to with other nations may also, by his actions, implicate him in violations of law worthy of civil or criminal investigations, or impeachment. And he'll have this opportunity dozens of times in the weeks ahead.

Well, we're still a country of laws, right?? Yea, but:

1). The Supreme Court has, for reasons that will never be clear, handed this convicted felon impunity from crimes committed while in office.

2). The spineless naked mole rats running this Congress would never have the courage or capacity for an impeachment.

3). Most of Trump's cabinet secretaries are so grossly unqualified they are unable to discharge their most basic duties - like learning how to communicate legally. They're not even capable of ordering dinner together, let alone executing their authority to invoke the 25th Amendment in removing their president.

So are we SOL?? No!! Because, as Cory Booker says, "The Power of the People is Always Greater than the People in Power." Which is why it makes perfect sense right now to be marching in the street day after day if needed to make leaders lead and hold this President accountable.

My father's younger brother (he never got the chance to be my uncle) died of diptheria as an infant around 1930. I still have a scrapbook passed on from my parents that includes Freddy’s picture and poems my Grandmother Esther collected, that made it clear what a deep and poignant loss that was. It’s likely there were stories like that for your ancestors too.

I was reminded of Freddy when driving home through rural Buffalo County, Wisconsin last week. As I wound through town roads in the heart of Wisconsin’s unglaciated Driftless Area I had to stop to explore a small, forlorn looking cemetery on a ridgetop near the highest point in the County. 15 or so scattered and neglected looking graves at the Upper Montana Ridge Catholic Cemetery told the story of German farmer settlers of the late 1800's, early 1900's. And as walked around and looked more carefully, I saw that at least half of them were markers of infants.

Jerome Mueller, age 1.

Maria Schmeider, age 2 months.

Roy Theissen, age 18 months.

(First name unreadable) Knapp, age 7 months.

Alloysious Fellenz. age 1 day.

Clarac Mueller, age 10.

Whether it was tuberculosis, diptheria, pneumonia, measles, or one of many other childhood diseases, various studies conclude that infant mortality in the U.S. around 1900 was more than 200 per 1000 live births (> 20%). Infant and child deaths would have been even higher in areas lacking access basic medical care, something that most any farm family from that era could confirm. Thanks to things like vaccines, milk pasteurization, and sewage treatment, the Center for Disease Control estimates that in 2000 United States infant mortality was as low as 7 per 1000 (.7%).

What in the world would those German families not have given to have had those children back in their arms? And how could they possibly even believe or forgive us, given all we know today, that we just put a vaccine denier in charge of our nation's health care agency, and have begun rolling back 53 years worth of efforts to assure clean water for everyone.

We can have a pretty good idea what they’d say today about the appointment and Senate confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health). Kennedy is just one of a suite of astonishingly dangerous and unqualified appointments to important federal agencies.

Senator Mitch McConnell, a survivor of childhood polio, was the lone Republican NO vote on RFK’s appointment, although clearly Kennedy’s reckless history of peddling lies about vaccines and other health issues was on the minds of many of them.

Senator Dick Durbin spared no punches in his statements about Kennedy: “The height of irresponsibility. … I am fearful that if we put Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of our nation’s health, innocent children will die,”

“It’s no secret what he would do. Mr. Kennedy himself petitioned the FDA to rescind authorization of all COVID vaccines in 2021. And a key associate of his has petitioned to remove the polio vaccine,” Durbin said. “In 1952, polio paralyzed more than 21,000 Americans and killed more than 3,000.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spread conspiracy theories to discourage uptake of the measles vaccine, for example – including travelling to Samoa to spread lies about its safety, fueling an outbreak that took 80 lives,” Durbin continued. “Before the measles vaccine, 48,000 people were hospitalized each year—with thousands experiencing life-threatening brain swelling. By 2000, measles was declared eliminated because of vaccines.”

Another lynch pin of childhood survival in the 20th Century was understanding the role of clean water and sanitation and making clean water available to everyone. The 1972 amendment to the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act of the 1974 spurred fundamental improvements and reduction of pollution of lakes, streams, and rivers as well as municipal water supplies throughout the country and brought environmental and human health benefits. The federal agency that put those laws into practice was the Environmental Protection Agency.

Early statements by President Trump that EPA spending would be reduced by 65% have been walked back, however significant Reductions in Force are planned for the agency, and newly appointed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and the DOGE team have already eliminated programs and offices and fired employees dedicated to environmental justice, and announced plans to eliminate the Office of Research and Development and more than 1000 employees attached to it, which provides the science basis for much of EPA’s work.

