Introducing PLAN, the Tool That Finds Every Public Lands Fight Open for Comment Right Now
The Public Lands Action Network is a free tool that finds every public lands decision open for comment and helps you write the one comment the law makes them answer.
Today we’re launching what might be the most important thing we’ve ever built.
For the last year and a half we’ve shown you what’s being done to your public lands and who’s doing it. Our Threatened Public Lands Map shows you every place on the chopping block. Our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard shows you how all 535 members of Congress vote. Showing you the fight was always only half the job. This is the half that puts your voice into it, at the exact moment the law requires them to listen.
It’s called PLAN, the Public Lands Action Network, and there’s never been anything like it for America’s public lands. Every morning it reads the entire Federal Register, the government’s daily log of what it intends to do to the country, and it pulls every decision open for public comment that touches the land you own. It explains each one in plain English. It shows you the official count of how many people have already spoken up. It hands you four fast ways to act. It covers all 50 states. And it’s free, with no account required and no paywall on action, ever.
Think of it as 5 Calls for public lands. Your lands are under attack, so you make a plan. This is your PLAN for Public Lands, and a network of the people making one alongside you. As of this writing, it’s tracking 21 open decisions with 107,459 voices already on the record, and new windows open every week.
This took a lot of time and work to get right. If you’ve ever worked with the Federal Register you know what an intentionally convoluted tool it is. We built a pipeline that scans it twice a day and taught it to tell a real public-lands fight from the thousand pieces of procedural noise around it. We wrote a plain-English read for every action. And we tried our best to actual make it look beautiful and highly shareable – a necessity to win fights. There were a lot of late nights, and a lot of mornings that started before the Register even posted.
We’re a small team, and we built this because you asked us for it. For a year and a half our inbox has filled with a version of the same question. Where do I comment? What can I actually do? How do I find these fights before the deadline passes? We heard you. This is the answer.
How it works
Every action on PLAN gives you the same four moves.
Comment. A prefilled starter you can edit, plus a few questions only you can answer. Which land near you this affects. What you do there. What you’d lose. A live strength meter tells you honestly when your draft is still a form letter and when it’s become your own. Then one click to the official government comment page with your finished words.
Call your rep. Enter your state and PLAN pulls your two senators and your House member, each with a tap-to-call number, a public lands grade from our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard, and a 30-second script tailored to the action.
Tell the media. A letter-to-the-editor draft plus a finder for your local paper.
Share. Every action generates its own photo share card, so the link you post renders as a poster with the land, the headline, and the days remaining.
See it work right now
Here’s what it looks like the moment you open it.
Right now the Forest Service has a comment window open, and the subject of that window is whether you get to keep commenting. On July 1 the agency proposed a rule that would shrink the public’s right to weigh in on the handbooks that decide how grazing permits get issued, how timber sales get reviewed for damage to water and wildlife, and what deadline you have to object before a decision goes final. We broke down exactly what it does last week. The window to fight it is open now, and 830 people are already on the last we checked. PLAN hands you the words and the link. You can make it 831 in about five minutes.
That window is one of dozens moving through the Federal Register every weekday, most of them buried in procedural language almost nobody reads, each carrying a deadline that passes whether you heard about it or not.
Your public lands are under attack. That much is true. The lie is that you are powerless to stop it.
You’ve already proven that’s a lie. This spring a coalition of readers, scientists, and tribal nations stalled Mike Lee’s move to gut the plan protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante, and he never got the vote. The people who tell you comment periods are theater are the same ones who count on you staying home.
Why one real comment beats a thousand signatures
Here’s the thing almost no activism tool does well.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, when a federal agency opens a comment window it’s legally required to consider and respond to substantive comments before it finalizes the decision. When agencies skip that step, courts have thrown the decision out. A specific, factual comment, especially one carrying insight the agency doesn’t have, becomes part of the record a judge reviews. That record is where rules get rewritten and where lawsuits get won.
The flip side matters just as much. Identical form letters get bundled, deduplicated, and counted once. The government says so itself on regulations.gov. One personal comment often carries more weight than a thousand copies of the same one.
The big petition tools optimize for the exact thing agencies discount. PLAN does the opposite. It helps you write the specific, personal comment the law forces the agency to answer, and it tells you why that matters.
More major fights open right now
Stop the public land giveaway for a Louisiana LNG hub. The government wants to hand public land to a private LNG company without competitive bidding.
