One of the fun features of America’s current moment is that, while one side tries to turn a fascist takeover into a crypto grift, the other has turned into a shambolic mess that chases outrage over effectiveness. Luke Nathan Phillips is a conservative public lands advocate who asked me to talk about bridging that gap. It’s my favorite podcast appearance so far.

You can listen to the podcast on spotify here.

Find Luke’s website here.

And follow Luke on Instagram here.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Here’s links to some of the stuff we discussed:

Wow. That bear spray article I published on Friday has become the most popular article I’ve written for this newsletter so far. And that fact in itself creates some stuff we need to talk about, while you guys have raised some points in the comments that require some clarification about the topic of the story itself.

But first, let’s start with some time travel.

Imagine for a second that you’ve paid a reasonably substantial sum of money to travel back in time, so you can see your favorite Old West character Billy the Kid in his natural habitat.

After landing in 1870s New Mexico, you naturally have some concerns about safety. Never mind that most communities back then regulated guns to the extent that they were banned in town centers, where only law enforcement officials were allowed to carry them, you’ve seen the old movies and you know Billy might be dangerous.

But not to worry, your time travel tour operator has the perfect solution. For the low, low price of $40 he’ll sell you a phaser set to stun that he personally guarantees will outperform any antiquated six-shooter these old timey simpletons might be carrying. And not only is it more effective—he even shows you a poster with some big numbers on it promising that—it’s also easier to use, and entirely non-lethal, so the good people back home protesting recreational time travel for involving too high a risk of collapsing space-time won’t get mad at you!

You swipe the payment chip embedded under the skin on the back of your hand across the operator’s NFC reader, and throw a can in the dusty saddlebag you bought just to wear for this trip, and sling that over your shoulder before heading into the saloon, where the operator promises Billy might just show up.

There, you sip a sarsaparilla while watching some cowpokes play poker. Before you know it, your two hours is up, and the time tour operator tells you it’s time to head back to the future. Not the one with the flying cars, the one where Biff Tannen has inexplicably taken charge, creating a dystopian hellscape.

Before you leave, the time travel tour operator informs you that phasers aren’t allowed in the time machine, but also that no one has considered that problem whatsoever, so there’s no chance of a buyback program or even a safe phaser disposal receptacle available anywhere near the timeport. In a rush, you chuck the phaser into a horse trough, and cross your fingers that you didn’t just create some sort of temporal paradox in which white supremacists again try to take over the country, just this time in the most clownishly incompetent manner possible.

Ok, back to our regular Biff Tannen-approved programming. Let’s discuss this fictional scenario.

Is selling time tourists a $40 phaser set to stun an ethical thing to do?

On one hand, it does seem to be effective at preventing temporal paradoxes caused by time tourists getting in sarsaparilla-fueled shoot outs with the locals.

On the other, we know that the time scientists commissioned to study the phaser’s effectiveness found it challenging to provoke Billy the Kid into fits of rage under controlled conditions, so mostly studied the phaser’s application in moving Billy away from the dumpster behind the timeport.

Based on that one very limited study (sending scientists back in time is not a profitable endeavor), we know that phasers don’t really work all that well if Billy actually draws down on someone, but since Wyatt Earp usually manages to confiscate his shooting irons anyways, that’s not always a problem.

That creates its own non-temporal paradox, because we sophisticates tend to think of time tourists as a notoriously dumb bunch of entitled assholes who will absolutely start shooting up the saloon when given half a chance. And doing that tends to create lethal outcomes for the finite number of Old West characters they will pay to travel back in time to see.

Rather than present the results of those time dumpster-based studies honestly, we’ve instead chosen to amplify misleading claims about the effectiveness of those phasers. And that seems to be working! By taking advantage of the cultural split between people worried about temporal paradoxes collapsing space time and people brainwashed into believing billionaire profits are more important than the continued existence of reality, we’ve successfully pivoted the discussion away from a close reading of the single, flawed study we’ve chosen to use, and into a conversation around shaming those who don’t fall in line with Marty McFly’s snazzy way of thinking.

Never mind that there’s more effective methods of avoiding a shootout with Billy the Kid that we ourselves use when we interact with him. Interventions like learning the topics that tend to enrage Billy, then simply avoiding those, or just not engaging Billy in conversation at all are nearly entirely effective. And choosing to visit the saloon with an expert in Old West culture can help you remember not to do those things, as can traveling in a group of fellow time tourists, while remembering to keep that group close together, so one of you doesn’t wander off and say something untoward to Billy while using the restroom. No, our time tourism business can’t rely on the vagaries of human behavior or intelligence, we must pursue technological solutions to all problems, no matter whether they actually work or not!

There, does making the most ridiculous possible analogy about bear spray help illuminate the topic, free of anthropomorphized emotions? Moving on…

Bear Spray Was Deployed In Fatal Glacier Attack

The Daily Inter Lake reports: “Search crews found a can of bear spray near where a Florida man was killed in an apparent bear attack in Glacier National Park earlier this month.”

[The victim’s father] “…believes Pollio deployed a can of bear spray during the encounter as officials indicated to him the area was very odorous when Pollio’s body was discovered days later.”

When I wrote last Friday’s article I’d been told that by a reliable source, but was asked not to report the fact definitively or do anything that might identify said source. Suggesting it was a rumor seemed like the responsible way to handle that.

You Really Don’t Like Clicking Links

Of the hundreds of thousands of readers who read last Friday’s article, only three percent clicked the link to the article I wrote for Outside way back in 2019, laying out all available science around bear defense and explaining the results.

I chose to link out to that rather than rehash my citations a) because that story took weeks of work and laid everything out much nicer than a recap could have, and b) because I was having a really busy day with some family stuff and had limited time to write.

This led to a number of readers, who I assume are unfamiliar with my career and reputation, to accuse me of going off half-cocked, and presenting conclusions without sources.

My takeaway is that I’ll try and do a better job of bringing older work forwards, even when that’s inconvenient. While it will never cease to amaze me that people are more prepared to spend their time writing extended screeds about what a piece of shit I am than they are following a provided link, it’s my job here to accommodate for the limited attention spans and reading levels of today’s media consumers, especially when writing about potentially contentious topics like bears.

Traffic Does Not Equal Revenue

As I wrote about in that piece addressing the false claim that the Forest Service is being dismantled, and the subsequent outrage cycle that caused (guess I forgot that previous resolution already, there’s a link there to an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago), media is in the midst of a transition away from “getting clicks” and into providing genuine service to its consumers.

Long term, this is probably a good thing. Short term, it’s making life hard for people like me who call journalism our career.

Despite being by far the most popular piece I’ve published on this newsletter so far, it netted me an entirely average amount of money.

I know both readers and colleagues are watching my career with curiosity, as I pivot away from the decade I spent as Outside Magazine’s most popular writer (by far) and into this new experiment in independence. I’m reluctant to reveal exact numbers for reasons of personal privacy, but here’s some limited insight:

This subscriber-supported newsletter nets me more per-year than the average salary in this country. But, I’m still making substantially less than I was until very recently. My floor for traffic here is higher than is currently being achieved by Outside, but I still don’t have the ceiling I did before that publication’s new ownership broke its website, then never bothered fixing it.

In terms of traffic, last Friday’s article was the most popular I’ve yet published on this platform, it’s still well behind what I was able to do with a fully-functioning legacy publication behind me. In terms of revenue, it made me $344, which is about my average here, and about a zero behind my highest earning article on this newsletter so far.

But, it did net hundreds of new free subscribers, and hopefully I’ll have the chance to convert some of those to paid subscribers in the near future, as they become more familiar with the value proposition I’m trying to create for you guys.

Just to save you the need to click a link, the media world is undergoing probably its biggest transition ever. External factors like changing practices at large tech firms like Meta and Google have eliminated the vast, vast majority of discovery that’d fueled easy reader conquest for the last two decades, while at the same time, consolidated ownership of legacy media brands is doing the whole obeying-in-advance thing Timothy Snyder warned us about, at the same time as the AI bubble is sucking up any capital that could otherwise be used to launch new ventures.

It’s been a perfect storm for eliminating jobs in journalism, even while leaving you, the reader, without good sources of information to turn to. Right now, it looks like the future might be independence, but it’s unclear how that will play out in the long term.

Also, you’ve always had to pay for media, that cost has just historically been hidden within the price of consumer goods. Eliminating the middle man actually represents better value for you, since you, rather than corporate America, get to choose the winners, but convincing you of that is exceptionally hard, and making a living from journalism right now is even harder. If you want journalism to exist around topics you care about—topics like animal conservation—then you need to step up and pay for a subscription to this newsletter.

There’s More To Bears Than Spray Versus Gun

The fact that the conversation around our ability to successfully coexist alongside large predators—which are more necessary for total ecosystem health now than they’ve ever been—has devolved into spraying them versus shooting them is desperately stupid.

The problem with presenting bear spray as more effective than a firearm, when it very much is not, is that by spreading that lie we’re giving people a false sense of confidence. People like the guy that just got killed in Glacier are venturing into bear territory with the understandable belief that they are equipped with an off switch for those bears, when that’s just not the reality.

The alternative to that isn’t tourists spraying national parks with uncontrolled full-auto bursts of 5.56 NATO, it’s people being given the chance to make reality-based decisions about their own safety. Decisions like simply choosing to hike somewhere without bears, decisions like paying for an experienced guide, decisions like owning or traveling with a big dog, and decisions like thinking critically about how they move through bear habitat.

I sincerely apologize that reality does not always involve fantastic solutions to real problems. I know that can be hard to hear. But it is my job as a journalist to present that reality in realistic terms, even if doing that does make you think I’m a giant piece of shit.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

On Wednesday, search and rescue crews in Glacier National Park located the body of a missing hiker. A statement reads, “His injuries are consistent with those sustained by a bear encounter.” Rumor has it that an empty can of bear spray was found alongside the body. Given the overwhelming presence of the message that bear spray is more effective than firearms, I think it’s reasonable to draw the conclusion that it wasn’t a grizzly bear that killed the man, it was disinformation.

If there’s one thing that sparks more controversy than guns in this country, it’s our ability to exist alongside large predators. And because that conversation often overlaps with the one around America’s toxic gun culture, and with our often clashing urban-rural, liberal-conservative cultural divides, it’s devolved into an absolute shit show. A shit show that precludes any chance of effective information reaching the people who need it.

As is anyone else who participates in the discussion around coexisting with grizzly bears, I am biased. As a mildly autistic person with an overdeveloped sense of justice, a special interest in bears, and who is quixotically pursuing the cause of journalism even as that profession is being destroyed by fascism, my bias is towards fact. In this article I’m going to do my best job as a journalist to present facts, and encourage you to use those facts to make smarter decisions about your own safety.

Fact Number One: Bears Are A New Problem

The population of grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies fell under 1,000 total bears by the late 1960s, and recovery efforts began in 1975, when the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

A large, slow-breeding omnivore prone to conflict with humans, grizzly bear populations expand gradually. Today, that population has roughly doubled from when the bears were listed.

The density of brown bear populations is determined by food sources. And with those remaining largely stagnant (or even becoming more sparse due to factors like climate change), young bears are forced to disperse to find territories not already claimed by mature adults.

This means that as bear populations grow, the bears are moving into places they haven’t lived for at least five or six decades, if not a century or more. And in that same time, the region’s population of humans has boomed. Towns and highways have been constructed in the places grizzlies used to live, while industrial farming and livestock grazing have moved not just into former grizzly habitat, but into the very mountain ranges that were once bastions for wild animals.

All brown bears everywhere in the world are the same species. But, populations elsewhere do not necessarily give us analogous practices we can apply to the Northern Rockies. Brown bear behavior and size vary heavily by ecosystem.

In coastal Alaska, for example, the Peninsular Brown Bear grows to roughly double the size of interior grizzly thanks to an ample supply of salmon. The bear I got a one-shot kill on there a couple years back stood nearly 10-feet tall. Those bears live in much denser populations in areas with few humans. They’ll run at the sight or smell of a human.

In eastern Europe, brown bears live in much closer contact with humans than they do even here in Montana. While staggering back to the hotel one night with a friend in the Romanian secret police, we saw one in an alleyway in downtown Brașov, which counts over 300,000 humans in its metropolitan area. It didn’t mind us watching it chow down on garbage from 20 yards away.

All that’s to say two things: 1) People living in or visiting the Northern Rockies and adjoining plains have not yet developed a broad cultural understanding of how to live alongside the grizzly. And 2) Information gathered elsewhere does not always apply well to our bears.

Fact Two: Bear Spray Is Not Effective In A Bear Attack

The only study ever conducted into bear spray’s efficacy found that, in an actual bear attack, bear spray was only totally effective one-third of the time.

I’ll wait while you wipe off the coffee you just spat on your computer screen.

The reason why you find that number so surprising is that it runs completely counter to the omnipresent propaganda spread by people that think you’re too stupid to handle the truth.

The common claim about bear spray is that it’s more effective than a firearm. The trouble is, that claim is in no way connected to reality.

I explored this in detail in Outside, before that publication fired me for writing articles like that. The origin story for it is that the PR department at BYU was desperate for a headline, so convinced a journalist at The New York Times who really should have known better to conflate the results of two different studies in order to reach a conclusion not supported by the science.

»PEOPLE SEEM TO BE STRUGGLING TO FOLLOW LINKS. JUST SO ITS COMPLETELY CLEAR, HERE IS A LINK TO AN ARTICLE I WROTE IN 2019 EXPLAINING ALL OF THE STUDIES ABOUT BEAR DEFENSE AND DETAILING THE STUDIED FAILURE OF BEAR SPRAY AS A DEFENSIVE TOOL. YOU CAN CLICK THESE WORDS AND THEY WILL TAKE YOU THERE.«

Source: the scientist who conducted those two studies. I called Tom Smith up at his home in Alaska, and he told me, “The appearance that bear spray outperforms firearms was not the focus of our work.”

The quick explanation there is that Smith conducted two different studies (among many others). The one about bear spray was intended to give federal conservation agencies the data they needed to give their workers bear spray for use in field work. Smith told me that most of the incidents he studied were, “largely intentional hazings, not surprise-encounter-type situations.”

The study on firearms that’s so often compared set out with an entirely different purpose and methodology. It was designed not to produce a conclusion on whether or not firearms are effective at stopping bear attacks, but rather to study the reasons why firearms sometimes fail to stop a bear. As such, Smith purposely selected incidents in which firearms failed, while excluding data sets that demonstrated their success.

No study has ever set out to compare the success rate of firearms to the success rate of bear spray. Anyone who ever suggests otherwise is lying to you.

And the entire problem with that conversation isn’t the false conclusion that’s so widely spread, it’s the binary framing of firearm vs spray, when a much more effective conversation would simply be built around preventing a bear from attacking you in the first place.

Fact Three: Avoiding A Bear Attack Is A Way Better Idea Than Trying To Stop One

In all of this, I’m constantly amazed that the conversation is so focussed around a false claim about bear spray’s efficacy rather than simply equipping people with the knowledge necessary to avoid a bear attack in the first place.

I live in Bozeman and regularly recreate across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, our family owns a second home near Glacier National Park at which grizzlies are omnipresent, and I spend virtually all of every September, October, and November sneaking around grizzly habitat in the dark hoping to ambush a deer or elk. How do I stay safe? Knowledge.

