The Power of People and Place in the Fight for Our Land, Water, and Climate

Pictured above: Flyfishing in Big Sheep Creek, Montana; photo by John Mullen.

From the plains of Montana to the beaches of Florida, many Americans view their national parks, public lands, forests, coastal waters, and other special outdoor spaces as a shared backyard. They are the places where we disconnect from the frenzy of daily life and reconnect with each other. They are the ancestral homelands of Tribal Nations, central to Indigenous identities and cultures. And they are the places we know, use, love, and take pride in as a country. They are our common ground.

But this reality is not reflected in the actions and agenda coming from Washington, DC, today. The current presidential administration and a compliant Congress are instead pushing an agenda that is premised on the idea that our shared lands and waters are, first and foremost, entries on a “balance sheet” – assets whose main use and value comes from being auctioned, sold, or given away to private entities, including for the extraction of resources like oil and gas.

This way of thinking wholly prioritizes the corporate interest over the public interest on our public lands and waters.

The policies resulting from this approach will unleash an onslaught of new drill rigs and pipelines in the coming decades, even as the U.S. is already the world’s largest producer of oil and gas.  As a result of a first wave of changes that Congress made earlier this year, more than 200 million acres of public lands – an area larger than the size of Texas – are now subject to mandatory oil and gas leasing, regardless of local community concerns or conditions on the ground. And people who live along the Pacific, Arctic, and eastern Gulf coasts will also soon likely face proposals to allow new offshore oil and gas drilling near their communities.

Beyond the immediate and medium-term impacts on local communities, these policies and actions will also lock in huge levels of carbon and methane pollution for decades to come. Additionally, in the West, they will carve up some of the best remaining habitat and most important wildlife migration corridors for myriad species, including pronghorn, elk, mule deer, and other big game.

Simply put, the unrestrained expansion of drilling and other extractive activities on our shared national public lands and waters is one of the least talked about – but most consequential – conservation and climate challenges our country faces today, with effects that will last for generations.

The good news? For all of us who care about the future of our lands, waters, climate, and communities, the fight ahead is one we can still win. But to do so, we must be clear-eyed about the moment we are in, learn from our history, and tap into one of the oldest sources of strength in our democracy: regular people speaking out and standing up for the places they know and love.

Here is the reality: the looming battle over the unrestrained expansion of drilling and mining on national public lands and waters won’t be decided in Congress, courtrooms, or the gilded White House offices in Washington, DC. It will be decided thousands of miles away, in communities where people come together to protect our common ground.

The Moment We Are In

Over the course of the past year, the democratic pathways through which people can make their voices heard and effectuate change have shifted. Strategies that were effective just a few years ago are less viable now.

For example, while legal challenges to illegal actions are still worth pursuing, we’ve seen the administration flout court decisions and undermine the authority of courts to stop or curb harmful decisions. And while advocates should still make their case on Capitol Hill, many in Congress have shown themselves all too willing to cede their constitutional powers to the executive branch.

Additionally, the technocratic language and Beltway-focused strategies that have dominated environmental advocacy in recent years aren’t landing with broad audiences. Regular people don’t think in terms of acronymed environmental laws, metric tons of carbon, lease stipulations, or parts per billion. Yes, detailed policy reports and statistic-laden social media posts have their place, but they’re not slowing down an administration that is adept at wielding symbols and cultural cues to rally its base behind policies that, despite their populist veneer, actually make daily life more difficult and more expensive for most Americans.

In this moment, the most effective levers of power in our democracy can be found on the ground, among communities and regular people who face a real and immediate threat to the places they love, to their identity, and to their ways of life – all of which are rooted in these public lands.

It is here – among ranchers, hunters, anglers, recreationists, rural business owners, and folks who don’t identify as environmentalists – that the conservation and climate movement must build alliances in the years ahead. For it is in places like the mountains of southern Wyoming and the sacred landscapes of the Four Corners that we will all be reminded of an age-old truth: no matter who is in power, Washington overreach can spark blowback wherever people depend on and unify around healthy public lands and waters.