The reality that most American families no longer have to endure the agony of loosing some or all of their children before they’re old enough to get on a school bus did not happen by accident.

Clean, pathogen free water, and vaccines for many childhood diseases did not come to America by accident either. All of those changes came about as a result of investments in scientific research, new technologies, and the role of the federal government to both fund needed investments and to establish effective environmental and public health standards.

All these discussions about federal jobs, and offices, and agencies, and acronyms can seem awfully arcane and bureaucratic, especially to the cohort of young tech boys currently scrubbing government databases for things they don’t understand but they think they can eliminate with impunity.

No data base however will ever fully reveal the return on taxpayer investment that accrued to millions of American families who no longer had to suffer the loss of their greatest gift. Put THAT on the DOGE wall of receipts, and the cost benefit won’t be remotely close. I’m pretty sure my Grandmother Esther would be really pissed right now, and I’m guessing your grandmother would be too.

"To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement."

-Thomas Jefferson, 1799

Few media companies (e.g. newspapers) did more to exemplify freedom of the press, and the courage it can take to sustain that freedom, than the Washington Post in the 1970’s.

Former Pentagon analyst turned anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg leaked the report titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force (AKA The Pentagon Papers) to the New York Times and Washington Post in early 1971. The Pentagon Papers were damning because they documented the extent to which the government had been lying about military and espionage operations in Vietnam that led to escalation of the war and, by extension, the unnecessary deaths of thousands of U.S. service members. The Times was the first to begin publishing the Pentagon Papers (in installments) but then halted publication in June, 1971 after a preliminary federal court injunction ordered them to cease publishing.

It was under that backdrop that Washington Post owner and publisher Katherine Graham made the risky decision for the Post to begin their own publication of the papers, for which the larger and more established Times had just been blocked. Adding to the risk for Graham, the Post’s parent corporation was planning to go public that year, and a miscalculation about running the leaked papers would have significant consequences for the company’s valuation. The Post’s lawyers opposed publication, but her reporters and editors argued for it. As Graham later wrote in her memoir, Graham “took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go.’” The Post published two of their own installments of the Pentagon Papers before receiving their own federal injunction.

Later that month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Thomas Jefferson’s belief in a free press.

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, June, 1971

Just a year later, it was Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who broke the story of Watergate scandal that ultimately helped bring down Richard Nixon. Breaking the story of Watergate and exposing how deeply the Watergate break-in and its cover up reached into Nixon’s White House only happened because of Graham’s courage and willingness to accept the financial and reputational risk posed by carrying the stories.

Graham, along with her late husband Phillip, were well established in Washington social circles. As the majority owners and publisher of Washington’s newspaper of record, the Grahams were cultivated by presidents, including Kennedy, Johnson, and later Nixon. While every administration seeks influence with the press, unlike his predecessors, Nixon didn’t mind resorting to direct threats either.

As Woodward and Bernstein began reporting the Watergate story, Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell infamously warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tits caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

Graham directed the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee to go ahead and publish the groundbreaking revelations that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace, and even reporting on Mitchell’s crude threat. (In 1971, the phrase ‘getting your…caught in the wringer’ was common slang, as wringer washers had for many years been standard in American homes, and getting body parts or clothing caught in them was a genuine risk.)

The Post’s new owner Jeff Bezo used to take those kinds of risks, but not anymore. Today’s Washington Post has effectively struck the colours of editorial independence.

Bezos pulled the rug out from under a planned endorsement of Harris 7 days before the election, he has spiked stories and even cartoons, and the Post has lost key editors and journalists, and thousands of readers in the process. Although he gives Bezos credit for maintaining editorial freedom during the first Trump administration, Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Post, described Bezos today as “cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty.”

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, likewise did an absurd about face with Meta last fall - making a public announcement about Facebook’s end of fact checking. In a video statement that looks as though his mother is off stage coaching him, Zuckerberg, in the name of allowing more truth, basically throws open the gates for blatant lying in sponsored content. In a related move calculated to just thrill MAGA die-hards, he announced that they were sending the few remaining humans at Facebook who will be left to look for crappy content from California to Texas, because somehow California based fact checkers just seemed too liberal. WTF?