According to Smith, the world’s foremost expert on human-bear conflict, simply going outdoors with another adult, and remaining close together, may be the simplest, most effective bear avoidance technique we have.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have not seen an instance where two or more persons have remained grouped, whether standing their ground or backing from a bear, that the bear made contact,” he told me.

Elsewhere in his research we can see that you’re twice as likely to be attacked by a bear in poor visibility terrain as you are when you can see a good distance. And that humans have a 90 percent success rate at terminating in-progress maulings by physically intervening, while those rescuers only have a 10 percent chance of being mauled themselves.

Put all that together—travel in groups and remain tight together, avoid areas of dense brush or tree growth when in bear habitat, help a buddy if they do get attacked—and you have the simple, effective, easily communicated information you need to actually stay safe in bear country.

It blows my mind that propaganda about bear spray is pushed at the expense of genuinely effective fact. I guess it’s just harder to package a few easy pieces of advice into a $40 can than it is some 2 percent capsaicin.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

The purpose of the Republican Party is to steal from working Americans and give to billionaires. And nowhere is that more evident than in eastern Montana, which was this week covered by The New York Times. You see, the Trump administration is ordering some rich people’s private bison herd off public land, in order to convince some poor cattle farmers that they work in their interest. Promise I’m about to make this make sense.

Here’s a gift link to the paywalled NYTimes story.

If there’s a more entitled, hypocritical set of people than cattle ranchers, I haven’t met them. They rely on taxpayer handouts in order to live the Western dream across vast swaths of land, then exert their extraordinary political power to turn around and tell everyone else that government aid, when it’s given to anyone other than ranchers, is “socialism.”

Nevermind that socialism is a system in which the government owns the means of production, and cattle ranchers are stealing money from the rest of us in order to produce beef for profit.

The ranchers themselves aren’t necessarily to blame for that, America’s unique political system, in which dirt is valued more highly than people, is.

Eastern Montana only counts about 100,000 humans in its population, but there’s room across those 90,000 square miles for about two million cows. This state and its 1.1 million citizens are represented by two entire Senators, giving all that dirt and all those cows the same political power as 40 million Californians.

Republicans at both the state and federal level do an absolutely terrible job representing the interests of those handful of cattle ranchers in eastern Montana. What they are really good at is convincing those ranchers that they aren’t getting screwed.

Since the 1950s, Republicans have held the cowboy up as the American ideal. And while nowhere is it more evident that the image of the rugged individualist thriving without any aid from a faraway government is a complete fabrication than it is with cattle ranchers, who survive almost entirely on government subsidies, those cattle ranchers sure do appreciate being the subject of all those movies and tv shows.

Visit northeastern Montana and you’ll see these “Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie Reserve” signs everywhere. SaveTheCowboy.net claims, “The APR is an existential threat to communities all over north central Montana. The success of APR is contingent upon them eradicating hundreds of family farms and ranches.” Other common pieces of disinformation spread by rightwing sources center around cut-off hunting access (APR allows hunters) and the spread of brucellosis, which actually works counter to claims: cows give it to bison, not the other way around.

But there’s something about the cognitive dissonance between being pandered to by make believe cowboys from California and that image being entirely fake that must make you subconsciously resent outsiders, because if there’s one widely understood truth about cattle ranchers it’s this one: they really do dislike people who aren’t of their kind.

Which leads us to discussion of American Prairie. Starting in 2001 with the goal of creating America’s first entirely-private national park, American Prairie is a tax avoidance vehicle for the Mars family. It’s been buying up ranches in the region ever since, and has set about restoring them to their natural state.

Remediating the damage caused by a century of industrial cattle ranching across over 900 square miles of open prairie would be an expensive endeavor, even for the Mars family. Luckily for them that nature has given them the perfect tool, and it operates for only $1.69/month per-cow and calf, at least on public land.

There’s two key pieces of information you need to understand coming into this discussion:

1. Bison act like “ecosystem engineers.” A wild animal that evolved to coexist with its native prairie, their natural movements break up the soil compaction caused by moo cows, disperse seeds, and foster the biodiversity that restores a healthy environment.

2. Land out West isn’t divided up into orderly parcels. It’s fragmented into interlocked, or “checkerboard” sections of private and public, often only separated by lines on a map.

Just one area operated by American Prairie shows a complicated mix of their own land, state land, BLM land, wildlife refuge, and other private land owners. Source: OnX

Check out any real estate listing for ranch land and you’ll see two types of acreage are included: deeded and non-deeded, with the latter often made up of permits to graze livestock on Bureau of Land Management or National Forest land. Sometimes that public land is even entirely “locked” inside of the private acreage surrounding it, making it a de facto part of a ranch, even if the public technically owns it. Which is where Republican politicians get involved.

Substitute “expensive hobby ranch” for “America’s first entirely private national park,” or “Mars family tax avoidance scheme,” and you’ll understand that we’re talking about the same thing. Yanking those $1.69 (nice) permits would represent a major blow to any operation, whether it’s engaged in ecosystem rehabilitation, or taxpayer-subsidized ecosystem harm. And that’s exactly what Montana’s Congressional delegation just did, in an effort to retain control of the Senate in this fall’s mid-terms.

Our Governor, Greg Gianforte (the dinosaur part of this conversation) is a tech billionaire from San Diego who occasionally takes a break from his regularly-scheduled program of persecuting anyone in this state who isn’t a straight, white, creationist dude to travel all the way from Bozeman to eastern Montana to dress up like a cowboy and pander to ranchers. He’s sometimes joined by his sidekick, Steve Daines, a tech millionaire from Van Nuys who made his fortune working for Gianforte in Bozeman, and who also likes to dress up like a fake cowboy.

The problem for the Mars family appears to be a lack of PR. By failing to dress up like fake cowboys, and go pander to American Prairie’s neighbors, they’ve reinforced the accurate perception that they’re rich outsiders trying to change eastern Montana’s way of life. And that’s something Gianforte and Daines, who are also rich outsiders trying to change eastern Montana’s way of life, yet somehow avoid that label through occasional cowboy hat wearing, have eagerly exploited.

Now, as Daines is retiring and his handpicked successor Kurt Alme faces a hard election battle against three excellent Democratic candidates and one extremely well-funded independent, control of the Senate may lie in eastern Montana, where people are currently very pissed off.

Even as Trump’s moronic trade war makes Montana beef uncompetitive in global markets, and even as the cost of producing it has increased, the foreign competition is being subsidized. Beginning in February, our dear leader authorized the import of 100,000 metric tons of Argentine beef, and exempted that from tariffs. That’s depressing prices even as input costs have soared due to the ongoing war with Iran. In addition to fuel costs, that region produces one-third of the global supply of fertilizer. And with that locked up, prices of cattle feed are soaring. Feed represents as much as 75 percent of operating costs for ranchers, any increase there squeezes already tight margins.

And margins are apparently getting tight enough for ranchers in eastern Montana that they might even vote for someone other than the Republican candidate for Senator. Unable or unwilling to rein in Trump, what Republicans need to win that race is the ability to refocus cattle ranchers on an enemy, and a victory against that perceived threat.

So what you’re really seeing take place with the order removing American Prairie’s bison from federal land doesn’t have anything to do with the Taylor Grazing Act, or whether or not bison are considered “livestock” in federal law, or anything else. It’s just naked politicking by Republicans in order to create yet more disinformation in an effort to influence the mid-term elections.

Put that under John Roberts’ repeal of the Voting Rights Act, the potential deployment of ICE to polling places, changes to voter ID rules, and attempts to disenfranchise women on your list of ways in which Republicans are trying to steal the mid-terms.

It’s hard to look at that list, and the extreme methods Republicans are employing in order to make it all reality, and come away with any conclusion other than that they’re running scared. They’ve lost the war for the hearts and minds of Americans, so they’re going to try to beat us using any other method instead.

But that can’t be the end of this story, because we’re not just talking about some poor ranchers here. We’re talking about some of the richest hobby ranchers on earth. And the Mars family is not without political power. And they are politically active. According to Open Secrets, they donated $166,000 in trackable donations to the Republican National Committee during the 2024 cycle, they also gave $72,000 to Kamala Harris, and $7,000 to former Senator Jon Tester, an actual farmer from eastern Montana.

And while that will be the playing field for this election, that could change for future ones, thanks to something else going on here in Montana that hasn’t yet gathered major national attention. The Transparent Election Initiative is gathering signatures to put its Montana Plan on statewide ballots this fall. Should that prove successful, it will bring to a halt the unlimited spending also made possible by John Roberts, with his decision in Citizens United.

Do free range bison stand a chance in any of this? If the Montana Plan can succeed, political feuds between billionaires like this one will be significantly limited. And that might just be the best thing for all wildlife, including the fluffy cows, that’s ever happened.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Harry Truman famously displayed a sign on his desk in the oval office that read, “The buck stops here.” It was meant to accept accountability for decision making, and through that, to exert authority. That’s the opposite of the leadership approach being put forward by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who just spent the week doing everything he could to lie, duck responsibility, and blame others for his own failures. But let’s start with the good news.

Westerman ESA Rollback Fails, Again

Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas) has been on a mission to destroy the Endangered Species Act as long as he’s been in Congress. His argument goes like this: “nO SpECCIES HAS reCOVered!!!!1!” (This is an exact quote.)

The problem there is that the ESA was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1973, and wildlife population levels don’t necessarily operate on 50-year timelines, especially as we continue to do nothing about the climate disaster. The reality-based rebuttal to corrupt dolts like Westerman is simply that 99 percent of species protected by the ESA haven’t gone extinct, even as human populations in this country have increased by 65 percent. And that is a remarkable achievement. Biodiversity is critical for sustaining human life.

Republicans in Congress had been planning to mark Earth Day this week by passing a version of the ESA rollback Westerman first introduced in 2021, which would have massively limited protections for protected species. But, that vote was abruptly cancelled when it became apparent they didn’t have the votes to pass it. That’s a solid victory for America, and a further indication that Republicans are seriously starting to sweat the mid-terms.

The attempt also resulted in by far my favorite version of the Gadsden Flag yet, Tweeted out by Anna Paulina Luna.

A Reality-Based Congressional Voting Scorecard

Speaking of the approaching mid-terms, it’s looking like we’re going to have to fend off significant efforts at disinformation around issues like public lands, climate change, and the environment not just from the party of petroleum, but also our allies here on the left.

Case in point: a supposed public lands voting scorecard published by the Substack newsletter “More Than Just Parks,” contains misleading conclusions.

For instance, Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), who has been a consistent champion for public lands across his 18-year career in Congress, and who was one of the leading voices in the fight to protect the Boundary Waters, is awarded a C grade, and ranked 45th, while Ruben Gallego, who last year introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act is awarded a D grade.

This is the same newsletter that recently spread the lie that the Forest Service is being “dismantled.”

Looking for a better source of information to inform your vote? The League of Conservation Voters has been publishing its National Environmental Scorecard since 1970. It awards Heinrich a 94 percent lifetime pro-environment score, while Gallego receives a 93 percent rating.

Wildland Fire Service Transition Plan

Speaking of disinformation, as fire season ramps up we can expect a ton of noise attempting to direct blame at anything other than the real cause: anthropogenic climate change exacerbated by decades of irresponsible development in the wildland urban interface.

One topic that you’re going to start hearing about nonstop is this new Wildland Fire Service.

On its surface, the idea of unifying federal firefighting efforts into a single agency isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just high consequence. And given this administration’s general incompetence, I think it’s justified to have a whole heck of a lot of skepticism about both the motivations and execution.

Also, if you don’t already subscribe to “The Hotshot Wakeup” newsletter, you should. They just published an analysis of the full USWFS transition plan, and reading that will help boost understanding as we move into a summer full of finger pointing over fire disasters.

Doug Burgum Passes The Buck

Speaking of finger pointing over fires, Doug Burgum did exactly that this week while testifying first in front of the House, then the Senate, about the White House’s nonsensical budget for FY2027.

As a quick note on that budget: it’s deeply stupid, and stands zero chance of becoming reality. So while it’s a good reminder that this administration is evil, there’s no need to pay much mind to it beyond that.

While testifying on Monday, ol’ Burgy was asked why last year’s fire that destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge was so bad. Rather than point towards climate change making fires inevitable, or a history of firefighting policies that we now know to have worsened fuel loads, he instead blamed staff at the National Park Service.

“…in retrospect, an approach of suppression versus containment might have saved hundreds of millions of dollars of historic properties,” he said, while falsely accusing NPS of failing to fight the fire aggressively enough. He did this in order to justify an order that the new Wildland Fire Service pursue a policy of immediately pursuing suppression around any fires that start this year.

“It’s going to be a year of suppression, meaning that when a fire begins, we’ll put it out. Sometimes we’ve had land managers that feel like they’ve been underfunded in terms of fuel load management, and so they’ll let a fire burn, you know, in a national park or in a wildlife refuge. They’ll let it burn thinking like, ‘Oh, I can manage some of my fuel load.’”

He points to the obvious problem with his own strategy: forests evolved to burn. And the century-long policy of extinguishing fires in order to protect buildings is, along with climate change, why we are experiencing such devastating fires.

With his suppression order, Burgum is again passing the buck, pushing the problem of historically high fuel loads onto future land managers, rather than accepting responsibility for the problem during his tenure.

Burgum was also asked to justify the cuts made to NPS staff last year. Remember, that rather than fire staff himself, he passed that responsibility onto DOGE, which then fired 4,000 park rangers, or 24 percent of all national parks staff.

“The [argument] that there was a massive reduction in the parks or anywhere across Interior related to DOGE is simply not factual,” Burgum lied in response, before suggesting that any firings were only of “probationary workers.”

Interior Participated In Lee-Daines Sell-Off Attempt

An investigation conducted by The Wilderness Society turned up emails that showed Department of the Interior Staff assisted Mike Lee and Steve Daines in their effort to mandate the sale of millions of acres of public land in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That material was published by “Public Domain,” another Substack you should subscribe to.

Most relevant here is the revelation that, through his staff, Burgum tried to aid the effort to sell lands under his management, even while claiming he was simply trying to create, “affordable housing.”

Altogether, this shadiness, plus all the stuff above, adds up to what’s really starting to look like a serious pattern of our interior secretary attempting to shirk any and all responsibility for absolutely anything, while repeatedly lying when asked about it.

If we can win against all the efforts at creating disinformation around the mid-terms from both the left and right, we stand a chance at Democrats taking control of both the House and Senate, at which point they’ll be able to hold Burgum accountable. This pattern of pushing responsibility onto his employees, then lying about that under oath, sure sounds like an impeachable offense to me.

The On Again Big Bend Border Wall

“Our Public Lands And Waters,” another Substack you should be reading and supporting, has details on the latest version of the plans to destroy a big slice of Big Bend National Park in an effort to virtue signal racism to the MAGA base.

During normal times, the federal government is accountable to the American people and must ask for our input around projects on public lands through the NEPA process. Not only are they engaged in efforts to dismantle that process, but they are also unwilling to answer questions from journalists. That results in this mess where we’re left trying to decipher any partial information that is occasionally made public.

All that’s to say: we won’t know what’s going to get built in Big Bend until it gets built. And again, if we can achieve a Democratic takeover of Congress, it probably won’t get built. If you care about the Rio Grande River, your first priority should be supporting Democrat candidates in the mid-terms.

