Greenwashing, Grifters, And Useful Idiots Won’t Make America Beautiful Again

An entirely reasonable rant about failing to meet the moment

An executive order issued by Trump last week establishes a new commission with a familiar name and purpose. Just like Make America Healthy Again is melting the brains of crystal hippies with disinformation around vaccines, this new Make America Beautiful Again commission sets out to provide cover for people in outdoor spaces to support fascism without appearing like turncoats on public lands. But just like MAHA inevitably leads to the death of children, MABA can only result in the destruction of America’s natural heritage.

Let’s work through the EO’s introduction, applying facts will help frame the scope of what’s going on here.

EO: “The United States is blessed with vast beautiful landscapes, abundant natural resources, and a rich heritage of discovery by travelers and outdoorsmen. America’s national parks, forests, waterways, and public lands have inspired generations and kindled our Nation’s spirit of exploration.

Fact Check: This is all true! America’s public lands system, which incorporates 640 million federally-managed acres is entirely unique, and gives Americans egalitarian access to the outdoors, ecosystem benefits like clean air, clean water, and abundant biodiversity, and ongoing revenue and economic activity from extraction, energy, grazing and timber harvesting.

EO: “To ensure that the next generation of Americans inherits this same sense of duty and adventure, my Administration will prioritize conserving our great American national parks and outdoor recreation areas.”

Fact Check: We’re starting to get into both falsities and language designed to transition the conversation into some bad stuff in just this second sentence. The Trump administration is engaged in an all-out attempt to destroy the environment, not “conserve” it. Eliminating public input in decision making on public lands, steam rolling environmental reviews, rolling back bedrock environmental legislation like the clean water act, gutting the agencies charged with the work of conservation, defunding Americorps (the grant program that funds conservation projects), working to sell off public lands, and setting the National Park Service up to fail in a badly disguised attempt to privatize its operations does not add up to an effort to “conserve” public lands.

Just in the budget reconciliation bill alone, Republicans reduced the staffing budget at NPS by a further $267 million last week. The National Parks Conservation Association reports that since Trump took office on January 20, permanent staffing at NPS has been reduced by 24 percent. Obama’s NPS Director warns that all this is leading up to a sell-off of less-popular national park units, and a privatization of operations even in crown jewel parks like Yellowstone.

Also concerning is the framing of only discussing “national parks and outdoor recreation areas.” A popular talking point in land sale circles is that some public lands are “underused” or “unappropriated.” Any attempts to parse areas of public land by importance to certain user groups is an attempt to identify or excuse the sale of other areas. Our public lands system functions as a whole, not just as a popular trail or “recreation area.”

EO: “Years of mismanagement, regulatory overreach, and neglect of routine maintenance require action.”

Fact Check: In an effort to discredit agencies, non-profits and experts, Republicans hellbent on destroying our natural places love to point fingers at faulty policies like wildfire prevention efforts, without identifying the reasons those policies exist. 60 percent of new homes built nationwide since 1990 are in wildfire-prone areas, preventing controlled burns, and mandating that fires there must be fought. Policy proposals from the right, like selling public lands in order to build McMansions and golf courses, would exacerbate rather than relieve that problem.

EO: “Land-use restrictions have stripped hunters, fishers, hikers, and outdoorsmen of access to public lands that belong to them.”

Fact Check: If OnX (a popular mapping app) says it’s public, you can fish, hunt, hike, or camp there (with proper licenses, tags, permits, etc). Land-use restrictions don’t apply to the public, they apply to industry, and with good reason. Public lands are managed for multiple use and sustained yield. Without restrictions, that forest where you want to hunt deer will be gone and the stream where you used to catch trout will be clogged up with erosion.

EO: “These bureaucratic restrictions have undermined outdoor traditions and threatened conservation funding.”

Fact Check: Federal and state conservation funding comes from the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson acts, which apply additional excise taxes to hunting and fishing equipment, respectively. Revenue from those industries is threatened by Trump’s moronic trade war, not “bureaucratic restrictions.”

EO: “The National Park Service and the United States Forest Service face more than $23 billion and $10.8 billion in deferred maintenance, respectively, leaving roads, trails, and historic landmarks in disrepair.”

Fact Check: And why is that? Republicans in Congress have been cutting budgets at NPS and USFS for decades.