Zuckerburg followed his public kowtow to Trump with other interviews that included painfully impotent and town-deaf sounding calls for a return to “masculine energy” and “more aggression” in the business world. This, ironically, from a guy who owns the damn business, but had just bent over and taken it from a President who forced him to re-write his business model AND make a $25 million pay off to Trump to settle a baseless 2021 Trump lawsuit they were almost certain to win. Damn. That’s masculine?? Talk about not being your own boss.

It’s not clear if Bezos and Zuckerberg ever had any consistent political views, but both had at least held reasonably independent positions prior to last November, and their businesses have mostly reflected that independence. What’s clear in their recent about-faces is that they’ve both been shaken down, or “gotten to” by Donald Trump.

In these and a raft of other cases involving corporate media (ABC, Disney, and even the Des Moines Register) - fear of retribution from the Trump administration is clearly driving them to abandon whatever personal beliefs they held for the sake of their business interests.

Jeff Bezos for example also owns Amazon and the space company Blue Origin, so his exposure to Donald Trump’s threats to weaponize government agencies to make his life harder is real.

These may be rational decisions for them, but they’re terrible decisions for a free society. The chilling effect that is silencing media businesses in unprecedented ways is also affecting independence in academia and non-profit organizations.

Who also won’t be standing up for free speech any longer are the more than 1,300 employees of the United States Voice of America who were placed on leave on last Saturday, a day after President Trump ordered the gutting of the government-funded media outlet's parent US Agency for Global Media, and six other federal agencies, crippling a media broadcaster that since 1942 has broadcast a message about American democracy to the world and which today reaches more than 400 million people around the world in more than 45 languages.

VOA’s recently fired former Chief National Correspondent Steve Herman on Sunday offered a Requiem for the Voice that Carried a Nation’s Conscience:

“All at VOA, who swore an oath to the Constitution, strove ​daily to live up to our charter: to be accurate, objective and comprehensive.” “That promise, more than any broadcast or byline, is a legacy worth protecting.To ​effectively shutter the Voice of America is to dim a beacon that burned bright during some of the darkest hours since 1942.”

Taken together, the assault on free speech in Congress, in the media, in NGOs, and in schools and institutions across society, is corrosive and it’s widespread, and it is a signal of an even deeper erosion of democratic values.

In a March, 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way suggest that given all these signals, U.S. Democracy is already failing.

“U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.”

In its place they suggest, won’t be fascism or dictatorship but what they describe as “competitive authoritarianism”.

“Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.”

It’s likely that in the months and years ahead, that we will see more and more state and local governments, media companies, and institutions strike the colours of free speech, either through any of dozens of choices that limit free expression, or simply through their silence. The effect won’t be limited to institutions - regular people will also feel constrained to speak, because of family, social, or employment considerations.

It’s now up to everyone of us who can to speak out about injustice, freedom, and democracy anywhere and everywhere we can. Every voice for truth helps make it easier for others to speak, and provides support and encouragement for those who can’t.

Silence, at times, can be strategic. But if you feel yourself afraid to speak your truth, that may be your best signal that it’s time to give that truth a voice.

“Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.”

- Maggie Kuhn, Founder of the Gray Panthers.

Earlier this week, for some reason, I was reminded of a haunting video I had last seen years ago of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party Purge. On July 22nd, 1979, six days after Saddam’s ascension to the Presidency, after having coerced the previous President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr into resigning, he called together a special meeting of Iraqi Ba’ath party leaders from throughout the country in a theatre in Baghdad.

First, the secretary of former President al-Bakr takes the stage and, after having been tortured and threatened in the days before, confesses to leading a plot to overthrow Saddam. He is then led away. Then Saddam pauses while he lights a Cuban cigar, and begins to calmly announce that the traitors are there in the room, and that “justice demands the sword”. As he puffs the cigar, he begins to slowly read the names of 68 party members who are participants in the plot, who are each ordered to stand, recite the party slogan, and are then led out of the hall.

All of the 68 were quickly tried for treason. 22 of them were sentenced to execution, carried out in public and televised, with other accused party members forced to murder their comrades with AK-47s.

The scenes inside the hall however are what still give me chills. As the names are called and the people sitting next to them are each led away, the 300-500 some people in the audience appear frozen - no one daring to rise or speak in opposition. After the last name is called and Saddam goes on to speak, they all rise and applaud furiously for the President’s proclamations, and it appears each time that no one wants to be the first person to stop. With the purge conducted in their presence, and fully impressed with the threat of death and fear for their lives and families, their absolute loyalty has been secured.