National Parks Traveler Closing

“Without the arrival of a patron saint of both the parks and the journalism that chronicles them, one with the resources who will commit to continue the Traveler’s mission and evolution, the operation will go dark this summer,” writes Kurt Repanshek, who has published National Parks Traveler for the last 21 years.

NPT has been a fixture in reporting around national parks as long as I’ve been writing about them, and its closure is just one more indication of how hard journalism has become in the 2020s. If you care about worlds like national parks and public lands, and want good journalism around those topics to exist, you must support it.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Testifying in front of the House of Representatives on Monday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum revealed that the maintenance backlog in national parks now totals over $35 billion. This is the first time we’ve gotten an estimate on the increase to the backlog caused by the Trump administration’s first year in office. The backlog stood at around $23 billion at the end of FY2024.

Republicans have been forcing a fail-by-design plan onto the park service for decades. That agency manages 85 million acres of our nation’s most valuable, visited, and fragile public lands, and our most important historic sites, yet the administration’s budget for FY2027 proposes slashing over $1 billion from its already inadequate $3.3 billion annual budget.

To put that budget in perspective, the entirety of the National Park Service uses in an entire year the equivalent of about a day-and-a-half of what the war in Iran costs taxpayers.

How has the administration managed to add $12 billion to the backlog in just a single year? Four main reasons:

1. Efforts to address the backlog were already underfunded. Even before Trump and his stooges entered office, the backlog was already expanding faster than supposed efforts to address it were able to mitigate.

2. NPS lost around 4,000 staff, or 24 percent of its full-time workforce, to DOGE RIFs and other cuts last year. Much of the maintenance in national parks is performed during summer months by seasonal hires, and efforts to staff up those operations last year were also sabotaged by the administration.

3. Leaving national parks open but understaffed during government shutdowns results in massive amounts of damage. The problem is so bad that officials from both Trump administrations have attempted to cover up the totals. At 43 days, last year’s shutdown was the longest ever.

4. Visitation is booming. At 332 million visitors, 2024 set the all-time record, and last year was a close second. More people equals more wear and tear, but the administration is responding by reducing rather than increasing maintenance budgets.

What’s included in the maintenance backlog? It’s tempting to think of it in terms of potholes, since roads in national parks have become so bad in recent years, but the problem includes everything from trail erosion to rusting water pipes. And all of this neglected maintenance absolutely impacts visitor safety. System-wide, there’s 17,000 miles of trails in need of work, 5,500 miles of road, and thousands of buildings and water systems that are slowly crumbling. All of this reduces the quality of the visitor experience, creates traffic and falling hazards, and results in environmental degradation as wastewater leaks into park water sources.

Exposing park visitors to those risks is a deliberate decision being made by the administration, as part of its plan to privatize park service operations.

The Trump administration alone is not to blame here. Leaders from across the political spectrum have failed to meet the scale of the challenge, even while taking advantage of it for campaign messaging.

Case in point: the Great American Outdoors Act, which passed with bipartisan fanfare in 2020, dedicated about $1.3 billion annually in offshore oil and gas royalties to the park service’s backlog over five years. But, despite all the victory laps from politicians on both sides of the aisle, that backlog still increased from about $14 billion to over $23 billion during that time.

Now, that five-year Legacy Restoration Fund has expired, and the proposal being put forward to replace it actually reduces funding by 15 percent.

All of this is, of course, stupid and short sighted. Every dollar invested in national parks nets taxpayers $18 in economic output. That’s such a good return on investment that it’s only eclipsed by ROI on other types of public land. But, rather than spending our money wisely on something that all Americans can agree is important, the administration is instead proposing pulling money from national parks in order to buy more bombs.

If you are able to afford to visit a national park this summer, and that visit results in a flat tire after you hit a pot hole, or a nasty case of diarrhea after you drink the water, remember that the money we could have spent preventing that stuff is instead being spent dropping bombs on schoolgirls halfway around the world.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

Traitors. Republicans in the Senate just voted to permit the construction of a heavily polluting mine in the headwaters for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The region’s ecosystem will be destroyed, taking with it $1.1 billion in annual economic activity, 17,000 jobs, and one of the last unspoiled slices of nature left in this country. What does America get in return? Nothing. Profits will go to Chile, the copper will go to China where it will help that country race head of us in its AI buildout, and any jobs created will go to workers from outside the state and country. Polluted water will also flow into Voyageurs National Park, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, and Lake Superior.

This is a developing story, I will build this story out further throughout the day. Check back for more.

“The Boundary Waters is a national treasure, and Americans visit it by the hundreds of thousands each year to enjoy the freedom to explore its pristine waterways and forests,” states Abby Tinsley, senior vice president of conservation programs at The Wilderness Society. “Today’s vote will expose the wilderness area’s headwaters to toxic mining waste forever, using a reckless and unprecedented tactic that puts countless more cherished public lands at risk. The Senate just bulldozed over local voices and science-based management in order to give America’s public lands away to a foreign mining conglomerate. Future generations deserve better, and our fight to protect this special place is far from over.”

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness covers 1.1 million acres of northern Minnesota, including 1,175 lakes, and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. A Congressionally-designated Wilderness, no road construction, motorized equipment, or commercial activity are permitted.

165,000 people visit each year, bringing with them $1.1 billion in economic activity that supports 17,000 jobs.

The primary draw is the area’s water, which is so famously pure that you can drink it right out of the lakes as you paddle across them. That water supports the kind of abundant populations of smallmouth bass, walleye, lake trout, and northern pike that no longer exist elsewhere in the lower 48 states.

But that pure water may also be the area’s undoing.

Water in the BWCA is so famously pure that it lacks the mineral content that could buffer sulfuric acid and reduce its harmful impacts. So, as that slowly enters the area’s rivers, lakes, and streams through mining waste, it will spread unabated. A “forever” pollutant, that sulfuric acid will stick around for centuries. Once the mine begins operation, no one alive today, and none of our children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren will ever again experience an unpolluted Boundary Waters.

That sulfuric acid will prove particularly harmful to the area’s fish populations, and the ecosystem they support. Sulfuric acid lowers the pH of the water sources it enters, and that then damages the gills of fish causing respiratory failure—fish will literally drown. The toxic aluminum it will leach from soil will disrupt fish reproduction, and reduce their food sources, which will likely lead to population collapse.

Sulfuric acid will also render the area’s water unsafe to drink, and its fish unsafe to eat. That will then impact species further up the food chain like black bears, wolves, and eagles.

There is not a possibility that sulfuric acid will enter the Boundary Waters, and then Voyageurs, Quetico, and Lake Superior, there is a certainty. Plans for the mine involve dumping hundreds of millions of tons of mine waste on the banks of the Rainy River, which flows for just a few miles before entering BWCA. There is no technology capable of preventing sulfuric acid from the mine waste from entering the Rainy River.

Once mine construction is complete, and extraction of the sulfide ore begins, the exposure of that material to water and oxygen will begin, forming the sulfuric acid that will then slowly leak into the Boundary Waters. Every day that the mine remains active, the pollution it creates will increase.

That copper sulfide mine will be built by Twin Metals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chilean minerals conglomerate Antofagasta. Profits will then go to Antofagasta’s owners, the Chilean billionaire Luksic family.

Antofagasta has already struck a deal to ship copper extracted from the mine to China for smelting. It will then be sold on the Chinese market. Demand for copper is booming in China as that country rushes to build out is renewable energy infrastructure in an effort to race ahead of the United States in the roll out of compute capacity in support of artificial intelligence.

According to Antofagasta’s own accounting, the mine will take about three years to build, at which point it will generate $1.2 billion in annual revenue, supporting 750 jobs. An Antofagasta representative has gone on-record stating that because there are no other copper mines in the state, that employment will be sourced from outside Minnesota and the United States.

“The short-sightedness of this incredibly disappointing decision is staggering,” states Lukas Leaf, executive director of Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters. “By overturning the mining moratorium in the Rainy River Watershed, our elected officials have put the interests of a few above the benefit of many. including the future generations we are fighting for. Paving the way for the Twin Metals mine does little, if anything, to satisfy the America First agenda, and is a direct assault on our outdoor heritage and public lands nationwide.”

While numerous lawsuits will invariably be fought, even the people filing them tell me they expect Antofagasta to begin construction as soon as the President signs this bill into law. Never say never, but I do not expect a legal remedy to become possible until such a time as Republicans are removed from power.

One unintended consequence here is that this vote—which uses the Congressional Review Act to disapprove a USFS management plan for the first time—will shift all of that agency’s management plans and the thousands of permits for commercial activity issued through them into being “rules” that require Congressional approval, and which cannot be replaced by anything “substantially” similar. So, while reports from a couple weeks ago that the administration was “dismantling” the Forest Service were wildly false, this vote in the Senate will, in actual reality, have the effect of dismantling USFS’s ability to conduct business for the foreseeable future.

Chile’s Antofagasta has more than enough money to endure endless court battles. America’s independent ranchers, entrepreneurial energy extractors, and small logging companies will be the ones who feel the impacts of this vote the most. So even while Republican senators have just stolen America’s natural heritage in order to give China an advantage in the race to roll out artificial intelligence, they have also caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.

The purpose of the Republican party is to steal from working Americans and give to billionaires. Apparently that includes foreign billionaires, even ones profiting from the success of our geopolitical adversaries. Never before has Republican disdain for America’s future been more stark.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

More:

The Senate has returned from its recess celebrating Zombie Jesus Day, and they’re hungry for brains. Actually I just made that up, everyone knows Republican politicians prefer to dine on the flesh of trafficked children. See the problem with fabricating stories? It leaves you, the general public, not knowing what to believe, which erodes the very foundations of both journalism, and the democratic society it supports. This is my weekly attempt to fix that.

HB 140, The Most Visited Wilderness In America, And China’s AI Buildout

All signs are pointing towards leadership in the Senate moving towards taking up House Joint Resolution 140 sometime in the next 10 days.

Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.

That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.

I dove into all that in more detail at this link.

Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.

So, either Republican Senators vote no, save the Boundary Waters, and cross their fingers that the mess they’ve created for the BLM doesn’t impact USFS, or they vote yes, destroy the Boundary Waters, and with it also destroy the Forest Service’s ability to conduct regular business for the foreseeable future.

A Note About Journalism, And Making Shit Up

I’ve worked as a journalist since an investigation I put together in my high school paper got our principal fired during my senior year. I graduated high school in 1999. I went to college for journalism, I began my career as journalist in 2002, have worked as a journalist without a break since that time, and continue to pursue the career even now, as the industry that supports it is collapsing.

All that’s to say: I believe in the cause of journalism—informing the public—and I’d like to think I’m equipped to speak about journalism from a place of experience.

I’ve been doing journalism around public lands since the late 2000s. In that time, my work around the topic has made it onto network and cable news, major newspapers, documentary films, and congressional hearings. I have won awards for the journalism I’ve done around public lands. And my work as a journalist covering public lands was recognized by the Biden White House.

I am not the only good source of journalism around public lands, but I do have a lot of experience with the topic, and am able to speak about it authoritatively.

The claim made by the Substack newsletter More Than Just Parks that the Trump administration is “dismantling” the Forest Service is, at best, a vastly under-informed, alarmist dissimulation of fact, and at worst an outright fabrication. One that’s spread widely, and been parroted by social media accounts as large as Alt National Park Service (which has no affiliation with the actual NPS, or any of its current or former employees) and even by Patagonia.

I’ve already tackled this topic twice now (link 1, link 2), and explained why just making shit up about public lands is so problematic for the cause of protecting public lands, so I’ll stop now.

I encourage all readers to carefully consider the sources of information you rely on during these troubled times. And I’ll remind each and every one of you that you’re welcome to reach out to me directly if you ever need help determining whether something is real. That offer extends to my fellow journalists. I am here for the net cause of journalism, not my own personal gain or ego.

What Is The Forest Service Anyways?

A central thrust of that fabrication appears to be that USFS is some kind of altruistic charity which can be “dismantled,” rather than a federal agency tasked with the job of permitting industrial activity on the lands it manages, under the legal framework created by laws like the Organic Administration Act of 1897, the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the National Forest Act of 1976.

Any time you hear about multiple use or whatever, all of that takes place within the bounds of that legislation, which are works that you can read, learn from, and apply to the real world. If the administration wants to achieve its aims of logging literally everything, it needs an intact Forest Service in order to manage that process, not a “dismantled” one. USFS is not being dismantled.

That’s to say: USFS is neither good nor bad, it is simply a federal agency tasked with the job of administering laws created by Congress. As much as we in the tree hugging outdoor recreation space like to tell ourselves feel-good fictions about the importance of our contributions to the economy, the very fact that our world has mostly come into being after those above laws were written precludes our involvement in them.

There’s a larger story to be written here about the need to continue the evolution of the laws that govern our public lands as we rebuild from this particularly damaging era in American history, but I’ll save that for another day. Today I want to again point to some false perceptions, so we can all learn from them.

One of those accounts comes from none other than famed longtime environmental writer Bill McKibben in The New Yorker. Bill begins with this really good point:

Translation: The agency was created from the beginning to pursue the cause of sustainable yield. Managed correctly, USFS lands could provide timber for the American economy in perpetuity. Again, industrial use is neither good nor bad, it must simply be managed in order to achieve a goal.

Bill then moves onto this:

This attribution of the merits of capital-W Wilderness to USFS itself is misleading. The concept of Wilderness areas—in which road construction, commercial enterprise, and motorized equipment are prohibited—was created by Congress (thanks Lee Metcalf!), and Wildernesses are designated by Congress, not USFS. Again, USFS is neither good nor bad, it simply follows the letter of the law. And laws are things that we elect representatives to create.

Beware False Agency

Two more pesky bits of reality: 1)There’s a big difference between telling yourself you’ve done your part, and actually doing your part. And 2) the purpose of the Republican Party is to steal from working Americans and give to billionaires.

I really hope that I am not going to be the first person to tell you this, but unless your bank account ends in nine zeroes, your Republican congressperson does not care what you have to say about anything.

For those reasons, all the supposed agency promised by the prospect of leaving a voicemail with your congressperson that, in a best case scenario no one will ever listen to, and in a worst case will be listened to only for the humor value your earnest pleas deliver these monsters, is misleading.

If you want to actually do something, you need apply pressure to things Republicans and their wealthy sponsors care about: their money.

I spelled out how to do that in this article last summer. All of that remains true:

If you disagree with anything you read here, call Senator John Kennedy on (202) 224 4623, I’m sure he can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

And Finally, Some Good News

The Trump administration today agreed to again fly pride flags outside New York’s Stonewall National Monument, just two months after they were removed from the spiritual home of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The move follows legal challenges by LGBTQ advocacy and historic preservation groups.

If we don’t distract ourselves with disinformation, learn what laws apply to the places we care about and how those laws work, then all work together from a shared reality in order to support the causes we care about, we can beat them.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

What’s my job as a journalist? Is it to get the most clicks possible? Is it to earn money? Is it to create action? If so, what type of action? As the mainstream journalism business fails, as we all suffer through a presidency that gets more untethered from reality every day, and as the institutions we all rely on get corrupted, that answer matters more than ever.

I think the most clicked article I wrote during my decade at Outside was this one, which shares a popular recipe for cooking chicken breast that I’d read somewhere else years before, and use two to three times a week in an effort to hit my macros. I wrote that during the height of the pandemic shutdown, as an easy throwaway to get an editor off my back so I could get back to the important business of losing my mind to anxiety about the end of the world. That’s incredibly depressing to someone who prides themselves on producing deep, insightful work, but one of my old editors still called me “the chicken breast guy” when he couldn’t remember my name at another colleague’s wedding a few years back.