Why People and Place Matter So Much Right Now

So many of the headlines in environmental, climate, conservation, and natural resource policy are driven by actions from Washington, DC. Through a barrage of executive orders, partisan lawmaking, agency directives, budget cuts, and mass firings at federal natural resources and environmental protection agencies (including the Department of the Interior that oversees our national parks and other public lands), the Trump Administration has launched a blistering assault on clean energy projects, basic safeguards for healthy communities, and land, water, and wildlife habitat protections.

Away from this dizzying barrage, however, a bigger story is beginning to emerge. It is the story of the costs and consequences of the administration’s policies on the everyday lives of people, and of how people are responding to those impacts.

The organization I lead, the Western Energy Project, builds partnerships to develop practical and balanced approaches to managing and stewarding our shared public lands. We know there have long been healthy and lively debates across the West, and probably always will be, about how to best manage the national forests, national parks, and other public lands that are central to the region’s identity, prosperity, and well-being. These debates are part of a vibrant democracy and typically result in the forging of compromise and creative, on-the-ground solutions.

But even as communities discuss and debate the hard questions, there is widespread agreement across the political spectrum and across rural, suburban, and urban communities on at least three points. People living in the West:

• Love their public lands, and want to keep them open, accessible, and in public hands.
• Want their public lands to be managed in a way that balances conservation and resource development.
• Want to have a voice in the decisions that affect the public lands they love, and bristle at top-down directives from Washington that aren’t rooted in on-the-ground knowledge.

And yet, with help from allies in Congress, the current administration has implemented an aggressive set of policy changes that seemingly ignore these points, slashing protections for clean water, communities, and wildlife for the primary benefit of oil, gas, coal, and mining companies. The administration seems to believe that Western communities – including rural communities in the West – will support any level of extraction and development, in any place, including right next to rural schools, cemeteries, places of worship, and even within beloved parks.

This is a miscalculation. Western communities know their landscapes. They know the difference between responsible resource development and reckless exploitation. And they are seeing policy decisions being made in Washington that are wildly out of step with public consensus on how public lands should be managed.

We’ve seen this happen before.

In the early 2000s, the Bush Administration created a White House “energy task force” stocked with industry insiders that spearheaded an effort to fast-track drilling on public lands and waters. Through this effort, the administration got Congress to remove basic safeguards that protect the people and places near drilling, and opened up  millions of acres of public lands in Utah (and other states) to drilling through executive agency processes.

The administration’s actions came to a head in 2008 when the Department of the Interior offered private companies the rights to drill for oil and gas on over 130,000 acres of the public’s lands in Utah. The 77 areas that the agency leased for drilling included lands on the doorstep of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Dinosaur National Monument, and petroglyph-filled Nine Mile Canyon. That lease sale sparked a tinder. A firestorm of opposition broke out across the West. Local businesses, recreationists, and community members who understood what was at stake stood up and fought back. Ultimately, the government backpedaled on the leases.

This kind of backlash can happen under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 2013, for example, farmers, ranchers, and small business owners from several towns in Colorado’s North Fork Valley banded together to successfully prevent oil and gas leasing on 30,000 acres that abutted at least one school and were interspersed with farms, vineyards, and water sources. Giving voice to community sentiment, one rancher noted, “It’s just this land-grab, rape-and-pillage mentality…. All it takes is one spill, and we’re toast.”

We’re starting to see similar frustrations begin to simmer across the country.

In Wyoming, for example, the Trump Administration has once again proposed to sell hundreds of thousands of acres of leases to private oil and gas companies in big game habitat, including migration corridors that the state itself has identified as important to keep intact. These are some of the very same landscapes that the first Trump Administration backed down from leasing in 2018 following an outcry from local officials, hunters, and anglers. Today, hunters are once more raising concerns, but as a result of changes Congress made earlier this year to the oil and gas leasing process in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including eliminating the public’s say on whether and where public lands are leased for drilling, very little can be done to prevent high value wildlife habitat from being auctioned off for drilling.

To put it mildly, people get angry when they learn that a government process has been rigged to silence their voices and to forbid a commonsense way of addressing issues they are raising.

Then there’s New Mexico, where the administration is moving to roll back protections for the Chaco Canyon area that have long-standing support from the All Pueblo Council of Governors (a body representing all twenty Native American Pueblos in New Mexico and Texas), the Hopi Tribe, and many others. This decision, announced right before one of the busiest cultural times of the year for Pueblos and right before the Pueblos elect new leadership, would allow drill rigs to sink wells right next to this sacred area and usher even more oil and gas development in a region that has been heavily industrialized over the past few decades.

