No One Knows What’s Next

What’s true for all of politics is doubly true for public lands

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.