That’s relevant here for a couple reasons. For most of the 21st century, our job could be reduced down to something so simple it was insulting: get clicks. The primary business model was display advertising, which would be sold at set rates of impressions per-thousand views, or “CPM” in industry parlance. A typical banner ad on most outlets would go for something like a $10 CPM rate. So, if I could write an article that got 500,000 views, that’d make the publication $5,000 from that ad. There were usually 3-4 banner ads on any given page, with their prominence determining where their rate sat north or south of that $10 standard.

At one point, the race for clicks got so reductionist that Gawker Media began paying its journalists based on the clicks they generated. I hate to admit it, but I’m actually the person who broke that system. Way back when I was the first road test editor at Jalopnik (this was long before the Thiel-Hogan lawsuit which destroyed that company, Jalopnik is unreadably bad in its current form) I ran a video of the nazi-themed orgy Max Mosley put on with the aid of five hookers, and the traffic resulted in such a large bonus that the company was forced to transfer to a steadier salary-based system.

Up until the pandemic, the formula for creating traffic like that was pretty simple. So long as you had a website that Google and Facebook liked, combined with a name that their algorithms thought had “authority,” you could push publish on a catchy headline and those platforms would do the rest of the work. I’d say 500,000 views or so was probably my average across the dozens of stories I published monthly.

But the problem was, only a small percentage of those readers stuck around, and made any given publication their go-to. So, when first Facebook, then Google realized that they could make more money keeping all those eyeballs inside their walled gardens, rather than referring them outwards, traffic cratered. Not just for me, but across every publication on the Internet. And at 5,000 views, that CPM model only generates $50 in ad revenue. Across the last few years, the business model that publishing had relied on since the advent of the information superhighway has been completely broken.

Beyond the ability for journalist to have jobs, and all the fun stuff like access to healthcare and financial stability that goes along with those, that collapse may be healthy for journalism in that the fundamental work has changed from getting clicks, into providing value for your readers. That model is epitomized here on Substack, which promises to directly connect readers with writers, even if the audience for dog-camping-meets-public-land-policy isn’t yet large enough on this platform to support a full-time wage.

But that transition also creates another problem for journalists: all of us have 25 years of practice and momentum behind the skill of getting clicks, and too many of us find the proposition of providing value for readers challenging and new.

On the flip side of that coin is the compounding problem that the majority of Americans are approaching functional illiteracy. My sister-in-law Tori, who is both smarter than me and also a writer, likes to patiently explain when we’re discussing media that more than half of adults in this country read below the 6th grade proficiency level, and more than 20 percent read below the 5th grade level, at which point they are considered illiterate. Her explanation for our current political moment? Fox News is written at a level 5th graders can understand.

My AI assistant (I use Anthropic’s Claude) tells me that this newsletter is written for people who read at least as well as a 10th grader. Reading level statistics start to get less clear once people stop pulling off their shoes to count beyond 10 digits, but it looks like you’d need to be in the top 20 percent or so of readers nationwide in order to walk away from an article like this one with some comprehension of what just happened to you.

What do those two problems add up to? Desperation, and an audience largely unequipped to distinguish fact from fiction.

We obviously see this routinely with Fox News and its fifth graders. But it’s worth identifying an example for purposes of discussing outcomes. Anyone with any reasonable level of reading comprehension looked at Nick Shirley’s “exposé” about day care centers in Minneapolis and laughed it off. When he wasn’t allowed to film inside those, it should have been obvious to anyone watching that was because it is the express job of those centers to protect kids from incels like Shirley, and not some grand conspiracy about reptile aliens visiting earth to steal our social services and give them to ancient Egyptians, or whatever it is Shirley claimed. And yet that still resulted in our government dispatching masked thugs to that city in order to murder American citizens in broad daylight.

Will claims that the administration is “dismantling” the U.S. Forest Service, which have spread widely (and even been plagiarized) following a misleading article making that claim on More Than Just Parks, cause similar trouble? While it’s tempting to dismiss that discombobulation of facts as innocent enthusiasm for the continued existence of trees, I worry that it could amount to something more harmful.

The general public only has so much attention to devote to niche causes like public lands policy, and stoking outrage when it’s unjustified risks exhausting already limited attention on issues that don’t matter. Worse, sucking up that attention by lying to the public risks forever turning them away from public lands advocacy, when they realize they’re being lied to.

A good example of that is the Great American Outdoors Act, which the pro-public lands world seems very enthusiastic about crediting to Senator Steve Daines (R-Thank God He’s Retiring), but which was actually introduced by John Lewis (yes, that John Lewis), and while full of good intentions, was co-opted by Republicans to greenwash their image ahead of the 2020 election, and is being used by billionaire creep/Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in an attempt to give free money to states that they can use to acquire public lands then sell those off at a huge net loss for taxpayers. The reason you don’t read that from others the pro public lands world is that they expended so much energy trying to convince everyone they’d finally made a real achievement that they painted themselves into a corner, and can’t admit they were taken advantage of. And in failing to admit that, they’re allowing Burgum to pursue that plan without significant pushback.

Just so it’s clear even to fifth graders: that’s bad.

A lot of the lie about USFS being “dismantled” seems to be predicated on the public’s false perception of the Forest Service’s job, which can understandably get conflated with that of the National Park Service in the public’s imagination. But where it’s NPS’s job to preserve our nation’s natural treasures for the enjoyment of the public, USFS exists for the primary purpose of managing resource extraction.

This misunderstanding, and the lies that foster it, are evident in another example of disinformation being put forward by the outlets and advocacy groups that claim to be pro public lands. All of those worked themselves into a tizzy last year when news came down that the Public Lands Rule was being repealed. That was less a rule and more a memo, because what it set out to do—make conservation a “use” of Bureau of Land Management land on the same footing as extraction—is not something an executive agency can simply declare, it’s something that requires an act of Congress, since we’re talking about changing actual laws here.

And that misunderstanding is perhaps the best possible framework for achieving actual understanding of what the Forest Service actually does. While yes, the agency conducts research into forest health, climate change, invasive species, and other feel good stuff, its primary function is to permit industrial uses of public land—grazing, mineral and energy extraction, and timber harvesting. And that knowledge likely changes how you feel about that agency being “dismantled,” which is still very much not something that is happening.

I already addressed much of this when I first tried to get ahead of this disinformation last week. But since it’s spreading so widely, let’s further address a few key points:

Claim: “BUT THEY’RE RELOCATING THE AGENCY TO SALT LAKE CITY SO THAT MIKE LEE CAN DO SOME UNSPECIFIED EVIL!!!!1!”

Reality: The plan calls for 130 of 270 headquarters staff to be relocated from Washington D.C. to Lee-land sometime between summers 2026 and 2027. Note those dates for later. USFS employs over 30,000 people.

Claim: “BUT FIRE!!!!1!”

Reality: This administration has been using wildfire to try and justify logging since Ryan Zinke was Interior Secretary. As was true then and is true now: logging exacerbates wildfire risk everywhere but immediately adjacent to homes, where industrial logging does not typically occur. They’re also trying to eliminate the NEPA process designed to identify and mitigate wildfire risks and science as part of the industrial permitting process, which is very stupid and something we should all be mad about, even our friends in the oil biz should be mad about it. The re-org plan does nothing about fire, and claims to leave all wildfire staff and operations untouched.

Claim: “BUT THEY’RE ELIMINATING ALL THE RESEARCH STATIONS!!!!1!”

Reality: The plan calls for “consolidating” the 57 current research stations into 20, and creating a new central research management facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. While yes, I think it’s safe to assume anything this administration does is evil, I must point out that we don’t yet have any idea what research programs, if any, will be cut. You can find a full list of USFS research programs and projects at this link. USFS does a lot of important work on stuff like fire behavior modeling and climate adaptation. It also spends a lot of time and money figuring out how to increase yields for the extraction operations it permits. Maybe they can use some of that spare capacity to help their new neighbor Mike Lee figure out how to regrow his hair.

Claim: “BUT BLM DID SOMETHING SIMILAR DURING TRUMP 1 AND THERE WERE ONLY 3 EMPLOYEES LEFT!!!!!1”

Reality: This is an example of agency resiliency, and a lesson that we can repair what is damaged. And no, there weren’t only three HQ employees left, they only managed to actually get three working out of that Exxon break room they tried to transfer BLM operations to, even though they had two years to execute. Ultimately, the move did cause 287 of 328 headquarters staff to resign. BLM employs about 10,000 people.

That gives us the best indication of where this is headed. Re-organizing USFS management away from its current regional offices and into 15 state offices, “consolidating” research locations, and asking 130 headquarters staff to move to SLC likely is an attempt to terminate experienced managers who cannot simply be fired in the usual manner. And all of this will cause a significant amount of institutional knowledge to leave the agency. But we do not know currently who, how many, or from what areas USFS might lose that institutional knowledge. We could be talking about a couple dozen, or a couple hundred people. And yes, it is shitty that people who have dedicated their lives to public service will have to lose their jobs this way.

Does any of that realistically sound like a “dismantling?” Does any of that really sound like something people should be getting all riled up about, over more important issues like the unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to break the permitting process on public lands?

Ultimately it’s that lack of perspective and insight that’s the real issue here. Sure, this re-org is probably a net-negative to the Forest Service’s ability to conduct business. But again, that business is primarily permitting extraction and other harmful uses of public land. And that re-org is not taking place in a vacuum. It’s happening even as USFS, like BLM, is being handed the single biggest crisis in its history by Republicans in Congress who don’t seem to understand how laws work.

That first-of-its-kind use of the CRA to break the management plans governing permitting processes on public lands remains the bigger story. And, it might just deliver salvation for our public lands.

Let me make this as simple as possible, you can make your own bad joke about illiteracy this time though:

• Using the CRA to invalidate Management Plans calls into question the legality of every single management plan and permit written on BLM and USFS land since the CRA became law in 1996.

• That legality may have to be settled on a case-by-case basis for each plan and each permit in federal courts, which already have a years-long backlog of cases.

• Operations governed by unsettled permits and plans may have to cease operations until judges rule on each.

• USFS and BLM will need to go back to the drawing board for every management plan and every permit written since 1996. The CRA prohibits the use of anything “substantially similar” to replace any agency rule it’s used to eliminate, so this is very much a case of starting with a blank sheet of paper.

• At the same time that is happening, the administration is trying to fire experienced staff at these agencies, and impose its own incompetent management on them. USFS chief Tom Schultz, for instance, lacks any experience of any kind at the agency.

• No plans, no permits = no drilling/logging/mining grazing.

• Should issues persist long enough, industry will continue its pivot away from costly, uncertain public land operations and towards expanding operations on private land and abroad. This is already happening with the oil business, despite Republican lip service to working in benefit of that industry.

• Industry itself will call for boosted agency budgets and staffing to speed the process of rebuilding permits and plans once the dust settles. Since impacts from all this will begin to be felt later this year, we’re talking FY2027 and beyond, after all this stupidity puts Democrats back in charge of the House, and maybe even the Senate.

• Trees get hugged, birds sing, double rainbows for everyone.

The problem with double rainbows for everyone is that those scare no one. And without a fear mongering headline, this article isn’t going to break through the broken algorithms, and convince the distracted public to pay attention. Writing this may not bring me clicks, but it does hopefully help readers of this newsletter become better informed. At least the few of you capable of getting through 2,700 words without going cross-eyed.

Also, I have to add one last note for organizations like Patagonia, REI, the Conservation Alliance, and all the others that are piling onto this moronic “dismantling” narrative: Jesus Christ guys, do better.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.

“Flood the zone with shit.” That’s Steve Bannon’s famous strategy for manipulating the media, and is very much the playbook for this second Trump administration’s attempts to turn America’s natural treasures into a profit center for billionaires. The idea is to roll out so much bad news all at once, all the time, that it becomes impossible to process it all, and hard to distinguish between real threats and utter nonsense. Every Monday, I try and cut through that noise, and make sense of what’s going on.

Let’s experiment with a simple format here, with the aim of taking complex and nuanced actions and making them as easy to understand as possible. Definitely open to your feedback.

White House Budget: $10 Billion For Arc de Trump, Plus Bribe For Military To Do Self-Invasion

What’s Happening: The White House has created its budget proposal for FY2027, and it contains cuts to pretty much anything anyone cares about in order to spend $10 billion building monuments to Trump in DC, and $500 billion bribing the military to do something scholar-of-fascism Timothy Snyder describes as a “self-coup” combined with a “self-invasion.” Included in it are massive cuts to the National Park Service that, if they happened, would essentially eliminate that agency’s ability to function.

Why It Matters: Sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but like I explained in that article about the Forest Service reorganization, a bunch of activists and journalists whose entire job should be knowing better are going all Chicken Little about every little thing, in an effort to scare people into giving them money.

There are three pieces of context no story about this White House budget should go without: 1) Congress sets budgets, not the President. 2) When it comes to the Park Service specifically, these cuts are essentially the same thing the White House proposed last year. If they were dead on arrival during the height of Trump’s power, they’re definitely not going to happen now that his masked thugs have murdered Americans in an American city in broad daylight, now that he’s created yet another forever war in the Middle East, now that he’s destroying the world economy, and now that the primaries are wrapping up and Republican lawmakers no longer need to worry about the threat of a far-right opponent. And 3) Adding to the already exploding deficit in order build a $10 billion “Arc de Trump” is such a laughable non-starter that this entire budget should be taken as nothing but the really bad joke that it is. We should all be laughing so hard we cry right now. The second we stop taking these clowns seriously is the second we stop giving them power over our lives.

Why You Should Care: During times as crazy as these, we need media outlets and advocacy organizations to help lead the way through, not focus on their own self interests. I get why that’s hard, I also lost my career in mainstream media to the whole obeying-in-advance thing. But sensationalism is not the answer. If we go in that direction, we risk losing our ability to break through to audiences at all.

Is this an indication of the administration’s priorities? Of course. But we’ve known all that since that golden escalator ride in 2015. The question we should be asking ourselves is why, given that knowledge, our friends and neighbors still voted for this. We need that answer, and we need a solution sometime between now and November, when our best chance at stopping it will come with the mid-term elections. If Democrats can take both houses of Congress, we can impeach and convict Trump, and move on with the project of forming a more perfect union.

DOI Plans To Cut Even More Staff

What’s Happening: Last week, the Department of the Interior issued notice that it plans to “offer” a Deferred Resignation Program and Voluntary Early Retirement to staff it thinks are in the way of carrying out “Interior’s mission and deliver world-class service for the American people.” It’s not clear what numbers it hopes to hit or exactly which agencies and roles will be targeted beyond ones that may not be “visitor-facing.”

Why It Matters: This is a good example of administration goals running into management realities. They want to privatize the park service, they want to dismantle services for Indigenous peoples, they want to stop doing anything on public lands but drilling them. And yet, they can’t just do that stuff, they have to follow the law. And the budgets Congress sets are laws. Those determine whether or not departments can be eliminated, or major changes can be made to staffing programs. Since they can’t just fire, say, every wildlife biologist in a national park, they will instead make their lives miserable, while offering them easy paths out of their employment.

