Peace for Our Time
On appeasement, purity, and the coverage your public lands actually deserve.
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has waged war on the United States government itself. They've gutted agencies, hollowed out American institutions, and fired career public servants by the tens of thousands — applauding themselves while they've done it. They turned Elon Musk loose on the federal workforce and the country watched him torment people who'd dedicated their lives to public service the way a troubled child pulls the wings off flies — publicly, gleefully, for sport. They fired scientists whose research was inconvenient. They purged inspectors general who asked too many questions. They fired independent commissioners and board members in defiance of Congress. They weaponized the Justice Department against political opponents and threatened federal judges by name. They deported American citizens. They sold access to the presidency for $148 million in cryptocurrency and held court with dictators while American institutions burned around them. They sent masked agents into American communities to spread fear and called it law enforcement.
That is the government of the United States in 2026. And if you understand that, if you’ve been paying attention for the last seventeen months, then you already know that the old rules for covering American public lands don’t apply anymore.
What we are living through has no parallel in American history. Our laws were never designed for this. They assumed good faith. They assumed a basic respect for the public trust. They assumed that no administration would attempt to hollow out the nation’s institutions in a cynical campaign to liquidate the American estate for the exclusive benefit of wealthy donors, friends, and family. They assumed Congress would act as a check. They assumed the courts would intervene when the law was brazenly violated. Those assumptions have failed spectacularly.
On your public lands, that looting has been breathtaking. Earlier this year we documented the 70 worst actions the Trump administration took against public lands in 2025 alone. We said then that it was a sustained, coordinated campaign to strip the nation of its shared inheritance, executed in bad faith by an administration unbound by law, precedent, or shame. Every major conservation law in this country is now under direct assault. And it’s only accelerated since.
None of this is subtle. None of it is hidden. They’ve told you, in writing, in budget documents, in executive orders, in internal legal memos, exactly what they intend to do. And they’re doing it.
Who We Are
We’re conservationists, writers, and filmmakers. Before we started this publication, we spent years working alongside the agencies that manage your public lands. We made films on complex topics for the National Park Service, we led a multi-year nation-wide media project with the Forest Service aimed at getting the American public involved in decision-making on their national forests. Over the years we donated enormous amounts of our work to these agencies free of charge. We were happy to do it. It was an honor to serve our government and help in some small way with the stewardship of our public lands.
And then we watched this administration vilify and purge the people we’d worked alongside and gut the agencies we’d served.
Like many, we saw the writing on the wall when Trump won reelection. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we put a successful business at risk to do this work.
Along with our investigative reporting and analysis of public lands issues, we built tools like our Congressional Scorecard and a Threatened Lands Map to help people looking for ways to defend these lands. We do this work without corporate sponsors, without institutional backing, without a safety net — and without pulling our punches.
We’ve made a deliberate choice about that. And it’s the choice this piece is about.
Peace for Our Time
There’s a famous photograph of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepping off a plane in 1938, waving a signed agreement from Adolf Hitler and declaring “peace for our time.” It’s at the top of this piece. Chamberlain had just handed Czechoslovakia to a fascist war-monger because he believed negotiation and patience and trust in the process would prevent catastrophe. He was wrong, and the world paid a terrible price for it.
We bring this up because there’s a version of Chamberlain thinking alive in the public lands space right now, and it’s doing serious damage.
You’ve seen it. You’ve probably had it served to you by an algorithm and you may well subscribe to some of its purveyors. Since the Trump administration began its assault on public lands, a cottage industry of contrarian commentary has sprung up on this platform whose primary contribution to this moment has been telling you that your concern is overblown, that you’ve been misled, and that they possess some deeper understanding of how things really work that normal humans lack. They’ve told you the people covering this crisis are doing it for clicks and subscriptions. That what you’re witnessing is just a reorganization, not a dismantling. That the real problem is the people sounding the alarm, not the people dismantling your government.
One such writer spent more energy comparing our Forest Service reporting to viral content that whipped up hatred against immigrant communities and led to federal agents raiding their homes and businesses (a comparison so reckless and so morally bankrupt it would be laughable if it weren’t published to an audience that trusts him) than he spent covering the actual reorganization. He illustrated those pieces, as he routinely does, with photographs we took for the very agency he claims isn’t being dismantled, apparently without realizing who made them.
Another veteran writer published a piece this week lamenting the rise of "disinformation" in public lands coverage — arguing, among other things, that moving the Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake shouldn't concern anyone because the city has elected liberal mayors and is home to strong environmental nonprofits. As if the issue were municipal politics and not the deliberate relocation of a federal agency to the state that sued to seize 18.5 million acres of your public land, run by politicians who've spent decades trying to dismantle the very concept of federal land ownership. He attributed claims to us that we didn't make and then stumbled to correct the claims he'd invented. He argued that reverting to a weaker management plan on Grand Staircase-Escalante wouldn't be so bad because Biden had operated under the plan for three years without disaster — an argument that only works if you ignore who's in charge now, which is the entire point. And his great worry was that readers might contact their members of Congress or comment on the federal register armed with imperfect information, as though the gravest threat to public lands in 2026 is a constituent letter with a misplaced nuance.
Another writer looked at the administration’s plan to close fifty-seven of seventy-seven research stations and move the headquarters to Salt Lake City and declared the whole thing might work out fine — who really knows? That same voice told you, in writing, that calling your members of Congress was a waste of your time, your energy, and your “social capital,” and that you should save it for August or September.
While the most sweeping assault on public lands in American history accelerates by the week, these writers have been busy telling anyone who'll listen that the alarm is overblown.