Which has me thinking more this week about the atmosphere of fear - infectious, disabling fear - that is pervading our own leaders and civic institutions today. I’m personally trying to find a good historical context for understanding what we’re experiencing.

But oh please, first the comparisons to Nazi Germany, and now Iraq?? Give us a break. None of our leaders would have people executed like Saddam! We’re a nation of laws. Plus, Trump would never, ever be able to pull off smoking a cigar as coolly as Saddam. So, the U.S. isn’t Iraq. And we’re not Nazi Germany.

A better way to think about that question might be to set aside direct comparisons to people and look for the patterns. Scholars like Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum tell us that countries moving from democracy to autocracy have followed a largely consistent set of patterns. Fear is a signature tool in the toolkit of all autocracies. Where America is on that trajectory may be debatable, but what’s not debatable is the growing culture of fear (AKA terror) in America today, and its corrosive effects on leaders in politics and throughout civic life. That fear can take many forms, but the signs of it are unmistakable.

No where has that culture of fear been more apparent than in the U.S. Congress, where it seems the last vestiges of independent thought are being erased.

Last November, as the names of one grossly unqualified Cabinet appointee after another made the papers, one unnamed staff told a reporter, “The Senate is not going to give up its advice and consent role for these guys. There are still a lot of senators who take their jobs seriously.”

As the increasing absurdity of each one of President Trump’s choices to lead agencies became apparent (Matt Goetz for Attorney General, RFK for HHS - is this a f%$#ing joke??), the predictable cluck-clucking from moderate Republicans (and some Democrats) gave way to silence, as even the most absurdly awful ones were confirmed on almost uniformly party-line votes.

The lonely and now lame duck Mitch McConnell, once the Darth Vader of the Republican movement but now an almost forgotten figure, was the sole Republican no-vote for Pete Hegseth, RFK, and Tulsi Gabbard. Ironically, it may not have been lost on him that he did more than anyone to ultimately set the stage for their being there to begin with.

Earlier in the morning on the day of the horrendous Oval Office meeting where Ukrainian President Zelensky was ambushed in a staged conversation that felt more like being shaken down by a mob boss, Zelensky had met with a bi-partisan group of US Senators including long-time Russia hawks Lindsay Graham (SC), Chuck Grassley (IA), and Roger Wicker (MS), all of whom expressed support (again) for Zelensky and Ukraine. Hours later, after the Oval Office assault, Graham’s staff removed photos of the Zelensky meeting from his website and released a statement suggesting Zelensky should resign.

Even after the monumentally consequential near abandonment of Ukraine and new-found support for Russia and our increasing detachment from NATO that appears to be coming under Donald Trump, Senators have not gone totally silent, but their protests and messages of concern have been muted almost beyond recognition. Many of them have coached Zelensky to come back and give away the Ukrainian minerals, with or without a security guarantee, but none of them have dared criticize the President directly.

On issue after issue, Republicans in Congress, even those with principled, long-standing positions and hard-earned expertise, have gone quiet or even crossed over to new positions. As Elon Musk and the DOGE team have ransacked agency after agency, firing staff en masse and killing entire programs, killing off USAID, the question keeps being asked, “when will they finally stand up?”

Another more pertinent question might be - what, exactly, are they so afraid of?

The classic answer for independent-minded politicians was always the fear of a primary. Buck the party line, and the party will find and fund your opponent in the next primary election. The Trump team has mastered that technique, leading to the sad spectacle that almost any Republican speaking in opposition to the Trump agenda today is one who has either left elected office already or announced their retirement and has no political capital left to lose.

But being primaried is not the only risk today - the danger today is more real and personal.

Congressman Eric Salwell (D-California) was recently quoted in an interview: “I have a lot of friends who are Republicans,” he said. “They are terrified of being the tallest poppy in the field, and it’s not as simple as being afraid of being primaried and losing their job. It’s their own personal safety and that of their family that they’re afraid of. They have spouses and family members saying, ‘Do not do this, it’s not worth it, it will change our lives forever. We will have to hire around-the-clock security.’ Life can be very uncomfortable for your children.”

Perhaps there’s no need today to drag people out of rooms in public and shoot them in courtyards, when the simple act of a Presidential tweet, or a tweet from Elon Musk, will instantly reach 10’s of millions of recipients, and unleash a torrent of hate and threats that will instantly change the quality of life for you and your family.

Trump’s public announcement that he personally ordered removal of the government security details that were protecting Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and others, all of whom were under credible death threats from at home and abroad, is another brutal signal that dissension in any form will put you at risk under this administration.