EO: “Despite these challenges, our Nation has proven that conservation and economic growth go hand in hand. Since the signing of the Great American Outdoors Act (Public Law 116-152), the outdoor recreation economy has grown to $1.2 trillion in economic output, and, in 2023, comprised 3.1 percent of employees in the United States and supported 5 million jobs.”

Fact Check: This is a deliberate mis-stating of cause and effect. A more accurate statement would read: Since GAOA failed to fully appropriate the Land and Water Conservation Fund budget, the maintenance backlog in national parks has grown from $14 billion to $23 billion and in national forests from $6 billion to $9 billion. Legislation proposed by Republicans would further defund LWCF, causing these backlogs to swell even further. The outdoor recreation economy has found a way to boom despite insufficient investment in infrastructure, and attempts by Republican politicians to prioritize oil and gas industry profits above the interests of all other industries.

After opening with these lies, the EO goes on to call for policies that prioritize extraction and energy operations on public lands, shift wildlife conservation efforts away from federal management, and establishes a “Make America Beautiful Again Commission,” composed of the Secretaries of Interior, Defense, and Agriculture, the EPA Administrator, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, the White House Chief of Staff, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.

As with other White House EOs that are big on broadness and light on detail, this one will likely be followed by various agency orders that establish actual policy and its implementation. Look for those in coming months.

Who Did This And Why Is It Happening?

Reporting in the Washington Post gives credit to an Instagram account called “Nature is Nonpartisan” and Benji Backer, the CEO of an associated nonprofit. Backer brands himself as a “Conservative Environmentalist,” but has little experience in the space beyond authoring a book of the same name that was published last year, and posting a couple dozen memes to that instagram account, which has under 10,000 followers.

WaPo reports that the MABA commission is modeled after MAHA’s, and that Backer was somehow able to use his connections to score a White House meeting leading up to all this.

Your eyes are not deceiving you, that is Lake Louise, which is located in Canada’s Banff National Park.

If we look at the MAHA movement as a model for MABA, what we see is a pack of grifters, influencers and conmen all looking to scam a buck from easily misled members of the public. As with public health, there’s an entire universe of legitimate organizations, agencies, and experts who perform real work in the conservation space, who could bring actual experience to this table, none of which are currently involved. But as with MAHA, actual solutions aren’t the point here, disinformation is.

The backstory is that the bipartisan resistance to Republican efforts to authorize the sale of 295 million acres of public land scared members of that party. In the run up to last year’s election, Republicans effectively captured the pocket books of major influencers who hold the keys to the imaginations of young men, and following the passage of the deeply unpopular budget last week, will again be relying on that demographic in their efforts to hang on to their majorities.

Benji is messaging social media accounts that participate in the conversation around outdoor causes claiming credit for MABA, and asking people to to give him their personal details.

Here in the west, access to the outdoors defines the identities of young men even more than their affinities for racist coffee or staged fights. So, big “manoverse” influencers like Cam Haines and Steve Rinella were forced to come out in opposition to the public land sell off, threatening the Republican Party’s hold over their audiences. MABA will give guys like that permission to again carry water for fascism, even if its connection to reality never grows beyond easily disproven claims like all the bullshit above.

As the mid-terms approach, look for Cam, Steve and their ilk to continue pushing support of anti-conservation politicians like the hyper-corrupt Ryan Zinke (R-Santa Barbara), now armed with the lie republicans are somehow working to protect public lands.

Speaking to WaPo, Backer himself acknowledges that mainstream conservation organizations already identify his work as an exercise in “greenwashing.”

A Veneer Of Legitimacy

As Mike Lee (R-Utah) began assembling the legislation that would eventually call for the sale of those 295 million acres, his colleague on the Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources, Steve Daines (R-Montana) went to The New York Times to brag that he was helping with what must have seemed likely successful legislation at the time.

An excerpt from that story reads:

“Jordan Roberts, a spokesperson for the committee, said Mr. Lee had ‘worked closely’ with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, to ‘incorporate key feedback, including ensuring a transparent public process.’”

“Matt Lloyd, a spokesman for Mr. Daines, said that the senator ‘expressed his strong view to the committee that he is opposed to selling public lands and did not help craft the legislation,’ though he was happy that Montana was exempt in the current bill.”

