President Teddy Roosevelt with John Muir in Yosemite: National Archives

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

COULTERVILLE, Calif. – On May 14, 1903, 126 years ago this month, a Republican President was at a banquet in his honor in San Francisco, California. But instead of going along with the official schedule with all the well dressed dignitaries, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history – ditched the crowd to head for the Sierra mountains and go camping with a rag-tag Scotsman named John Muir, a wanderer who bathed in mountain streams.

Muir spent decades arguing that wilderness wasn’t a commodity to be harvested but a living, breathing system worth protecting. Roosevelt listened and agreed.

For three nights in Yosemite Valley, the most powerful man in the world disappeared on horseback with pack mules and canvas tents, even leaving the Secret Service behind. They camped beneath the Grizzly Giant, a sequoia so old it had been standing for millennia before the United States of America existed even as an idea.

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir camping in Yosemite: National Archives

Muir pointed to meadows chewed down to dirt by sheep. Ancient trees already marked with logging axes. And then he explained the chain reaction. Trees held snow. Snow fed rivers. Rivers kept farms alive hundreds of miles away. Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels and dies. He had mapped out some of the most important lands that needed protecting.

On the second night, a heavy snowstorm hit. Rangers feared for the President’s life. But at first light, they found him sitting upright, covered in several inches of fresh snow, brushing it off his mustache. He looked around at the silent white forest and burst out laughing. He called it one of the finest experiences of his life.

Roosevelt returned from those mountains a man with a mission. He protected 230 million acres of American land, created 5 national parks, 150 national forests and 18 national monuments. Yosemite itself was placed under permanent federal protection three years later.

War on Conservation

Now one of the most unpopular Republican president’s in U.S. history seeks to dismantle all of that by privatizing the Forest Service and gutting the National Park Service. He has not only declared an unpopular war on Iran. He has declared war on the very idea of conservation itself.

Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot are turning over in their graves as Donald Trump launches a devastating war against the conservation movement.

“With the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history,” according to one writer on Substack, “Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a ‘reorganization.’ An execution.”

The administration announced it would move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, home to the most anti-public-lands movement in America.

“They’re shuttering every single one of the 10 regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives,” wrote Jim Pattiz with “More Than Just Parks.”

More than 50 research outlets across 31 states are set to close, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, “the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone,” Pattiz says.

And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with 15 political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service build more roads and cut more trees. Its 193 million acres of protected forests, an area larger than Texas, the largest public land agency in the country, “handed over to the very people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”

They called it euphemistically a reorganization.

But what it actually is, “stripped of the Orwellian window dressing,” according to Pattiz, “is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history. It dwarfs anything that’s come before.”

This must not be allowed to stand. It will surely be reversed by the next administration, once the wrecking ball Trump is removed from the White House for good, never to return.

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Originally written as a syndicated column for The Progressive Populist newspaper out of Austin, Texas, and Iowa.

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