Bradley Moss, a lawyer for the FBI Agents Association, recalled Trump publicly attacking his boss, Mark Zaid. Zaid was a lawyer representing the whistleblower who disclosed details of a call Trump made to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in 2019 that eventually led to his first impeachment. “Donald Trump literally held up a photo of my boss, called him out by name, said he was scum, was a liar, etc,” Moss said. “Next day, I woke up to, like, 150 voicemails. Texts were flooded throughout my inbox. We were getting death threats like crazy, and there was actually at least one man who went to prison for making threats against my boss.”

All of these are signs of a weakening democracy - or an emerging autocracy.

In an excellent recent article in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way noted that: “Democracies require robust opposition, and robust oppositions must be able to draw on a large and replenishable pool of politicians, activists, lawyers, experts, donors, and journalists. A weaponized state imperils such opposition. Although Trump’s critics won’t be jailed, exiled, or banned from politics, the heightened cost of public opposition will lead many of them to retreat to the political sidelines.”

All of that brought me back to last Tuesday evening March 4th as I watched President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. I watched 77 year old Representative Al Green being ejected and led away by the Sergeant at Arms (and later censured) for his protest, and I watched Democrats futilely wave their little signs, but apparently lacking the courage to just get up and walk out together. And I watched every Republican in the chamber rise and applaud, and laugh, time and again as the President spoke of seizing Panama, and Greenland, and acquiring failing Canada, insulting trans people, and laughing about African countries ‘nobodies ever heard of’, and lying about Social Security fraud, and more.

And it made me think about all those Ba’-ath Party members in Baghdad in 1979 who were led away to their end while the people who remained just clapped on, smiling, in fear for their lives. I am sending a card of thank you today to Representative Al Green.

Don't sell the land momma, Don't sell the land

My heart's in these hills momma, Don't sell the land

- From the traditional Bluegrass song Don’t Sell the Land, by Harold Macomber and John Morris

In the first years of the 20th Century, two men with different ideas alternately collaborated and sparred over a vision for public lands in America. Both of them were friends and travel companions of the new President, Theodore Roosevelt.

According to the author John Clayton in his 2019 book Natural Rivals, “The romantic John Muir favored preservation: leaving nature alone so as to benefit from its holistic wonder. In contrast, the forester Gifford Pinchot believed in conservation: using natural resources sustainably to serve the ‘greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.’” In a huge, still largely unsettled country, and with a leader in Roosevelt willing to experiment with a long view and progressive ideals, those competing visions proved to also be complementary.

John Muir’s writing and advocacy led to creation of America’s National Parks, while Pinchot’s pragmatism and political savvy led to creation of today’s National Forests. Together they and Roosevelt helped make real the vision that the American people, through the federal government, would own our most special places, retained and managed for the common good.

That vision of our public lands has survived and thrived for more than 120 years, thanks to a durable bi-partisan consensus. Today, about 640 million acres of America (28% of the entire country) is managed in National Forests and Grasslands, National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, National Conservation Lands, and other lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) within the Department of Interior.

Fast forward to 2025 and there’s a new President, some new advisors, and a very different future is in the offing for our public lands. It turns out they’re worth something, and well, dammit, we could really use the money about now.

“Selling off large swaths of public land couldn’t happen here”? Consider that Donald Trump’s only apparent use for public lands to date has been to use them as a platform to blame others for their failures to manage them. And today there are no John Muirs or Gifford Pinchots to whisper in his ear about why losing them would be a terrible idea. Instead, there’s mainly just Elon Musk - who has probably not spent an entire day outdoors since he was a child.

If you weren’t convinced of that possibility already, consider seeing that horrific meeting at the White House last Friday when the President overturned 80 years worth of alliances with democracies around the world in a single conversation, sending a big F&%* You to our strongest and longest allies. That dark afternoon by itself should tell you that there’s not a single tradition, alliance, institution, agreement, or principle that matters enough to Donald Trump to preserve if breaking it advances his own interests.

The lines of evidence at this point are about as clear as writing on the wall in red Sharpie markers.

The first lines were drawn by the House of Representatives on January 3rd while Joe Biden was still President. 2025 House Resolution #5, adopted as one of the first orders of business, included an amendment in Section #(C)(2) that basically allows Congress to give away or sell public lands without considering their value, or the costs of giving them up, to the American people. This bit of stage setting didn’t receive a lot of press, except for groups like the Wilderness Society who watch those things closely.

