A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours

So Long, Public Lands? Plus, History being erased, hummingbirds evolving, a highway turns into a park, a free Klamath River blooms, and more!

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terrific but sad image from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

Hello, all! Wow, it’s been a minute, huh? Well, I guess I should catch y’all up on some things.

It has been an incredibly hectic few weeks. There has been a whole lot of shakeup around, some of it good—some of it a little less good. I successfully pulled off a surprise 40^th birthday party for my husband that I’d been planning for six months, and that happened just a week and a half after my own birthday. It was a blast but a lot of work and I’m still sort of recovering.

I’ve also been working part-time as a copywriter for the past few months, and I got my hours bumped to full time. That’s great—but there was also a reorganization recently so I’m learning what my new responsibilities are and trying to figure out how to manage writing the newsletter with the new time asks. I apologize for the delay here—I’m figuring it out!

Also, sadly, I had two friends pass away within a week of my birthday, which hit me a lot harder than I was expecting it to. And of course, all of this is before we actually get to news and stories about the outdoors, which have been—let’s just say rough—lately.

With everything going on in the world right now, Republicans seem laser focused on the most important issue facing the country: how to sell off as much public land as quickly as possible. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” includes a lot to dislike, but for our purposes here, this proposal would authorize up to 3.3 million acres of public land in the West for sale.

According to the Wilderness Society, the bill’s provisions mean more than 250 million acres of land meet the legal requirements for being put up for sale—about the size of California, New York, and Texas combined.