Why You Should Care: Despite the rhetoric that this is about efficiency, cutting staff like this actually ends up costing you and me money. Not only does that come in the form of reduced services and functions, but also the costs inherent to terminating employment contracts. It’s estimated that last year’s DOGE RIFs cost taxpayers at least $135 billion in termination liabilities. And public service is inherently more efficient than privatized operations, which are one of the administration’s stated goals for the park service. An analysis by Project On Government Oversight found that privatizing government functions resulted in an average of an 85 percent increase in their cost to taxpayers.

Trump Versus The Endangered Species Act

What’s Happening: In a very rare move, the administration used the war in Iran as pretext to assemble the Endangered Species Committee last week, which voted to exempt oil and gas drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico from measures intended to protect endangered species there.

In a lesser reported story, following a seven-year legal battle a federal judge finally issued a ruling about assaults on the ESA the first Trump administration pursued, and vacated them.

The rules struck were:

• The “death by a thousand cuts” rule which stated that a project would have to impact the entirety of an endangered species’ habitat to be impermissible. This allowed, for instance, a logging clearcut project to move forward in spotted owl habitat because it only threatened a portion of that habitat, not the whole thing.

• A rule which limited considering to only direct impacts of the project in consideration. For example, permitting for a highway construction project would only consider the impacts of the highway itself, and not the associated development its traffic would bring.

• A rule which required permitting agencies to accept promises of mitigation at their face value. This meant that a company could just make a vague promise it’d plant trees or something, and permitting would be required to continue even when it was obvious that company had no intention of planting any trees.

• A rule that would have allowed USFWS and NOAA to ignore ongoing harm being created by existing projects, with no requirement for those agencies to require companies to change their practices or mitigate their harm.

Why It Matters: The pace of the legal system is not able to keep up with the rate at which the Trump administration breaks stuff. Take the Gulf’s Rice’s Whale for instance. It’s thought that only 51 individuals remain, and that those are uniquely vulnerable to oil and gas operations, which will now be allowed to expand in the whale’s habitat. Even if a judge rules that overriding the ESA for some bullshit “emergency” was illegal seven years from now, that will likely be too late for that species.

Why You Should Care: When this is all over, one of our primary goals as a nation will have to be preventing it from ever happening again. That means codifying norms into actual laws, and empowering our institutions to act on timelines that meet current and future challenges. We need leaders capable of meeting that challenge.

Big Bend Border Wall Protests

What’s Happening: The administration wants to build a wall right down the middle of the Rio Grande river in Big Bend National Park, for reasons untethered from reality. Everyone from local sheriffs to local hippies are upset about this, and they all assembled in Austin this weekend to protest.

Why It Matters: America seems to have lost the ability to organize resistance in any way other than lame protests, which cannot be shown to produce any sort of result.

Why You Should Care: The formula for organizing to stop projects like this one is clear, and I laid it out in this article. If you actually care about Big Bend, or immigrants, or wildlife, or whatever, then you need to find a way to create effective boycotts any and every company involved, enable workers to strike by raising the money necessary to pay their living costs while they’re out of work, and generally apply pressure to the legislators who have the power to prevent this project from going forward. No, none of that is as easy as showing up for a march through downtown Austin, but that’s the point. The appearance of action is not the same thing as actual action.

And Finally, Some Good News

What’s Happening: The reason why we have politicians who work in the interest of billionaires rather than the rest of us is that the Supreme Court gave those billionaires the ability to spend unlimited sums of money on elections, and to do that anonymously. A bunch of seriously credible current and former lawmakers in Montana think they have a solution to working around Citizens United without directly challenging it in court. And now, following an attempt by evil Republicans to keep that measure off the ballot, a state supreme court ruling has permitted it to go forward. Should the Transparent Election Initiative garner enough signatures, Montana’s voters will have the chance to end dark money’s corrupting influence on American politics this November.

Why It Matters: I explored the whole thing at length in this article. This is very real, and something you should be spreading the word about.

Why You Should Care: Should this pass, any corporation doing business in Montana will lose the ability to spend money on politics. That will include many large entities, even ones incorporated elsewhere. Never before has a vote in Montana mattered so much to every American. Should it pass, it will also provide a model other states can follow, and our country will be on its way to ending this extremely corrupt moment in our history.

Top photo: One of the last Rice’s Whales in front of a NOAA research vessel. Credit: NOAA.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life.

Pickup trucks are the most popular vehicles on American roads that actually serve any sort of objective purpose. But most car journalists treat them like a distasteful afterthought, and struggle to find the fucks necessary to give you meaningful coverage of them. Which is why no major outlets were able to bring you the two most obvious observations possible about this new Hyundai Boulder, which debuted this week at the New York Auto Show.

Big Monkeys

I think it was incredibly generous of The Rock to loan his 2004 Ford Bronco concept to Hyundai so they could make a big to-do about announcing their plan to enter the body-on-frame market. He even let them peel off the blue ovals and replace them with silver oval Hyundai badges!

The point here appears to be that the Korean automaker wanted to announce its plan to make a mid-size pickup, and possibly a Jeep Wrangler/Ford Bronco rival based on such, but just rolling out a rebadged Kia Tasman wouldn’t have gotten many headlines, so they did this instead.

No word on how much value this 2004 Ford Bronco Concept will have lost to the wide body kit and grumper Hyundai bolted to it, but I’m sure a zookeeper as talented as Dwayne Johnson won’t need to sell too many vials of gorilla sperm to make up the loss.

Just like the production Ford Bronco looked nothing like this 2004 Ford Bronco concept when it finally debuted 16 years later, it’s unlikely the Kia Tasman will look anything like this 2004 Ford Bronco concept either.

Believe it or not, but Hyundai and Kia aren’t actually the same company, rather they’re sister brands that exist under the same corporate umbrella. That means they share platforms, even though they compete in similar segments. Kia is a little more value focussed, while Hyundai is a little more mid-tier? I won’t lie, even I get confused.

So it’s extremely unlikely that Kia developed a new mid-size body-on-frame platform all on its own, with no plans to share it more broadly across multiple trucks and SUVs that will exist with both brands’ badges on their hoods.

Kia just launched the production Tasman pickup for hard use in austere conditions outside the US. It’s…not nice to look at, something Hyundai will almost certainly fix when they reskin it for the American market.

And the first product on that new platform is the Kia Tasman pickup, which is earning strong reviews in Australasia for its utility, if not its looks. There, it competes with the Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux, offering payload capacities of over 2,500 pounds in some configurations, and the simple, robust powertrains necessary to meet that market’s demands for tool vehicles they can use in austere conditions.

While that number may sound scarcely believable when compared to America’s luxury-oriented trucks (the best selling mid-size truck here is the Tacoma, which can’t safely carry four American-sized adults), it’s actually in-line with what utility trims of the Ranger can carry in that market. Bringing that truck to the US involved fitting lighter springs and more compliant dampers, which brought its max payload down to about 1,900 pounds (5th gen, short cab, 2WD).

Another relevant data point tethered to actual reality comes from The Drive’s Byron Hurd, who reports that Hyundai sees an opportunity to differentiate itself in the mid-size pickup segment by offering slightly more interior space.

That’s again in-line with the Kia Tasman, which features a more upright, squared-off cab than the Hilux or Ranger, which facilitates slightly more shoulder and leg room.

Will a Hyundai Taco rival be this ugly? Doubtful. I’d picture something that shared the hard points of the Tasman’s rough shape, but which adopts a front clip and headlight graphic more akin to the 2004 Bronco Concept seen here.

Beyond that, we’re left with speculation. The Tasman uses the standard independent front-suspension and live axle with leaf spring arrangement, and in Australasia pairs a 2.2-liter diesel with an 8-speed auto. So far, so normal. I’d expect Hyundai to keep the rest of the translation conventional, and use its 2.5-liter turbocharged gas motor on this side of the Pacific. As used in the Santa Fe and Santa Cruz, that delivers around 280 horsepower and 311 lb-ft, about the same as other mid-size trucks.

If Hyundai can deliver such a truck, at a competitive price point, they’ll have a winner.

Is there an opportunity to do anything different or new? We’re talking about a conservative automaker entering a conservative segment for the first time, so I doubt it. About the whackiest move I could see them making is offering the Palisade’s new 2.5-liter turbo-hybrid powertrain as an option, which takes performance up to 329 horsepower and 339 lb-ft, but which will also add cost while reducing payload.

Will Hyundai also offer some sort of short wheelbase Wrangler/Bronco rival? If they’re serious about entering America’s truck market, then trying to position a cute little soft top as a halo vehicle is the conventional playbook. But how many sales can that segment really support, especially in a post Iran war energy environment? I’d much rather see a fixed-roof, body-on-frame 4Runner rival. Hyundai’s opportunity there is to offer a vehicle drivers can actually see out of, paired with a payload high enough to safely take an American family on a camping trip. Offer that at a price point lower than the 4Runner’s ridiculous $70,000 sticker, and the Koreans could steal the mid-size SUV segment away from both Toyota, and the unibody jokes that Jeep is saddled with.

A (Good) Formula For “Survival” Knives

Casting broad outdoor utility as “survival” probably helps sell stuff to people who don’t really spend much time outdoors, but likely also ends up limiting the time people spend outdoors by presenting such as some scary battle against nature.

With that out of the way, a robust fixed-blade knife that’s large enough to process firewood and small enough to carry offers outdoors folks a practical, multi-purpose tool.

Enter this new Redington from Giant Mouse. They told me about it a couple weeks ago and it went on-sale yesterday. I had them send one over because I thought it sounded neat.

Redington (bottom) with an Esee 3-HM (top). The latter features an actual linen micarta handle.

Its Bowie-shaped 5-inch blade and full-tang handle (the handle is bolted to the outside of the metal) is strong, looks nice, and is reasonably practical for both wood-splitting and finer slicing tasks. I’m also a fan of Giant Mouse’s refined details. Here, those include a prominent choil paired with sharp forward jimping on the spine that allow you to securely choke up your grip, so the knife can work smaller when necessary. The spine is squared off forward of the handle so it can spark a ferro rod, but smoothly radiused as it enters the handle, which combines with good scale fitment to eliminate potential hot spots.

Redington (top) next to an Esee 6 that I’ve carried since the 2000s.

GM’s materials claim those handle scales are made from linen micarta—my favorite knife handle material—but this is actually G10. That’s not quite as soft in the hand, but prominent ridges are milled into that typically slick material to offer solid grip, wet or dry, bare hands or gloved.

The kydex sheath is also free of any unfinished edges. It uses Chicago screws on the blade’s heel and finger guard for solid, adjustable retention. And while the nylon belt loop isn’t quite long enough to move the pommel below the level of your belt, so you won’t be able to wear it under a backpack hip belt, the eyelets feature standard spacing, so I’ll be able to replace that loop with straps, or my favorite MKC kydex loop.

Redington (top) with a Mora in a custom sheath wearing one of the kydex loops Montana Knife Company includes with its sheaths. Since MKC promotes hate, I no longer carry their knives, but at least that’s given me a source of these takeoffs!

Magnacut steel is as good as its reputation, and is handsomely presented here with a stonewashed finish. The benefits of Magnacut are that it strongly resists rust and discoloration, and pairs the typically conflicting knife steel properties of edge retention and chip resistance. The downside of Magnacut is that it’s hard to work, so knives made from it tend to be expensive. This big hunk of it costs $425 and production is limited to only 225 units.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

News broke last night that the administration is planning an agency-wide restructuring of the Forest Service that will include relocating its headquarters from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City, replacing its regional office system with a state-based one, and consolidating its 56 research and development facilities into 20. Fascist goons claim this is some sort of effort to move USFS closer to the forests it manages. Opponents claim this is the end of USFS as we know it. Neither claim is true, here’s why.

What’s Happening?

The plan is to relocate 270 USFS staff to a new “headquarters” in SLC, while 130 will remain in DC. While the office of the Chief will be one of those relocated to Utah, it’s not clear how the divide will come down for the remaining teams.

The restructuring will also bring an end to the regional organization of USFS operations. The nine USFS regions will be replaced by 15 state offices and regional leadership will be replaced by statewide offices.

Management of research facilities will transition to a central office in Fort Collins, Colorado, and consolidation will reduce the total number of facilities by more than half.

USFS claims that none of these changes will impact fire management programs or relocate operational firefighting staff.

Has Anything Like This Happened Before?

“This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” claims Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who has no experience at the Forest Service.

During the first Trump administration, the Bureau of Land Management was temporarily relocated from its Washington D.C. headquarters to an office building in Grand Junction, Colorado shared with Exxon, amid similar claims of moving agency leaders closer to the lands they manage.

But rather than that occurring, the attempt to relocate the BLM instead caused mass resignations of career officials, while operations devolved into chaos as the inexperienced political stooges tasked with running the agency instead embroiled it in scandal.

By the time the Biden administration entered office, only three staff had actually begun working in Grand Junction, and that office was quickly re-designated a regional “hub”, and the headquarters returned to Washington D.C., as a competent Secretary of the Interior and an experienced BLM Director (Tracy Stone-Manning) set about rebuilding the agency.

And while much harm was attempted during BLM’s time in the wilderness, ultimately it ended with the same number of total acres under agency management, with most physical damage being assessed as temporary.

That doesn’t mean longterm harm did not occur. Hundreds of career staff left during that time, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, and the ability for the agency to operate efficiently. Stone-Manning was left spending much of her tenure in an attempt to rebuild the BLM, rather than use it to progress the benefit to the American people it’s supposed to provide.

Why Are People So Worked Up?

Last year, when it looked like Mike Lee and Steve Daines were going to succeed in their effort to sell off 3.3 million acres of BLM and USFS land, while authorizing the future sale of much more, that story broke through to normal Americans who don’t spend all their time obsessing over public land management policy, resulting in record attention for the publications who talk about this stuff, and the non-profits who use it to fundraise. That 15 minutes of fame has been hard to replicate, and outlets have taken away the wrong lesson from it—fear sells—rather than simply accepting that the vast majority of Americans care about public lands, but don’t particularly care about the inner workings of them.

This is the same reason there is still so much disinformation about nothingburgers like the Roadless Rule recision. And as I argued last fall, putting out false information and generally making much ado about nothing actually works against our side’s efforts to advocate for better management of public lands.

That’s not to say there won’t be harm done here. As we saw with the BLM relocation, many career officials will likely be unwilling to uproot their families from a market with good schools and a high standard of living to a city founded by religious extremists that’s already visibly experiencing the impacts of climate change in the form of arsenic-laden air pollution. At least if the cognitive impairments evident in “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” can be considered a barometer of such.

That loss of institutional knowledge will come on top of the 3,400 USFS staff—10 percent of its total workforce—who were RIF’d by DOGE a year ago. The change from regional to state offices is likely another attempt to force out even more career employees by restructuring their jobs in such a way that these changes circumvent any protections they might otherwise have.

But it’s been inevitable ever since Trump got re-elected that something like this would happen. And this has been acknowledged inside USFS.

Writing to all staff in his retirement letter last February, former USFS Chief Randy Moore, a 44-year veteran of the service, made it plain: “The federal government is undergoing a significant transformation,” Moore explained. “How agencies are structured, staffed, and operate is shifting, and the Forest Service is not exempt from these changes.”

“As part of a broader effort to reduce the size of the federal government, we parted ways with colleagues we worked alongside who successfully contributed to our mission, and who were valued members of our Forest Service team,” he continued. “The workforce will continue to be unsettled for a while.”

So What About The Logging?!