According to the Wilderness Society’s Lydia Weiss, “This move effectively puts our public lands on the clearance rack and is the logical first step in a campaign to expedite sale of those lands.”

Exactly one month later, a new President with a bucket of new Sharpies started signing executive orders, including this one, that calls for formation of a new American Sovereign Wealth Fund, and which directs the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Treasury to figure out how to organize it, and figure out how to pay for it, and report back within 90 days.

Yea paying for it is going to be tricky. According to experts, including the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Sovereign Wealth Funds are typically created by countries with consistent surplus revenues. The fact that U.S. Government has not generated a surplus since Bill Clinton was in office and our national debt now exceeds $36 trillion makes it clear there is no surplus available to capitalize such a fund. That basically leaves selling stuff - which is where our public lands come in.

In fact, at the signing ceremony, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained where some of the money might come from: “We are going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people. We are going to put the assets to work.”

Enter our new Secretary of the Interior, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who explained in his confirmation hearing that the nation’s parks, public lands, and natural resources—including timber, fossil fuels, and minerals—are assets on “the nation’s balance sheet.” Burgum speculated in his confirmation hearing that federal lands could be worth as much as $100 or $200 trillion. He argued that the U.S. government, run like a business, should know the value of the corporation’s assets and use those assets “to get a return for the American people.”

All this talk is getting attention. Land Tawney of the American Hunters and Anglers Action Network was not shy: “Looking at our public lands as part of a balance sheet? That’s shit that’s never been said out loud before. Now you have a sitting Interior Secretary saying that, and the administration saying that. I think it’s definitely in the sphere of things that can happen and maybe even will happen.”

You’d have to sell everyone of our 640 million acres of federal lands for about $312,000 per acre to get the $200 trillion Burgum mentions. While that valuation is absurd if you’re just thinking about the surface rights, the much bigger dollar value in public lands lies below ground. If you factor in more than 700 million additional acres of federally-owned subsurface mineral rights, and more than a billion acres of oil and gas rights offshore, you’re getting closer to real numbers.

According to an unnamed former federal employee who spoke with Andrew McKean of Outdoor Life Magazine, states may be interested in cutting deals with the federal government, agreeing to take surface ownership, for instance, in exchange for allowing the minerals to remain in federal ownership.

“This is a terrifying proposition, because the states could maximize revenue by developing and then selling the surface, but the feds get to keep the [mineral] royalties and the industry gets a green light to drill and mine. It’s literally the worst of all worlds for those who want to keep the surface not only in federal [ownership] but un-industrialized.”

There are already mechanisms to sell existing federal lands without congressional approval. Small BLM parcels less than 2500 acres can be sold without approval, and sale of larger parcels are only blocked in Congress if one of the chambers passes a resolution to oppose it. Other agencies can dispose of lands if consistent with their own plans in value for value trades. Such trades however could easily be manipulated with skewed appraisal valuations. Without career employees and independent Inspector Generals in place that door is open even wider to abuse.

In Congress however, the pressure to find $1.7 trillion in spending reductions will not fall quietly on the backs of seniors and Medicaid recipients alone. But the drumbeat for billionaires tax cuts won’t stop either, and it’s possible, even likely, the gleaming temptation of federal land sales to meet the budget reconciliation mandates will start to look more and more appealing as members of Congress get weary of being mass harangued by shouting AARP members in grocery store parking lots at home.

For this consideration, the action will almost certainly occur at the House Subcommittee on Federal Lands, Chaired by Wisconsin’s own Representative Tom Tiffany. Those who know Congressman Tiffany won’t feel reassured by his commitment to the public domain.

One of the tyrannies of an all-business mindset is that you obsess about things that may be easy to measure (even if inaccurately), and tend to ignore the things that are harder to measure, even when they’re actually more important.

The things that almost certainly won’t be measured in a balance sheet if we start putting our public domain on the auction block include:

• The clean air, clean water, and wildlife habitat enjoyed by public land adjacent communities of all sizes and politics.

• The share of the $1.2 trillion in U.S. outdoor recreation spending attributable to public lands.

• The economic value of timber, oil, and minerals removed from federal lands that are effectively subsidized by federal stewardship.

• The conservation and public benefits of the more than $12 Billion federal agencies spend annually to maintain and restore public lands with investments that benefit local communities, businesses, and contractors.

• The over 70,000 federal employees employed in agencies managing those lands, a significant number of whom live, work and spend their paychecks and raise their children in rural communities.