While we lack transparent insight in the committee’s process, the fact that Lee exempted all public lands in Montana from any sale points to at the very least an attempt to give Daines something to take to Montana voters as he campaigns for re-election next year, if not an outright agreement between the two Republicans.

But my reporting around the total acreage threatened by the legislation, as well as connecting Daines to its creation brought pushback from a surprising source: Outdoor Recreation Roundtable.

When former BLM director, current president of The Wilderness Society Tracy Stone-Manning broke news to me during an interview that total acreage threatened by Lee and Daines totaled more than 100 million acres, and the subsequent stories were shared widely across social media, representatives of ORR took to comment sections in efforts to absolve Daines of responsibility. This reveals a rift between mainstream conservation nonprofits and industry lobbyists, with the latter pursuing attempts to glad-hand anti-conservation Republicans with the slim hope of influencing their policies.

“Governor Burgum’s history of support for outdoor recreation, the outdoor recreation economy, and the protection of public lands and waters makes his leadership critical,” wrote Jessica Wahl Turner, president and CEO of of ORR in a January letter endorsing the Secretary of the Interior’s nomination. “We are hopeful that the Governor’s long-time admiration of Teddy Roosevelt, sophisticated understanding of business, and commitment to public-private partnerships will help support and grow the recreation economy, its adjacent sectors, and all who benefit from it in every corner of the country.” Since that time, Burgum has worked to sell off BLM land, break the National Park Service, eliminate public input on public lands, and handed over control of the department to a DOGE operative. ORR has not retracted its endorsement.

We see similar efforts from conservative-leaning conservation nonprofits. Not only did the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership recently give Ryan Zinke (R-Santa Barbara), who directed the largest reduction in public land protections ever, its highest award for conservation, but it’s also applauding the MABA commission.

“We thank President Trump for recognizing that land and water priorities are vital to sustaining outdoor traditions for future generations,” reads a statement by TRCP’s president and CEO Joel Pedersen. “We look forward to working with the administration to ensure its implementation.” Pedersen makes no mention of of the administration’s unprecedented assault on clean air, clean water, public lands, or the agencies that protect all that.

“President Trump’s Executive Order is a significant step toward ensuring public lands continue to be places where the public can safely practice and pass along the traditions of hunting and recreational target shooting,” states Joseph Bartozzi, president and CEO of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the lobbying group for the gun industry. “Thriving wildlife across America is successful only through the investments by hunter-conservationists and firearm and ammunition manufacturers that pay the overwhelming share of excise tax dollars to fund this vital effort.” Bartozzi makes no mention of the the impacts Trump’s moronic trade war is having on firearms manufacturers, or the reduction in Pittman funding that will result.

How Do We Beat This?

Expect to see conservation organizations continue to try and take part in the MABA commission. In so doing they’ll be putting forward a genuine effort to try and help bend policy in the right direction, but whether it’s intentional or not, also be adding weight to attempts by Republicans to spread disinformation, and melt the brains of mid-term voters.

To all the people who think they can reach some sort of deal with this administration, or this Republican party, I simply ask you: On November 3, 2026, will we be better off holding some sort of hard-earned incremental compromise as they push forward with their anti-American, anti-conservation agenda, or will we be better off kicking assholes like Ryan Zinke and Steve Daines out of office once and for all, and replacing them with lawmakers who actually care about the outdoors? We only get one answer, because working with them is ultimately going to be working for MABA’s goal of sowing disinformation.

Even if we ignore all the evidence and work under the assumption that MABA is somehow an intellectually honest endeavor, what amount of progress could ever be possible under this leadership? Fascism is a system where government serves only its leaders. We are not those leaders. Until we again have democracy, a system where government serves its people, we the people only exist to be stolen from. Don’t help this administration steal our natural heritage.

Top photo: USFS

Want to do something to fight attempts to steal public land, dismantle national parks, and destroy the environment? Want to go further outdoors while better enjoying the experience? Upgrading to a paid subscription helps independent journalism change minds, and buys personal access to Wes, who will use his experience and his extensive network of subject matter experts to guide your gear purchases, help plan your trips, and save you money. You can read more about what Wes is doing on Substack at this link.