Under the Trump administration and as mandated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the USFS sure is selling a lot of logging permits. But the issue that a lot of the fear mongers miss is that in addition to being evil, these assholes are also incompetent.

Expanding logging operations requires three major prerequisites: roads, lumber mills, and legal permitting.

Road construction through national forests must be funded by taxpayers under current law. But, Agriculture Secretary Rollins has only allocated $50 million for new road construction over the next five years. A mile of road in a national forest costs anywhere from $10,000 on the low end, to over $600,000 in a challenging landscape like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. And that’s before any bridges or erosion mitigation work come into play. That budget is nowhere near enough money to open up significant new areas to logging.

Beginning in the 1940s, our country slowly shifted away from relying on natural forests for the majority of its timber supply, and towards “tree farming.” Compared to wild forests, farmed lumber is engineered to grow straighter and more uniform. It’s also less dense and softer than the natural alternative. And that means mills built to process farmed lumber typically cannot process the natural alternative, are no longer located near natural sources, and operate at lower costs. 89 percent of the timber we produce in this country now comes from private tree farms, not public lands. We no longer have the industrial infrastructure necessary to support massively expanded logging.

In order to log a slice of public land, a private operator must operate using a permit written by the relevant management agency (the BLM also sees significant logging operations on lands it manages). Those permits can only be issued according to a management plan. But Republicans in Congress have just irrevocably broken that planning and permitting process so badly that it’s going to take years upon years of legal action to figure out a way forward.

This is where we can start talking about the ways in which this USFS restructuring is related to current events.

Beginning last October, now-retiring Senator Steve Daines (R-Good Riddance) began the process of using the Congressional Review Act to disapprove of Resource Management Plans issued on BLM land where he wanted to see expanded energy extraction. What Daines does not appear to understand is that while invoking the CRA allows him to avoid the Filibuster and pass such measures with only the Republican majority voting in favor, it also shifts those RMPs from being a normal agency function into being legally considered a “rule,” which must be approved by Congress. And since none of them have been approved by Congress, that renders all of them, and every permit written based on them, invalid.

This is where the stakes get higher.

While doing that for BLM RMPs might also render the USFS’s Land Management Plans legally invalid (a judge will have to rule on this), there is a vote pending in front of the Senate to definitively render those LMPs invalid: the one that will permit that copper mine to be constructed in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters, which will then destroy the nation’s most popular Wilderness area with sulfuric acid.

The Senate has until the end of April to hold that vote, or the measure disappears. If they vote to move ahead, the Boundary Waters will be destroyed, but the entire permitting process for USFS will also be definitively broken. If it doesn’t occur, or if the vote fails, the Boundary Waters will be saved, but the USFS may be able to proceed with issuing permits.

In both scenarios, America will get at least a small victory. Meanwhile, either way that unfolds, the tree haters lose. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is some small shred of positive news in that.

The other big prerequisite for new logging operations is private investment. And right now, the war in Iran is combining with Trump’s moronic tariffs to increase both the cost of borrowing money and the operational costs of any large project, while creating uncertainty both for financial markets and the wider economy.

How much demand for construction materials will there be over the next few years? How much will producing those materials cost? And what return can investments and borrowing be predicated on? No one can answer those questions right now. Everyone sees trends moving in negative directions.

So, is the administration trying to make it easier to log America’s forests? Sure. But at the same time, it’s taking a lot more steps to make doing that much harder. The fact that we have to deal with an attempt to destroy our democracy is scary, I am not trying to minimize that. But the very thing that might save our country and our forests is the fact that this attempt at a fascist takeover is also desperately stupid.

Top photo: USFS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

Contractors in Glacier National Park have started clearing snow from Going-to-the-Sun Road. It’s a symbolic sign that national parks and other public lands are beginning to gear up for summer visitors. And not only is that happening weeks earlier than usual due to a freakishly warm, dry winter out West, but as people start to return we’re going to begin witnessing the impacts of Republican attempts to starve these places out of existence.

The entire purpose of this project is to foster a better connection with my readers. So I really enjoy it when you guys reach out with story ideas, observations, and questions. As a reminder, upgrading to a paid subscription not only keeps this newsletter free so that it can change the most minds possible, but it also buys personal access to me for help with your gear shopping, travel planning, and outdoor problem solving needs. You can do that privately by email (my first name at wessiler.com), or also solicit the help of this entire community by using the “Chat with Wes” feature at the top of this website, or on our new Discord forum.

This story idea comes from Matthew Carriker, who dug into national park visitation numbers and remarked that, while down three percent from the all-time high in 2024, the number of people who visited national parks last year was higher than 2016, the previous record year.

And while that number will absolutely fall this summer due to high fuel prices, it still sets up an interesting problem: the workforce tasked with keeping national park visitors safe is down 24 percent compared to 2024. At the same time, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s order that all trails, features and attractions in national parks must remain open unless he personally approves their closure remains in effect.

But we learned all that last April. What’s changed? Winter. Even though it was a warm and dry one out West, the opposite was true back East, and a season full of wind and freeze-thaw cycles is still going to have had significant impacts on both natural and manmade features across the national park system.

2024 already brought a $46 million cut to the budget NPS has for major repair projects. The last time it was tallied, the maintenance backlog in our parks stood in excess of $24 billion. Parks went without maintenance during the record 43-day shutdown last October and November, so many will not have performed necessary winter preparations. Fewer staff were on hand during the winter to keep up with maintenance.

Just on trails, that means ledges will have eroded, rockfalls and landslides will have occurred, and there will, of course, be thousands of trees down everywhere.

Let’s compare just those trail hazards to the ways in which visitors die accidentally in national parks, which come predominantly from falls and drownings, two things that are not necessarily unrelated.

Fatality causation factors in national parks. Graphic: NPS

Last year, remaining national park staff put in heroic efforts to hold everything together. This year, with conditions compounded by both winter and reduced maintenance? An already superhuman effort is going to be harder.

This is relevant because the administration’s seven-step plan to achieve its stated goal of privatizing national parks expressly requires a very public “failure” of the visitor protection system in order to justify its argument that the private sector can more effectively manage our nation’s natural wonders. And what better evidence of that “failure” than a series of high-profile, easily preventable deaths? Or better: one big, tragic accident that takes the lives of multiple visitors at once. That’d represent the entire manufactured argument, all summed up in headlines and outrage spread nationwide.

It’s the tried-and-true fail-by-design playbook that’s been used by Republicans to justify the privatization of public services for decades, just here accelerated into a two-year timeline.

Why so fast? The mid-terms are approaching, and once that new Congress is sworn in, with Democrats likely taking control of at least the House of Representatives (assuming we have free and fair elections), that co-equal branch of government will again begin to perform its oversight duties, and there will be the kind of investigations and impeachments necessary to hold this lawless administration accountable. If park operations are to be transferred to private operators, or if units are going to be sold off entirely, then that will need to occur by the end of this year.

Burgum need not necessarily hope for falls and drownings. Rangers have two jobs in national parks: protect visitors, sure, but they’re also there to protect our natural resources from those visitors. And with the lack of snowpack, the deadfall, and the reduced efforts to mitigate fuel loads, all of this is also building towards a surety of devastating wildfire.

Last year already saw the loss of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge to a huge fire. If this summer brings the destruction of more historic landmarks or natural features, or if all the fire activity just bankrupts the agencies tasked with fire suppression, then the administration could put that forward as an argument for privatization as well.

Polling ahead of the mid-terms is starting to look like this November might bring an historic wipeout for the Republican legislators enabling this type of anti-American activity, despite math that sees fewer Republican legislators competing for contested office. But while that represents hope for the future, on public lands at least, things are going to get worse before they get better.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

Most outdoor publications assign gear coverage to the youngest, most inexperienced writers on their teams. I’m neither of those things, so every Friday I’m trying to bring you some genuine insight into exciting new stuff. This week, we have some questionable naming decisions from Toyota, along with a pivot to more affordable camping gear from household names, and the usual selection of technical innovations that you should know about now, so you can shop for them when they go on-sale next season.

Enter Turd Hammer

TRD stands for “Toyota Racing Development,” and is the badge Toyota has for years affixed to appliances like the 4Runner when they want you to add thousands of dollars to your total financed amount in return for a $200 upgrade to your shocks you’d be better off buying in the aftermarket.

That’s apparently the kind of belief-in-your-customers attitude American consumers want from their megacorp overlords, because Toyota trucks attract rabid loyalty based on a decades out-of-date reputation for reliability. And within the Toyota Stan universe, TRD is lovingly pronounced “Turd.”

That’s funny and reverential when it’s pronounced “Turd Pro,” but “Turd Hammer” really seems like a step too far down the bad joke rabbit hole.

Since the new Tundra is already the most unreliable, slowest, least efficient half-ton truck, with the lowest payload and highest prices that’s still probably a decade out from a refresh, Toyota is taking the logical step of copying what Ford first did 17 years ago, and adding a Raptor-like high-performance off-road model it hopes will provide a halo to that model’s public image. This week, news broke that they plan to call it the Tundra TRD Hammer.

Beyond the name, details are still slim. There’s 37-inch tires visible in spy photos, and some widened fenders front and rear, suggesting some sort of widened-track, long-travel suspension system. It remains unclear if it’ll be a mid-volume model targeted at the normal Raptor, or a limited-run, very high performance special seeking to steal the Raptor R’s crown.

Had we been having this discussion in like 2016, I’d forecast a hit. But with a collapsing job market combining with high inflation and exploding gas prices, I fear economic conditions may be just wrong for this thing’s timing. I plan to explore the impacts this moment is likely to bring bring to the off-road and overlanding market in a longer piece in the near future. Shame it isn’t electric, no word on whether or not it will be able to actually be used off-road in stock form.

All-In-One Hot Water From Joolca

Joolca makes great propane-powered hot water heaters for camping sinks and showers. But until now you’ve had to install the heater unit somewhere on your truck, then connect a separate water source in addition to the propane canister. Great solution for dedicated rig builds, not so much for more casual campers.

That changes with the $600 Hottie, which packages everything you need but the propane into a box about the size and form factor of a portable power station. As an extra stroke of genius, it’s compatible with both the standard 1 pound green propane canisters (bonus points if you use an Ignik Tap Rack), or the bigger barbecue ones. Store it in your garage, and just throw it in your TRD-badged driving appliance when you’re ready to have hot water on a camping trip.

Marmot Wraptor Sleeping Bag

With synthetic insulation versions priced at $199, generous proportions, zipper-free magnet closure, and foot vents, these new Wraptor sleeping bags pack a lot of high-end features into a nicely-priced option for car camping from a brand you’ll recognize.

Also available in 650-fill down, I recommend most car campers go with a quality synthetic alternative these days, not only to save some money, but also because it’ll perform better alongside condensation or bad weather.

Spend the money you save on a quality sleeping pad with a good R-value, and all the above will deliver a solid night’s sleep this summer.

Finally, A Better Swiss Army Knife

Victorinox has been trying to re-invent its classic Swiss Army knife for as long as I’ve been carrying one. But, until now, its efforts to integrate features like a bigger knife blade, or a lock, have never managed to elevate the iconic original. I think this new Synergy range is their best effort yet. It combines their excellent aluminum scales with a slightly-tweaked classic form factor, plus both a locking knife blade and a pocket clip. $78 without scissors or $96 with.

A Lighter Fjallraven Frame Pack

I’ve been intrigued by durable, stylish Swedish brand Fjallraven’s wood-framed backpacks for a while, but haven’t yet found a way to integrate one into my needs since they just don’t hit the light weights of the ultra high tech solutions I’m used to. This new Kajka X-Latt gets closer, providing a 45-liter capacity for 2.6 pounds.

Still far from ultralight, that weight penalty may be worth it in some scenarios thanks to excellent color choices, and sleek design. $380 is a high price to pay for something I’d carry on casual, shorter-distance treks only.

Jeep XJ Pioneer Concept

“OE+” is a style of vehicle modification where you set out to re-imagine what a car or truck might have looked like had the maker gotten it fully right on its first try. I’d argue that the build Virginia and I put together for her 200-series Land Cruiser is the pinnacle of that art form.

Now, Jeep’s own designers have done that for the brand’s classic XJ-platform Cherokee, as part of the range of designs they bring to each year’s Easter Jeep Safari in Moab. Starting with an original two-door model they found in near-mint condition, all they did was clean it up a bit, fit a small lift tweso clear 33-inch tires, and fab up a set of custom, body-colored rock rails.

It’s perfection, and reminds me that I’ve always wanted to own an XJ. Maybe I’ll put something similar together one day when we have the garage space necessary to store a handful of classic vehicles.

Wearable Sleeping Bags For Dogs

Don’t forget that your dogs need insulation for nights spent outdoors too. I’ve always just wrapped our pack in their Ruffwear Powderhound Puffy jackets and called it good, but that brand’s new $99 Palisades Sleep Poncho looks like it’d offer more warmth, in a more packable form.

Cinching closely around the dog’s neck to trap warm air, and connecting to their back legs with stretchy straps to hold it in place, the Sleep Poncho is designed to drape over the dog no matter what sleep position they choose, and can be clipped up to stay clear of late night potty breaks. Just don’t forget to give them something to insulate them from the cold ground.

A Magnetic Belt Buckle From Arcade

It took me a while to be converted, but I’ve worn nothing but Arcade’s stretchy-but-strong Hardware belt for the last couple of years, in both original and hook-style buckles.

That original works, but is both bulky and cheap looking, failing to fit through some belt loops. The hook is slimmer, but takes a little more attention to do and undo. This new $50 magnetic closure promises to fix those problems with a buckle that’s guided into retention by magnets, without looking all zany or anything.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

The film adaptation of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” is off to a strong start, with a solid first weekend box office and 96 percent positive reviews from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. In it, Ryan Gosling plays a resourceful astronaut who sets out to save humanity with the aid of his pet rock. But there’s also an unexpected co-star: the Leatherman multitool the character relies on, at one point to save his own life.

I reached out to Portland, Oregon-based Leatherman, who confirms the tool is a Surge. They apparently sent a number of models out to the film’s props department, who selected that specific tool on their own.

In this screen cap from the trailer, Gosling can be seen deploying the Surge’s blade. Doing that one-handed, while wearing gloves, is a lot less easy with the Surge than it is with the Arc, on which the blade is equipped with a thumb stud.

Is that choice honest to Weir’s original book? While that mentions the use of a multitool multiple times, it makes no mention of any make, model, or specific feature set from which we can guess at any specific item.

The Surge is a larger version of Leatherman’s popular Wave, targeted at professional users. To achieve that, it’s been, “engineered with large pliers, long blades, and a rugged frame built to handle demanding work.”

Those pliers feature replaceable wire cutters, the knife blade is 3.1 inches long and made from 420HC stainless steel, and the entire package is housed in a stainless steel chassis that allows you to quickly access important tools like that blade without opening the handles. Gosling can be seen doing exactly that in this trailer, in which the tool appears at both 1:43 and 2:18.

Is the Leatherman Surge an authentic choice for an astronaut? Navy SEAL/physician/NASA Astronaut Jonny Kim carries a Leatherman into space.

In this video, we can see Kim using his Leatherman to open access panels onboard the International Space Station for cleaning.

Kim isn’t carrying a Surge, he’s carrying a limited-edition tool from Leatherman’s Garage program of experimental releases. That Garage Batch #005 was built to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary, and is essentially a Leatherman Arc that’s had its handles cerakoted white and its Magnacut knife blade coated in bronze.