• The up to 15% of U.S. annual CO2 emissions that are offset by American forests.

• The over $892 million sent annually to over 1900 counties and local units of government through the federal Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) and other formula programs. The PILT payment program expired at the end of 2024 and has yet to be reauthorized.

Did this list miss anything? Almost certainly it did, and I invite you to comment and add others.

But setting all this possibility up is the crisis in land management that has already been triggered by actions taken since January 20th.

The mass firing of as much as 10% of the federal lands workforce in mid-February is just the beginning. Barely a week later, agency heads received a directive from OMB Director Russell Vought to begin drafting restructuring plans to include shedding all agency responsibilities not directly and explicitly mandated by law, and to shrink agency budgets through Reductions in Force (AKA mass firings).

The memo’s first line is all you really need (or really want) to read: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.”

With agencies being turned upside down and led by appointees with little experience, and many or most of our best people at the doorstep, or already out the door, our Parks Service, Forest Service and other agencies will simply not be able to manage day to day needs, let alone crisis situations. In the short term there’ll almost certainly be a dramatic increase in unlawful activity, vandalism, illegal encampments, illegal off road use, resource damage, timber theft, and out of control fires.

That crisis in the making will need a resolution somehow. Are we hiring everyone back? Not likely or even possible at least in the short term. But there has to be a way forward.

It will be up to people with sound judgement and vision to help craft a better future, one that addresses needed reforms that can help better realize the incredible benefits public lands have provided Americans for more than 100 years.

And it’s time for everyone who cares about our public lands to make John Muir and Gifford Pinchot proud by standing up.

Spread the news across the land, and just do the best you can

All we've got is just the land; Take a stand, save the land.

- From Save the Land, by Grand Funk Railroad

Writer and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s National Parks "the best idea we ever had”.

The federal government, until this month, managed about 640 million acres of land and inland waters, which is about 28% of the total area of the United States. Let that sink in - more than a quarter of America is owned by you and me. In fact, the idea of National Parks, National Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, and our other public lands have been so awesome that typically well over 500 million visitors spend time on them each year.

I don’t have the ability here to adequately address the issue of indigenous lands in this picture, but it’s important and deserves to be noted that today’s U.S. public lands were all once tribal lands, and tribal communities throughout the United States have an important stake and legal right to be part of any decision making about their future.

Up until January 20th, the National Park Service (NPS) has an annual budget last year of $3.2 Billion. That’s .06% (1/15th of 1%) of the total federal budget - less than the budget of the City of Austin Texas. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) had an annual budget of just under $9 Billion, about .15% of the federal budget - roughly the same amount of money it takes to run the City of Sacramento, California.

Knowing this, the idea that the new administration, tasked with finding $4 trillion in savings to pay for massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, would look first to our National Parks, National Forests, and National Wildlife Refuges to find savings is simply absurd. But, in less than one month, the effect of firings, hiring freezes, and spending freezes is already deeply felt in many of the most special and most rural places in America.

In our own Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin, National Park Service staff maintain 69,000 acres on the mainland and 21 islands, including a visitor center, 9 lighthouses, 19 docks and associated harbors, ranger stations, bathhouses, and a total of 132 buildings. Park staff are also responsible for providing a safe and positive experience for more than 500,000 visitors each year, which they accomplish with the help of seasonal staff who are hired and trained over the course of the winter and spring.

Beginning in late January, the hiring of new employees throughout the National Parks System was frozen and job offers for seasonal employees were rescinded. This loss alone has guaranteed it will be impossible for most parks to maintain normal summer operations. In February, the seasonal staffing hole was compounded by the firing of over 2000 Department of Interior employees (including National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service), and up to 3400 US Forest Service employees who were considered probationary. At Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, the park that one year ago had about 20 full-time employees and was about to on board at least 12 more for the summer, now has just 13 employees, with no authority for a single new hire.

All the recently fired probationary staff throughout NPS, USFS, FWS, and other agencies received an email on a Friday morning that included this message: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” You worked your ass off on that job for not a lot of pay, but a lot of pride. Damn, that hurts.

Employees, including those traveling or in the field, were informed they had a few hours to return to and then vacate their offices before being locked out of email and all computer systems. Their supervisors received another email directing them on how to handle the firings. Imagine being directed to fire the person you hired and mentored and show them the door with a cardboard box on a few hours notice.