As one member of Congress recently said during an event with Tribal leaders, “Can you imagine allowing oil and gas drilling in the heart of a church? This place is holy.” Yet, all indications suggest that’s precisely what’s about to happen.

In Minnesota, the administration is moving forward to eliminate protections against mining on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, America’s most-visited wilderness area, despite the broad consensus in Minnesota that one of the country’s most pristine natural treasures and a critical source of clean water should be safeguarded. The protections that had been in place were developed based on input from Tribal Nations, scientists who studied the delicate hydrology of the area, local small business owners in northeastern Minnesota representing the growing outdoor recreation economy, and others who worried that expanded mining could imperil the area’s crystal-clear waters.

The move to allow mining near the Boundary Waters has been met by a wave of criticism, including from hunters and anglers, which is hardly surprising given that the administration’s approach runs deeply counter to longtime public support for protecting this area.

And in Congress, a partisan majority in the U.S. Senate recently overturned a management plan that balanced conservation and development on 12 million acres of shared public lands in Montana. Local communities spent years in discussion, debate, and compromise to develop that plan, only to see it thrown out the window by Washington politicians – many of whom couldn’t pick out the Yellowstone River on a map.

A Montana rancher, worried that the legal chaos resulting from the loss of the management plan could endanger ranching permits on public lands, compared the Senate’s action to the work of “Communist central economic planners.” The “votes today,” he said, “couldn’t be more top-down, more political, or more disconnected from the interests of Montanans who will be most affected by their actions.”

There is no mistaking it: the overreach coming from Washington, DC, right now is beginning to galvanize a broad cross-section of communities across the country, especially in the West. Sportsmen and women who have hunted the same lands and fished the same streams for generations. Small business owners whose livelihoods depend on tourism and recreation. Ranchers who need clean water and intact ecosystems for their operations. Tribal Nations protecting sacred sites. Many of these people would never call themselves environmentalists, and some might even bristle at the thought of being labeled as one. But they all share a common conviction: the places they know, work in, live near, visit, and pray from – our common ground – are worth protecting.

Building the Power of People and Place

It’s hard to overstate the power and impact that local, place-based advocacy – through the channels of our democracy – can have on national policy.

Look at the fight against PFAS contamination. Toxic “forever chemicals” from military installations, airports, and industrial facilities have leached into the drinking water supplies of countless towns across the country. But nearby communities – including military families, veterans, and business owners – have been relentless in their advocacy, making it a problem that neither Democratic nor Republican politicians can ignore.

Or consider the successful effort a few years ago to uphold limits on methane pollution from oil and gas development on public lands. Some Senators tried to overturn common sense standards intended to ensure that oil and gas infrastructure on public lands wouldn’t spew methane into the air. Methane leaks from drill rigs, production platforms, and pipelines were causing all sorts of health problems for people, costing taxpayers lost revenue, and worsening climate pollution. Western folks took their message nationwide and strategically worked together to fight back against the Senators’ efforts. In May 2017, they delivered the first Senate-floor defeat of a Congressional Review Act resolution during President Trump’s first term.

And then there was the fight this past summer to stop a proposal from Senator Mike Lee of Utah to force a vast sell-off of America’s public lands. Equipped with detailed maps of the forests, recreation spots, and public lands that were on the chopping block, a furious army of hunters, anglers, conservationists, outdoor businesses, and leading media influencers rallied a mass-mobilization that stopped the sell-off dead in its tracks.

Based on what I’ve seen succeed and what I’ve seen fail – from working in the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, the White House, and at the Western Energy Project – winning campaigns tend to have at least three common elements.

First, they must be broadly reflective of the local community. In the West, the strongest efforts to defend public lands bring together individuals from differing perspectives – for example, hunting and angling groups, small business coalitions, unions, agricultural producers, faith communities, tribal leaders, and traditional conservation organizations, among others. Having a healthy breadth of support isn’t for window dressing. It’s essential to building durable political power. When a coalition includes local fly-fishing outfitters, county commissioners, and leaders of Tribal Nations, decision makers take notice.