The Arc is the superior tool. Not only are all of its features accessible using a single hand, but the Magnacut blade will hold its edge much longer than than the Surge’s 420HC, while also better resisting chips to its edge.

Kim can be seen pairing his custom Arc with Leatherman’s own Ratchet Driver accessory. He carries the multitool in a ZapWizard holster, which also accommodates that ratchet.

One other relevant plot point from Weir’s book is that the Project seeks out commercially-tested rather than prototype solutions whenever possible. Not only does this tend to reduce cost when compared to bespoke equipment, but it also crowdsources durability testing and allows them to take advantage of a wealth of consumer feedback in order to select the right tools.

And the choice of a Leatherman fits well within that concept. Not only did Tim Leatherman invent the multitool 40 years ago, but the company still makes everything in America, to higher quality standards than any of its knockoffs. I carry the Leatherman Arc.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

Mondays are for public lands on this newsletter. But there’s a bigger story we need to talk about this week, because it’s completely intertwined with how we use those lands now, their future, and pretty much everything else on this planet. And that story is climate change.

Rate Of Warming Accelerating

A new study published by researchers in Germany suggests the rate of global warming, “has accelerated significantly.”

The paper’s plain language summary reads:

“The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.”

This chart shows the rate of increase for the global average temperature. The researchers suggest that the blue line most accurately represents their findings.

Of particular interest to this article is the effect created by removing statistical noise created by El Niño and La Niña weather events, which I’ll get to in the conclusion. For now, chew on this for a minute:

“In conclusion, our analysis of GMST data after removing the best estimate of the influence of three natural variability factors reduces the noise level sufficiently to reveal a large and significant acceleration of global warming, regardless which statistical method is used. Note that the adjustments reduce the global temperature in 2024 and minimally in 2023 by removing effects of El Niño as well as the solar maximum. The evidence is thus strong that the statistical significance of warming acceleration is not due to outlier years in 2023 and 2024, but that global temperature has departed from its previous path since around 2015.”

Hawaii’s Kona Low

A series of slow moving storms are dumping feet of rain across the Hawaiian islands right now, leading to extreme flooding. Estimates mid-disaster already putting damage totals in excess of $1 billion, and that number is likely to climb significantly once things dry out, and officials can actually get into impacted areas.

That number is significant for a reason: the accelerating number of weather-related disasters totaling at least $1 billion (inflation adjusted) is possibly the best lens we have for getting our heads around the ways climate change is impacting humanity.

In 1980, there were seven total weather-related disasters in the United States that totaled at least $1 billion in damage, with the total amount of damage pegged at around $30 billion. In 2024, there were 24 such disasters totaling $182.7 billion. Again, all these numbers are inflation adjusted so they can be directly compared.

In 2023, the Lahaina Fire caused $5.5 billion in damage to western Maui.

Another interesting threat here is the number of impacted families asking for help via GoFundMe. Last year, I explored the problem inherent in disaster victims seeking aid through crowdsourced donations, even as that practice becomes more and more common as the Trump administration continues its efforts to erode the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which had been run as part of a love triangle involving a disgraced former governor, a disgraced former Trump campaign manager, and hundreds of millions of dollars in missing taxpayer funds, and which is now run by a disgraced former MMA fighter who Bernie Sanders once had to stop from getting into a fistfight on the Senate floor. That agency is also impacted by the ongoing partial shutdown of the federal government due to a conflict between Democrats and Republicans over funding masked government thugs set loose on our streets for the purpose of murdering American citizens. If that disagreement is not resolved, FEMA’s longterm disaster recovery funding may not be able to help victims impacted by this series of storms in Hawaii.

Nebraska’s Worst Fire Season, Ever, In Winter

One of the insane things about our current moment is that we’re all focussed on the dramas unfolding in Washington, the Persian Gulf, and on Truth Social, rather than the fact that our agricultural heartland is burning down, in the middle of March.

All in, the fires which started on March 12, were caused by high winds and dry conditions, and have so far burned over 800,000 acres, making them the worst in Nebraska history. Now partially contained, officials remain worried that high temperatures and extreme winds could make more fires likely this week, with relative humidity falling as low as 11 percent on Wednesday.

Current versus historic western snowpack. Graphic: USDA

The Melting West

It was 79 degrees here in Bozeman on Friday, the hottest every temperature recorded in March. Elsewhere, records fell from California to Arizona to Texas to Canada, and in over 1,000 other locations.

That marked the end of a winter in which we’ve seen some of the lowest snowfall totals on record, again across the entire American West.

How bad is that? According to USDA snowpack data peak snowpack began falling in late February, a full month before it usually does, and currently stands at record lows.

Adventure photographer Nate Luebbe summed it all up best in a Threads post: “80% of the meltwater for the western US just simply won’t exist this summer.”

Everyone is pretty hesitant to speculate on what that may mean, simply because the situation is so dire. But if you value things like fish populations, irrigation water, or your house not burning down, you’re probably going to experience some real bummers this year.

Sea Level Rise Underestimated

The earth isn’t a perfect sphere, and natural factors like currents and wind can cause ocean water to pile up in certain areas, all while variable weather compounds the challenges of measuring exact sea levels. But as technology improves, so does our ability to filter out that noise.

And that’s just the case with global sea level estimates, which in some cases such as the Mekong Delta, may be been estimated with a margin for error larger than a full century of sea level rise.

What’s that mean? We could see greater impacts in some coastal regions, sooner than previously expected.

Combine that underestimation with the accelerating pace of warming, and all our numbers for worst case scenarios this century could be drastically low.

Current vs historic sea temperatures at the Scripps Pier in La Jolla. Graphic: UCSD

West Coast Sea Temperatures Are HOT

Luebbe also points out that current sea surface temperatures in southern California are, “already higher than the mean summer MAXIMUM.”

“A massive marine heatwave has dominated waters off the West Coast since last summer,” explains NOAA. “This marks only the third time on record that such a large section of the coastal ocean has remained so warm for so long—particularly into winter months—without it being an El Niño. We are in uncharted conditions.”

“Godzilla” El Niño Inbound

The crazy thing about all of this is that it’s occurring during a La Niña cycle, in which water temperatures in the Pacific around the equator are cooler than normal. That typically suppresses temperatures and extreme weather in this country. El Niños, in which that area of the ocean are hotter than normal, typically do the opposite.

“Climate models are signaling that a particularly powerful El Niño is brewing, likely to form in the second half of the year. If it takes hold, scientists say it could be the strongest we’ve seen in at least a decade,” explains The Inertia.

Hype around the event is growing so much that some have begun referring to it as a “Godzilla” event. If things continue as expected, 2027 will almost certainly become the hottest year on record, potentially eclipsing 2024, in which the global average temperature reached 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial.

As bad as the weather is right now, it may just be a preview of conditions as we move through summer and fall.

Top photo: NWS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

Coverage of outdoors gear lacks experience, the freedom to be honest, and centers results for the brands and publicationa, not the consumer. Every Friday, I’m going to try to fix that by rounding up new releases, and bringing you some honest guidance drawn from my 24 years of experience reviewing this stuff.

Want to help? Send me links to new gear you want to see covered.

iKamper Skycamp 4.0

The original iKamper Skycamp rooftop tent debuted in 2017, and packed a spacious shelter into a hard-shelled roof box. If it looks familiar, it’s because that original shape has been ripped off by Roofnest and a thousand other companies that all just apply fresh logos to white label stuff they buy in bulk from Alibaba. In contrast, iKamper actually designs and produces in South Korea, which has a strong camping culture. The fact that iKamper has its own factory is a major boon to their ability to iterate designs and control quality.

This fourth iteration adds a new 3P size (which will be spacious for two people, or allow room for a dog) which weighs about 160 pounds. So while the pictured 4Runner doesn’t have room in its 895 pound payload to safely carry this thing alongside passengers, much less cargo, it does technically fit within that vehicle’s dynamic roof load capacity. So 5/10 to whoever produced this photoshoot in the Alabama Hills.

Also new is a little more interior height, and small improvements to features like the built-in lighting, diesel heater port, cork flooring, and the breathable canvas that helps iKamper tents resist condensation.

If I was shopping for a normal RTT, this would be at the top of my list. But, with prices starting at $4,500, I also understand why people are so willing to choose the Chinese knockoffs. My advice: Either budget one of these as part of a comprehensive build that considers the weight in your suspension plan, or just sleep in a quality ground tent setup.

CountyComm Meg Folding Kitchen Knife

Not only is this thing named after Jason Statham’s finest work, but it represents a rare, unique use case for folding knives: food preparation. The only other quality folding knife designed for this purpose I’m aware of is the Spyderco Spydiechef which is smaller, four times the price, and doesn’t give you as much space for your hand above a cutting board.

Practical? Throwing a fixed blade in your camp kitchen box is pretty easy, and I love my Benchmade Station Knife for that purpose, but just as something to have in my pocket as I grill for big groups, or while preparing food in camp? I plan to order an OD Green G10-handled version once the $80 knife goes on-sale.

That price point is partially made possible by use of VG-10 steel, which is cheap, but one of my favorites. It’s easy to sharpen, strongly resists staining, and will hold its edge better than most kitchen knives. CountyComm is also direct to consumer, cutting out at least one 100 percent markup.

Dometic Water Bottles

Available with a few different lid designs compatible across the .65, 1.0 and 1.2-liter sizes, these new water bottles from Swedish RV accessory brand Dometic are copper lined for clean taste, double walled stainless steel for insulation, and come in a range of fun colors.

With prices starting at about $40, they’re right in-line with a Yeti Rambler bottle.

Warn Fully Hidden Winch Kit

Every 4x4 should be fitted with a winch. But mounting a winch is extremely difficult, typically requiring a full replacement bumper, which adds a ton of weight on its own, necessitating dedicated suspension. Bumpers also interfere with parking and radar cruise control sensors, even if they’e supposedly compatible with those.

To fix those issues across a range of popular vehicles—Ford Super Duties and F-150s, and Toyota 250-series Land Cruisers*, 4Runners and Tacomas—the $850+ Fully Hidden Kit provides a mount for the brand’s $1,750 Zeon XC winch that attaches to the frame rails behind the bumpers and requires only minor modifications to the stock bumper on those vehicles.

That Zeon XC is more compact than a standard Zeon, allowing for the fitment of a 12k lbs winch on mid-size trucks, and rotates the clutch forwards so you can reach it through the bumper. There’s 70-feet of synthetic roper on the drum. You’ll need to swap out the chain hook for a proper shackle mount at additional cost, but this is still probably the lowest drag way to get a winch on any of those vehicles.

Exped Ultra Sleeping Pads

Swiss brand Exped is honest about its struggle to break into the American market, describing itself as a “best kept secret” during a recent presentation. That’s a shame, because the brand itself is very innovative—it invented the inflatable sleeping pad and flat valve, and created the luxury pad segment—and offers top-tier quality at reasonable prices.

Its new Ultra range of sleeping pads solves the crinkley noise problem inherent to mylar reflective insulation layers by separating that from your body with a layer of lofted synthetic insulation. So you get the reflected body heat warmth and light weight of mylar insulation with the silent sleep of lofted insulation. And employing both types results in high R-values.

Sleeping bag temperature ratings are established in a test paired with a 7.0-R value pad. So you’ll sleep cold while using anything less. And most backpacking pads don’t meet that R-value.

I’ve got an Ultra 6.5R in long-wide, which weighs only 20 ounces and has a 6.9 R value. It’s a rectangle, so it’s not quite small enough for ultralight summer backpacking, but will be a good companion for fall hunting and canoe trips where weight and space are a little less of a concern.

With this launch, Exped is trying out a new pricing structure that sees all pad sizes within a given model range priced the same. That’s $200 in this case, which is excellent for such a warm pad. And while that probably helps them simplify SKUs, I don’t really understand why buying a smaller size that uses less material wouldn’t be a little cheaper. I’d also love to see this technology offered in slimmer mummy shape to cut some weight and packed size.

The pad I’m really excited about though is the Ultra 10R, which uses a top and bottom layer of lofted synthetic insulation to achieve a 10.2 R-value for under 2 pounds of weight.

Compare this range to the popular Therm-A-Rest NeoAir XTherm NXT, which has only a 7.3 R-value but claims winter camping applicability, and you can see the advantage. With the Ultra 10R, there will no longer be a need to carry an additional closed cell foam pad in order to sleep in sub-zero temperatures.

Mountain Hardwear Ghoul 20 Sleeping Bag

On the other end of the price and warmth spectrums arrives this new ultralight summer bag. It justifies its $800 price point (for a Long) with the use of 950+ fill power ExpeDRY down. That’s the same gold particle treatment used in that Sitka parka I reviewed at length a year ago. Combined with a 10D face fabric, that creates a very compact packed size and very low 633 gram weight (normal length) for a full mummy bag with a 20 degree limit rating. Part of achieving that is thanks to the use of a reflective fabric on the top half of the bag that works like a mylar sleeping pad to reflect warmth back at your body, reducing the amount of down necessary to achieve that temperature rating.

I’ll do a longer writeup once I’ve had a chance to take mine camping. This is very much a case of quality and features targeted at discerning users with the budget necessary to buy solutions. But first I need to find a new ultralight sleeping pad to pair with this thing. Maybe a Nemo Tensor Elite?

Goal Zero Yeti 1500 6G Power Station

The portable power station space is now a lot more competitive than when Goal Zero essentially invented it way back in 2008. But compared to the now-ubiquitous stuff from brands like Jackery and Ecoflow et al, Goal Zero still offers the kind of quality you can genuinely rely on.

This new flagship offers 1,500Wh of capacity for $1,500, a just-right size for most general users. What makes it unique is all the vibration and temperature testing Goal Zero has done to ensure this thing will stay working through years of hard use. The company says it targets a 10-year lifespan even if you drive a lot of washboard, and that it can reliably power stuff down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit.

They believe in that durability so much that they’re sending me a unit used in their own product testing, rather than a brand new one. That’s impressive.

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Old sled dogs never die. Nature endures. Ski passes hit record prices even as season shortens. iPhones save lives in avalanches. And, Oregon may have found a solution to making wildlife funding sources more diverse. Here’s the stories you don’t want to miss from the outdoors this week.

A Dog Sled Racer Says Goodbye To Her Pack: Every time I read a Blair Braverman story I find myself wishing two things: 1) that I could write as well as she does and 2) that I could devote my life to spending time outdoors with dogs to the degree she has. Today in the New York Tims she tells the story of taking a team of old sled dogs into the wilderness, and talks about what made her a successful racer. Here’s a gift link that will allow you to bypass their paywall for 14 days. Give yourself half an hour and enjoy this one.

The State Of Nature In America: To mark Earth Day in 2022, President Biden ordered the creation of a peer-reviewed nationwide report on the condition of nature, modeled after the National Climate Assessment. Both have now been cancelled, but the nature report has found a source of private funding to continue its work. Published last week in draft form, what’s now called The Nature Record contains 868 pages and 15 chapters. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but the takeaways appear to be that while there’s a lot of threats and problems, there’s also a lot of resilience and opportunity. It’s an encouraging conclusion that we still have the chance to turn things around.