One supervisor noted that “All of the people fired from my organization were excellent performers. People were blindsided and absolutely demoralized by this treatment. I was forced to act in a way contrary to all my values. No employee should ever be treated this way.”

As a result of what’s already happened, camping and recreation opportunities on National Parks and National Forests will be dramatically curtailed. Many of those 500+ million annual visitors to public lands will be in for a rude surprise when they arrive to enjoy the highlight of their summer and find they have no place to shit or shower. On February 24th, all NPS spending accounts were frozen, meaning that should any future visitors even find an open bathroom, or manage to force their way into a closed one, there probably won’t even be toilet paper available because as of today the parks can’t buy any more.

Meanwhile, hundreds of infrastructure improvement projects such as trails, bridges, new facilities, energy upgrades, and roads that were in progress have been paused or abandoned - losing the value of the improvements, and in many cases stranding or wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of the employees fired at the Apostle Islands was a journeyman electrician who had been detailed to a project at Isle Royale National Park, upgrading off the grid park facilities at Isle Royale's two main facilities at Rock Harbor and Windigo from diesel generated electricity to solar power. All of the close to $2 million that has been invested in that work to date becomes a stranded cost to taxpayers, with no resulting benefit. $2 million wasted. None of the kids at DOGE telling us how much money they’re saving us is bothering to account for that.

Replicate this kind of stupidity 500 times, and you can begin to grasp the impact of the sledgehammer approach to personnel management taken by the Trump Administration.

Timber sale programs on National Forests contribute important benefits to the local economy and job creation and generate at least $150 million in cut timber revenue each year, a number which is multiplied many times over as those trees are harvested and processed into paper and wood products. Future timber sales will be significantly limited by federal firings as reduced forest staff are unable to meet timber sale targets, harming forest businesses and fueling talking points about bureaucracy on federal lands.

Perhaps most bizarrely stupid, and reckless, is the certain impact of firings on fire management. Although many employees whose jobs were specifically firefighting were (reportedly) protected from firing, many of the 3400 fired Forest Service and 1000 fired Park Service employees were cross trained for fire management and would serve on wildland fire crews during fire season, as well as assisting with prescribed fires and other fire safety management year round.

That might be worth saying again. The ashes were barely cool from the devastating fires in Los Angeles that surpassed all past fires for severity and property loss, when the nation’s lead fire management agency was forced to fire thousands of trained firefighters who would be on the lines to fight future fires in 2025.

Every science-based assessment of fire risk in fire prone areas finds a need for more fuel treatments and forest management to reduce fire risk. The Trump Administration has just increased the short-term and long-term fire risk for Americans living in fire prone areas.

The chainsaw theatrics with federal employees this administration is taking are not smart, they’re not efficient, they're hugely wasteful and expensive, and they’re unnecessarily cruel and disrespectful of people who make it their mission to serve the public interest. Treating people so callously is not consistent with any Christian values.

It only makes sense when you realize that hurting and demoralizing public servants is actually the intention. Hating on public servants became a policy goal long before January 20th. None other than Russell Vought, now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and one of the architects of Project 2025 said this in 2024, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Wisconsin US Senator Ron Johnson was asked about the firing by Wisconsin Public Radio and said “Better we do it in a controlled manner instead of in an uncontrolled crisis.” When 23 year old coders are actually pushing the buttons that fire tens of thousands of public servants in a single keystroke, it actually is an uncontrolled crisis and Senator Johnson, instead of acting, is watching it unfold in his own state.

For all the mess that’s occurring and about to occur on our nation’s great legacy of public lands, the question has to be, what happens next? In the short term there’ll almost certainly be a dramatic increase in unlawful activity, vandalism, illegal encampments, illegal off road use, resource damage, timber theft, and out of control fires.

Faced with the fallout from that mess, with federal land agencies emasculated and the best people running them having walked away or fled from public service, THIS administration will only be able to imagine (and certainly already is imagining) one solution: privatize the operations and open the gates to unrestricted private development. Today’s park concessionaires at places like Yellowstone will look like old fashioned ice cream stands compared to the casinos, bars, off road trails, parking lots, cheap hotels, and private marinas that may soon be coming to public lands near you.

Quite likely that was the desired outcome all along - and the destruction of public agencies and the people working in them was simply the necessary first step.

None of this of course is written in stone - our nation is writing this history day by day, and every one of us has a role. Leaders everywhere need to step up and oppose the gutting and trashing of our greatest public treasures.

Those leaders are everywhere - including YOU.