Which raises the question, what more does this administration have to do to get these people to understand the seriousness of the moment we're in?
They pardoned the people who attacked the United States Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. They've praised them. Sung songs about them. Lauded them as patriots over and over again. The people who violently beat police officers, smeared feces on the walls of Congress, and tried to hang the Vice President of the United States. Their appointees for jobs in government and federal judgeships are required to support the big lie and the January 6th insurrection. They created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to reward them — the amount itself a grotesque co-opting of the founding year, paid for with your money.
What does this administration have to do before the people telling you to relax, telling you our reporting is overblown, finally understand that we aren’t operating under normal constraints anymore?
The man running the BLM believes public lands shouldn’t exist. The U.S. Forest Service is run by a logging executive who believes you prevent wildfire by sending all the trees to lumber mills. The Department of Interior is stuffed with a cast of characters that make James Watt look like John Muir. A right wing nationalist wields nearly unchecked power within the Office of Management and Budget and tortures public servants and agencies like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants.
We reject the breathtaking condescension of treating our readers — people who care deeply about this land, who show up, who call and write and testify and donate and drive hours to public hearings — as a mob that needs to be managed rather than citizens exercising the most fundamental right they have. We reject the idea that calling your senator is a waste of your “social capital.” We reject the scolding, superior tone of people who’ve appointed themselves the arbiters of acceptable alarm in the middle of an unprecedented national emergency. And we especially reject the irony of being lectured about journalistic standards by writers whose most engaged work has been attacking ours.
You aren't children. You don't need to be told when it's appropriate to be alarmed. You found this publication because you were looking for the truth about what's happening to your public lands, and you stayed because we gave it to you straight — without hedging, without false equivalence, and without telling you to wait until the timing was more convenient for someone else's comfort level.
The Burn It All Group
There’s a second strain of criticism in this space, and it’s harder to argue with because it comes from a place of genuine conviction — even if that conviction is aimed at the wrong target at the worst possible time.
The Forest Service is a deeply flawed institution. We know that. We’ve written about it. We wholeheartedly share the desire to see federal land management reformed and reoriented toward ecology, however that can be achieved.
But there are people in this space who’ve watched the Forest Service get hollowed out, watched career scientists and land managers get purged, watched thousands of livelihoods get destroyed — and felt something close to vindication. Who responded to our reporting not by covering the crisis but by attacking us for having the gall to defend the agency and the people inside it. Who’d rather demand a perfect agency from a fascist government than defend the imperfect one that’s all that stands between your land and the people who want to strip it bare.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that’s usually attributed to Confucius that goes, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” You can acknowledge that an institution is flawed and still fight like hell to keep it standing for now — because the alternative under this administration isn’t the perfect agency these critics have been dreaming about. The alternative is no agency at all, and every extractive industry in America racing to fill the vacuum.
These are the same purists who, if Trump tore up the Constitution tomorrow, would criticize anyone mourning it by saying, “that old rag didn’t even give women equal rights.”
Where We Stand
There’s a great quote from Franklin Roosevelt that comes from a little-known speech he gave at Milton Academy in 1926, three years before he became Governor of New York. He seemed to understand exactly why progressives keep losing to people they outnumber. Roosevelt said, “Probably on any given problem of modern life, if a count or classification could be made, the out-and-out conservatives would be found to be in a distinct minority. Yet the majority would be so divided over the means by which to gain their ends that they could not present sufficient unity to obtain action. This, has been the history of progress.”
He could have been describing the public lands movement in 2026. The people working to dismantle your public lands are a minority. They’ve always been a minority. But they’re unified, they’re funded, and they’re in power. And some of the people who should be standing against them are spending their energy tearing each other apart over who has the right framing, who has the proper credentials, who’s been covering public lands long enough to be taken seriously, and whose outrage meets the acceptable threshold for polite discourse. Meanwhile the land gets destroyed and access disappears.
We will call a dismantling a dismantling. We will name the people responsible, document the laws they’re breaking, and give you the evidence. We will tell you when your land is under threat and what you can do about it. We won’t equivocate about an administration that has made its intentions clear and acted on them. We won't treat agencies being run by people appointed to subvert them as good-faith actors. We won’t present the lie and the truth as though they carry equal weight. And when the White House responds to our reporting — not with a correction, not with a counterargument, but with a damage-control operation — we’ll take that as confirmation that we’re doing exactly what we should be.
This publication exists because 640 million acres of your public land deserve coverage as serious and as uncompromising as the threats against them. We aren’t funded by corporations or political parties or big-pocketed donors. We answer to you — the readers who show up, who share the work, who subscribe because they believe the truth about what’s happening on their land matters enough to support. You are the reason we can do this. You are the reason politicians are citing our work and why the administration felt compelled to rewrite a federal website to dispute what two guys with a Substack newsletter uncovered.
While the critics argue about tone and purity and who has the proper credentials to sound the alarm, the administration that pardoned the mob that stormed the United States Capitol, violently assaulted police officers, and tried to hang the Vice President — is looting your public lands.
We're not leaving the arena. We aren't pulling our punches. And we're proud to stand alongside a community of people who understand the moment we're in and what it demands.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Jim & Will
I've mentioned before that my husband ran HotShot crews for the USFS and fought wildland fire for 43 years and was proud to serve our public lands and the people that enjoy and appreciate them.
What is happening now it's just an absolute gut punch.
No one ever said or believed any federal agency was without fault, but for the most part, everyone wanted to preserve and maintain our public lands for future generations.
Keep fighting the good fight. We are all in this together.
We need your voices, thank you for staying in the battle.