Second, successful place-based campaigns are pragmatic. To win, you need a winning coalition. And to keep a coalition together, you need to align on what people agree on and not expect agreement on everything. This is especially important now, when our body politic feels so polarized. A rancher and a self-described environmentalist might disagree about grazing policy or wilderness designation. But they can work together to oppose a massive new mine that would poison a watershed they both depend on. This kind of pragmatism requires discipline and humility. It means checking ideological purity at the door. And it’s what makes these coalitions effective and powerful, reminding us all that even in times of turmoil, we can find common ground.

Third, communities leading these campaigns need support to have their voices heard. There’s no sugar coating it: regular people who are standing up and speaking out face a political system rigged against them. Oil and gas interests spend millions on lobbying, advertising, and political contributions. Folks organizing to protect their watershed can’t match those resources dollar for dollar. But with a bit of help, their authentic voices – characterized by clear, straightforward, non-technical, plain-language messages – can reach decisionmakers. Community perspectives can break through, even against shiny and expensive industry advertising, when their contribution is recognized, trusted, and empowered.

This is where national non-profit and philanthropic organizations are needed more than ever, not to direct these efforts, but to support them. These types of organizations can provide technical expertise, collaboration space, communications support, and strategic coordination. They can connect people in communities facing similar threats, allowing them to learn from each other and amplify their collective power. Importantly, these national groups can contribute meaningfully by being good partners to groups on the ground – being willing to stand silently behind, ensuring they have the resources needed to tell their own story in their own voice.

So here is what it takes: authentic local leadership and broad community coalitions, a pragmatic approach, and adequate resources. Get these elements right, and the priorities and perspectives – and politics – of real people standing up for the places that matter to them will prevail.

Investing in People and Place

I’ve spent two decades working to advance conservation, energy, and environmental policies that promote the public interest. The pattern I’ve seen is clear: when people organize around the places they care about, when they speak with genuine voices rooted in real experience, and when they build coalitions that truly reflect their communities, they can become a political force that transcends partisan politics and that no administration or official can ignore.

Helping people protect places that matter is unglamorous work, perhaps. It is, however, a core aspect of the beating heart of our democracy. The work requires patience and long-term investment.  There are no silver bullets, no shortcuts. As a leader working to protect one of the threatened areas noted in this piece said, “Sometimes it takes a long time to get the right thing done…this is going to require some patience, some resilience and determination.”

But in working to safeguard the lands and waters that matter, we learn not just about the value of those places we love and hold sacred, but about what our values are. We honor who we are as a country and a people. This is not democracy in theory, but in practice: the steady work of committing ourselves to the deeply relational and often challenging effort of building a shared vision for our future, rooted in the values we hold most dear.

I’m reminded of a visitors’ center a couple hours from my hometown in Kansas that introduces people to the Flint Hills. This is an extraordinary landscape: the largest remaining expanse of tallgrass prairie in the United States. Exhibits in the center share the stories of the indigenous people who have lived there and educate visitors about the plants and animals that can be found nowhere else on Earth. The center also tells the story of the regular people – from all walks of life – who call this place home and who have worked for years to protect the Flint Hills.

“The more you learn about the place, the more you find its values,” one resident of the Flint Hills observed.

This is true everywhere across our country. And it is a reminder that as we seek ways of conserving our lands and waters for future generations, each of us driven by our own set of reasons and experiences, we must take the time to learn from each other about the values of a place. This exchange of perspectives – listening, discussing, finding shared purpose – is democracy in action and it’s how we create changes that last for many lifetimes.

Very simply, the fight for the future of our lands, waters, and climate can be won, but only if we invest sufficiently in the continuous work of building power and community, and only if we talk, think, and connect with each other in ways that are grounded in the realities of day-to-day life where folks live, work, and raise families.

In the end, saving the places we love is inseparable from strengthening the democracy that sustains them. When we invest in the power of people and place, we are choosing not only to protect our land, water, and climate, but to renew the democratic promise that these places belong to all of us – and that their future is ours to shape together. And at this moment, it’s essential to get back to basics and devote more resources to support the power of people and place in the fight for our land, water, and climate – our common ground.