Stop the rollback of grazing rules on public lands. A weaker standard for what livestock can do to the range you own. We traced how that program became a welfare empire for billionaires and corporations.
Support updated protections for the Olympic Coast sanctuary. A chance to make a protection you already own stronger, and proof this work cuts across the usual political lines.
Each takes about five minutes. Each puts your words in a legal record that agencies must answer and judges review.
Why we built this
As many of you know, More Than Just Parks began the way most of our work has, with a camera and a long drive. For years we made films about America’s public lands, and the agencies that manage them hired us to do it.
Somewhere along the way the work changed. The more time we spent on these lands, the better we understood how they came to be protected and how easily that protection could be undone. When this administration started taking the protections apart, opening the land to industry and gutting the agencies we’d worked alongside, we couldn’t keep filming as though nothing was happening. So we turned the same skills toward the fight, reporting and digging through the records, naming the people and the money behind the decisions.
That’s what More Than Just Parks is now. We publish almost every day. We built our Threatened Public Lands Map to show every place on the block, and our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to grade all 535 members of Congress on how they actually vote. And now we’ve built PLAN, which puts your voice on the public record when a federal agency asks for comment. And there’s more on the way. Most of what we make now, we make for you, because the people who love these places have always been the ones who protect them, and too often they’ve had to do it without a clear way to find the fight or know where their voice would count.
We’re done sitting on the sidelines, and done watching everyone else sit on theirs. Pick one decision. Say something true. That is how this is won.
Go explore it. Pick one fight, read the agency’s own words next to our plain-English read, and see how fast you can put your voice on the record. Make your PLAN: morethanjustparks.com/public-lands-action-network
Then share it like crazy. Post it, text it, drop it in the group chat that only ever argues about basketball. Bookmark it. Share it like the deadlines depend on it, because they do. Every person who opens PLAN is another voice on a record the agency has to answer, and every action carries its own share card, so your link lands as a full-bleed photograph of the place with the headline and the countdown built right in. This is how a comment window nobody was supposed to notice turns into 800 voices, then 8,000.
And sign up for PLAN alerts while you’re there. Tell us the state and the issues you care about, and we’ll send you the comment windows that matter to you while there’s still time to act. A weekly digest plus instant alerts when a critical window opens, double opt-in, unsubscribe anytime. When a window you acted on closes, the digest reports back the final official count, so you always hear how it ended. You can also see exactly how PLAN finds and checks every action on the methodology page.
If you like this tool or have ideas about it please drop us a comment!
Now get out there and start PLANning!
Will & Jim
More Than Just Parks runs entirely on reader support. We take no money from billionaires or corporate sponsors, which is what lets us keep action on PLAN free for everyone. If this is the kind of thing you want in the world, a paid subscription keeps it running. It costs about what you’d pay for a bundle of firewood a month. These places can’t write a check to a lobbyist. They’ve got you, and now you’ve got PLAN.
Brilliant. Our public lands are being raped-and-pillaged. There’s been scarce coverage by MSM. And clearly Congress has abdicated its crucial oversight role. Until we can VOTE and put an end to this circus, we need more of this. Thank you.
Too often, people reach for excuses when confronted with the hard work of citizenship—the responsibility of holding our elected representatives accountable.
First, More Than Just Parks gave us a clear and compelling account of what is happening to our public lands and why it matters. Then they equipped us with practical tools, including scripts that make it easier to contact our elected officials. Now, with the introduction of PLAN, they have taken that mission even further. By harnessing cutting-edge technology, PLAN helps expose actions affecting our public lands and empowers citizens to respond directly to the lawmakers responsible.
What the Pattiz Brothers and More Than Just Parks have accomplished is remarkable. They have pulled back the curtain, replacing confusion with clarity and helplessness with action. They haven’t simply sounded the alarm—they’ve placed meaningful tools into the hands of ordinary people who care about protecting America’s natural heritage.
The future of our public lands will not be determined by technology alone, however. It will be determined by whether we choose to use these tools, raise our voices, and encourage others who share our commitment to do the same.
Thomas Jefferson is often credited with saying, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Whether those words apply to our democracy or to the stewardship of our public lands, their meaning remains the same: freedom and preservation are never self-sustaining. They endure only when citizens refuse to look away.
Thanks to the vision of the Pattiz Brothers and the innovation behind PLAN, we have been given more than information—we have been given agency. The power to make a difference is now within our reach. What happens next is up to us.