Record Prices, Little Snow: Epic passes for next winter went on sale earlier this month. With a base price of $1,089, skiing is now more expensive than ever before, even as resorts across the west are already closing for the season, amid record high temperatures and little to no snow. But the worst hit trails may be at Nordic facilities, which tend to set at the bases of the big alpine resorts, and that small difference in elevation has been enough to keep many closed all year. Virginia and I haven’t skied once this winter, something we’ll hopefully be able to correct next year, if it actually snows in the Rockies again.

Outside Is Out Of Ideas: Speaking on The Rebooting Show podcast, Outside Inc CEO Robin Thurston “opens up” about some of the struggles he’s faced in his effort to destroy every outdoor publication anyone ever cared about. Allegedly the company is now turning a small profit on $125mm in annual revenue. But, rather than the result of new user recruitment or strong ad sales, that appears to just be the result of firing everyone with any talent or experience at the company, and replacing them with a bunch of low-wage hacks who turn out the kind of slop even AI would be embarrassed of. Thurston claims that he’s now pursuing an IPO, but that seems like an unlikely outcome. The backstory here is after burning through $200mm in Sequoia Capital’s cash, Thurston is under immense pressure to deliver the return on investment he promised. He initially tried to sell the entire collection of brands he wasted all that cash acquiring in a single bundle that he initially valued at $500mm, but after finding zero interest, is now out of ideas.

One interesting revelation is the current revenue split. Advertising buys have fallen by 30 percent company wide, and he’s now found himself relying on “subscription” revenue to make up the difference. But while Thurston suggests that’s coming from content, I highly doubt that the collapse in readership has turned around since I was fired last September. The content being churned out over there is shockingly bad, with zero indication that any money is being invested in talent or even process. I suspect that things are as they were before: Gaia revenue is bankrolling the entire company. The problem there is that money is needed to reinvest in that product, which is now years behind competitors like OnX in the mapping app space.

To quote one investor I talked with about potentially putting together an offer for the business, “I’m afraid the odds of a good outcome for that company grow less and less every day.”

An EV I Actually Like: I always get in trouble for allowing the rational part of my brain to get underwhelmed by the current state of the electric vehicle. Manufacturers are busy exploiting consumer goodwill in naked cash grabs, rather than making any sort of effort to actually take advantage of the inherent benefits of the technology to make better vehicles.

Another thing I’ve found depressing for the last 30 years or so was the state of BMW. What was once a company that made simple, lightweight, well-engineered cars that were good to drive pivoted to making complicated, heavy, poorly-engineered crossovers that were immensely ugly.

But this new electric 3-series changes that. Not only is it genuinely good looking, but it’s an actual sport sedan, which is what BMW got famous for making. No word on weight, and obviously we’ll need to wait and see if if I can offer a genuinely engaging driving experience, but I’m actually bullish on this thing recapturing enthusiast appeal.

iPhones Save Lives: Turns out the survivors of California’s deadliest avalanche in Tahoe last month used their iPhones to communicate with rescuers, despite the absence of cell service. The newest iPhones, Google Pixels (what I use), and some other devices have begun incorporating a satellite-based emergency communication feature similar to that which previously required carrying a Garmin inReach device.

While there are arguments that expanding this feature so broadly will overtax first responders, its ubiquity is also going to save lives, which can only ever be a positive thing.

One company it will not be positive for though is Garmin. And while that brand is busy pushing feature iterations to its inReach range designed to enable it to compete with smartphones—cameras and touchscreens—they have to be sweating. Personally speaking from the perspective of a longtime inReach user, once I find a reliable way to communicate casually with my wife and friends from the field, I can’t wait to cut down the number of subscriptions I pay for and reduce the amount of devices I carry.

Oregon Wildlife Funding: Writing in OutdoorLife, Dan Collins explains Oregon’s new source for wildlife funding, which uses hospitality tax to pay for conservation.

The backstory here is that America has wild animals because hunters pay for them. This bothers everyone from people who hate hunting, to hunters themselves, but until now there’s been no good alternative. In contrast to conservation (managed use), preservation (protection at all costs) is just too expensive to expand beyond national parks and similar.

“Oregon lawmakers passed new legislation this month that establishes a new revenue stream for fish and wildlife conservation,” writes Collins. “The law, which goes into effect next year, raises the statewide transient lodging tax (also known as a hospitality tax) by a nominal 1.25 percent and directs this revenue toward programs that will benefit Oregon’s fish and wildlife resources.”

It’s anticipated the measure will add $30mm to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s $600mm annual budget. Hopefully that can expand further should it prove successful.

God Squad Has The Power (To Kill Endangered Species): It may sound like a bad Christian comic book movie, but the so-called “god squad” is actually something much worse. Late Friday night (when all good news drops), the Department of the Interior announced plans to convene the Endangered Species Committee on March 31, to consider as-yet unnamed measure to deregulate oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, the Bureau of Ocean Management announced plans to spend $5 billion to employ high-risk deepwater drilling techniques.

Those two things together paint a worrying picture. You can read more on E&E News.

What I’ve Been Up To: I’m trying to enact a regular publishing schedule that will allow me to publish a newsletter every weekday, and deliver regular topics and formats. As part of that, Wednesdays will be for these outdoor news roundups. That plan is off to a great start, because I already missed Tuesday, which I plan to use to publish fun gear videos.

After rumors began to spread that I was planning to pull out of my race for Montana State Senate, I needed to go ahead and announce that, and get all the paperwork sorted.

Why? Montana has a citizen legislature, which relies on real working people to take time out of their careers to spend 90 days, once every two years, making the laws that govern all of us. That time is compensated with annual pay of about $5,000. So it’s more volunteer work in politics than it is a new career in politics.

And while I knew this would be a money-losing endeavor going into it, I did not expect that raising my hand to be a part of a solution to our current predicament would cost me my career. The day after I announced my campaign last September, Outside used it as excuse to fire me, even though they’d previously given me the verbal go-ahead.

So I’ve been looking for a new job ever since. And not only has doing that while writing this newsletter and learning to run for office been a lot, it’s been compounded by the stress inherent to worrying about money. I held out longer than I should have, largely because I’m confident I’ll be able to find a significant step forward, but at the same time it was becoming evident that my campaign and the eventual office I was committing to were ruling out options for significant career advancement. I found myself having to choose between the change I could make through an exciting career, and the potential held by a seat in the state senate, and landed on the answer that allows me to earn a living.

I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to resist the gravitational pull of reality this time, but am excited about the potential a new career holds. And the good news here is that I now have more time to focus on continuing to build this newsletter, not just as a side hustle, but as one potential option for my primary platform.

As always, I appreciate the support you guys give me by reading, sharing, and subscribing to this work.

Top photo: USFS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

How long will the war in Iran last? How bad will gas prices get, and when? Will a terror attack on U.S. soil give Trump the excuse he wants to cancel or control the mid-term elections? Are we about to lose the Boundary Waters? Will Big Bend lose the Rio Grande to a border wall? The funny thing is, it’s not just normal Americans who don’t know the answers to these questions, our leaders don’t either.

Welcome to your weekly roundup of developments around public lands news. I’m going to try something new for the next couple of weeks, and shift this newsletter away from irregular long-form articles, and into regular daily topics. I’m thinking Mondays will be for public lands, and the goal here is to give you an update on everything you need to know, plus my analysis, all in a format that’s easy to read, simple to understand, and achievable for me to put together with regular timing. Definitely open to your thoughts as I iterate!

Doug Burgum Hates The Poors

What’s Happening: Speaking at a conference put on by BlackRock (the world’s largest investment firm), everyone’s favorite billionaire Secretary of the Interior stated that advocates for public lands are, “financially illiterate.” After demanding a taxpayer-employed aid bake him a fresh batch of cookies, he went on to rail against the federal permitting process for extraction projects, and protections for ocean ecosystems.

Why You Should Care: The Department of the Interior is responsible for managing 20 percent of the entire land area of the United States, plus 3.2 billion marine acres on the outer continental shelf. All of that is supposed to be managed in benefit of the American people, but ever since his confirmation hearing last year, Doug has publicly struggled to get his head around the fact that the public trust is not a private business he can just pump, dump and walk away from.

He first proposed selling public land in order to pay down the national debt, then tried to change that to borrowing against public land to do the same (which is not better), before proposing selling our land to private developers in order to build something he called “affordable housing” but which really meant golf courses reserved for the wealthy. He turned over the reigns of his department to DOGE, which fired 25 percent of the entire staff at the National Park Service, then he left those parks open during the longest government shutdown ever, all in an apparent attempt to kill visitors in order to manufacture the kind of scandal that will allow him to privatize NPS operations.

My take: You’re going to see a lot of outlets attempt to offset Doug’s claim with that figure from Outdoor Recreation Roundtable that attempts to place a total value on the economic impact of the outdoor industry. A) ORR’s math is garbage, and includes activity that has nothing to do with public lands or the outdoors, like the bikes kids ride to school, or the backpacks they carry with them, and B) they ignore the legislative basis for public lands management, which differs by agency but by and large prioritizes industrial activity within the bounds of major environmental laws like NEPA, ESA, CWA and CAA, all of which are under attack by Republicans right now. This argument doesn’t just ignore reality, it is, to quote Doug, “financially illiterate.”

The purpose of multiple use and sustained yield isn’t to shave whales, it’s to guarantee our country’s access to resources into the future. This is what Doug either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about. Selling everything, or cutting down every tree in one fell swoop, or whatever nonsense he’s proposing now might generate some short term profits, but those would come at the expense of continued, sustainable profits in perpetuity. And that’s the reality of what’s dumb here.

Then there are the unquantifiable ecosystem benefits created by public lands: clean air, clean water, and abundant biodiversity. There’s a few different ways to chip away at the edges of those in order to define values—the cost of treating coal-caused cancer versus the profit derived from burning it for example—but the reality is we need that stuff in order to continue to live on this planet.

NPS Visitation Down 3 Percent In 2025

What’s Happening: NPS has released visitation numbers for 2025. Despite all those fired rangers, despite the longest government shutdown in history, despite all the chaos and economic destruction, despite foreign tourists traveling anywhere but Trump’s America, total visits were down only 9 million from 2024, when an all-time record 332 million people visited parks where visitation is tracked.

Why You Should Care: The Trump administration is involve in an ongoing effort to privatize operations and sell-off units within NPS.

My Analysis: If this summer has insane gas prices, visits will trend down again, but remain at historically high levels. And while staff in national parks are engaged in heroic efforts to hold things together, something will eventually give. Some made-for-TV visitor will be killed in some sort of gory, easily preventable accident. Some natural treasure will be irrevocably damaged by some influencer trying to accrue likes on whichever social media platform the Ellison family decides will be most popular. And when that happens, look for the administration to pounce. We’re currently at step four of the seven-step plan to destroy NPS.

Do Higher Gas Prices Mean More Drilling?

What’s Happening: Some clown ignored 40 years of research, planning and caution, and initiated the worst case scenario in the Middle East, one in which Iran has been given not only a reason to close the Strait of Hormuz—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil must be shipped—but the motivation to keep it closed for as long as possible. Dumping strategic reserves into the market has partially suppressed gas prices, but that can only last so long. And all of this is coming together just in time for peak summer demand.

Why You Should Care: There’s starting to be rumblings that expanding domestic production could help mitigate the looming energy crisis. And rather than use that as a reason to expand the production of and permitting for renewables, financially “literate” stooges like Doug Burgum are arguing that it’s cause to expand drilling on public lands. They’ll likely use this as an excuse to pursue longtime goals like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and easing regulations across broad swaths of other kinds of public lands.

My Analysis: Getting all worked up about drilling isn’t going to bring gas prices down on any sort of reasonable timeline. In ANWR, for instance, the oil industry itself estimates the timeline from a permitted and sold lease to oil production is at least ten years long. While it is likely we’ll still be at war in Iran in a decade’s time, consumer and voter sentiment do not operate in decade-long periods.

All of this Republican nonsense is going to intersect with reality in really unpredictable ways. Under Barrack Hussein Obama, our country became the single largest oil producer in the world. But the kind of crude oil we grow domestically is not always the kind we use in our refineries, so we still import about 60 percent of the oil we use.

On top of that, the oil business is embarked on the project of pivoting away from domestic production, after Trump’s moronic trade war made economic conditions for oil drilling here unfavorable.

Other variables at play include trade restrictions on Russian oil, and the growing alliance between that country, Iran, and China, which relies heavily on oil that travels through the Persian Gulf. So does India. And there’s all that oil sitting under newly-compliant Venezuela to consider too.

A sensible administration would use this as an opportunity to speed the deployment of wind, solar, and hydroelectric power, and would have been preparing for this moment by subsidizing the domestic development of low-cost electric vehicles. A conservative administration that was at least partially tethered to reality would at least allow the free market to decide. This administration is punishing automakers for pursuing EVs, drastically raising the cost of domestic auto production, and preventing the rollout of cheap renewable energy.

It’s not just international relations that operates in decades. So too must significant capital investment. Adapting our nation’s refineries to the common sense application of processing the oil we produce here, planning to manufacture affordable, efficient vehicles, and constructing renewable capacity are all extremely difficult amid the chaos we’re suddenly embroiled in. That leaves our industrial capacity paralyzed, even while foreign adversaries are being given the tools and justification they need to eat our lunch.

All that’s to say, your next car might just be a Chinese EV, but we’ll probably destroy a bunch important nature in America anyways, just to say we did.

Don’t Believe What You Read About The Big Bend Border Wall

What’s Happening: Apparently a bunch of outlets haven’t been paying attention for the last decade, and don’t realize that our government now acts in chaotic, unpredictable ways, especially when it comes to external communication. A map of the “wall” they plan to build right smack in the middle of the Rio Grande River, where it flows between Mexico and Big Bend National Park was pulled down, amended, and republished. Journalists who really should know better jumped on an assumption that this meant advocacy against the project had been successful. Had they actually just picked up the phone and called anyone in Texas, they wouldn’t have published fake news.

Why You Should Care: Good journalism is more important than ever before. But, as legacy media outlets like Outside have begun obeying in advance, financially failing, or like Outside, both, this has created a vacuum for good, vetted, edited, work you can rely on. This is a problem because the public cares about public lands and the environment, so a burgeoning market for content around that has begun to grow. And that demand is attracting amateurs, NGOs who see it as a path to fundraising, and people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who try and compete for attention by stoking the same kind of fear journalists are supposed to fight against.

My Take: You, the public, are the ultimate arbiters of who succeeds and who fails in this new media environment. If you want good, reliable information around topics you care about, you need to learn to determine the difference between good and bad content, then financially support the kind you want to see exist.

No One Knows What’s Next

We’re still waiting on two important votes in the Senate: the one on destroying the boundary waters, and Scott Socha’s confirmation for Director of the National Park Service.

Because they’re using the Congressional Review Act in pursuit of destroying the Boundary Waters in order to give Minnesota’s copper away to China, that measure only requires 51 votes. Socha’s nomination requires the same, since the filibuster no longer applies to executive branch nominations. That these votes have not yet taken place seems to point to an unraveling inside the GOP, one that’s playing out publicly in the form of all the lawmakers resigning ahead of the mid-terms.

Will those resignations untether Republican Senators from even the minimal responsibility to their voters they’ve felt up until now? Will the party push back on unpopular policies and people in an effort to try and keep ahold of that body in the mid-terms? Are they just too distracted by all the explosions and pedophilia? I wish I could tell you, but there just isn't visibility into their machinations right now. The only thing for certain is that all this is going to get worse before it gets better. If it gets better.

Top photo: USFWS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.