In May of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited John Muir, one of the most revered naturalists of his time, in Yosemite, California. Muir took Roosevelt on a three-day camping excursion through the area, hoping that exposing him to Yosemite’s natural beauty would convince the president to set aside Yosemite and other wilderness areas to be designated as national parks.
Roosevelt was so taken by Yosemite’s beauty that he placed nearly a million acres of the land under federal protection, officially declaring the land a national park in 1906. “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias,” Roosevelt said of his time in Yosemite. “Our people should see to it that [these lands] are protected for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty unmarred.”
Partly because of Roosevelt’s efforts, conservation has become enshrined as a core part of American governance and culture. Not only do our expanses of protected wilderness promote recreation and biodiversity, they have also helped to inspire the ethos behind American society. As conservationist Sigurd Olson once wrote, “Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life.”
Interest in protecting natural lands was once a bipartisan cause, but our federal lands are now facing very dire threats from elected officials. In June, Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee added a provision to the “Big Beautiful Bill” that would require the sale of millions of acres of public lands, removing these areas from federal protection.
Luckily, Lee’s proposal was struck from the already-disastrous bill after it received major pushback. However, it’s clear that the idea of ending national conservation efforts is still popular among some in Washington. President Trump hopes to do away with as many wilderness protections as possible, and many members of Congress would support him in this process.
Back in March, Trump said that he plans to “free up our forests” so he can “take down trees and make a lot of money.” According to Trump, we haven’t been able to do this because of the “environmental lunatics that stopped us.”
Clearly, Trump and the values of MAGA ideology as a whole are completely disconnected from the best of the American spirit, which holds nature in a state of reverence. If you viewed our natural resources purely based on their material value as Trump does, then harvesting them for profit would make logical sense. Yet any nature lover knows this completely misses the point.
Unlike Trump, many Americans — among them millions of farmers, fishermen, hunters and hikers — understand what Olson and others knew to be true: Natural lands are not just physical entities, but also spiritual ones. They offer a feeling of permanence that is hard to access elsewhere. As nature writer Terry Tempest Williams writes in a recent New York Times column, open lands “inspire open minds.” They are the “open space of democracy,” she says. When our ancient natural places are destroyed and turned into urban developments, we can forget to live for the long-term and instead opt for expediency in the current moment.
Because we live in a world that pushes us to view every relationship in transactional terms, it would be easy to dismiss the threats to national lands as inconsequential. Some might consider losing access to them to be trivial amidst so many threats to national institutions, especially if one believes recreation is all that can be gleaned from having these spaces available. What this misses, however, is that our wilderness areas are themselves a crucial national institution. As Williams alludes to in her piece, democracy cannot survive in a place that treats natural lands as just another asset from which to extract resources.
If all the current attempts to undermine our society have one thing in common, it’s that they seek to convince us that everything is replaceable. The expansion of artificial intelligence is based on the premise that robots can do all tasks once done by humans; the dismantling of democracy is based on the premise that there is nothing special about our system of governance — and, if the Earth itself is replaceable, then we might as well abandon this planet and move to Mars like Elon Musk says.
The problem is that none of these things is replaceable — and neither is public land. Our nation’s wilderness might be safe for the moment, but the threats to it are sure to persist, considering we have a president who not only has never visited Yosemite but doesn’t know how to pronounce it. Now, it is up to us to ensure that Mike Lee and other members of Congress can never succeed in selling off a crucial part of the American spirit. Once it is gone, we can never get it back.
Olin Rose-Bardawil of Florence is a recent graduate of the Williston Northampton School where he was editor in chief of the school’s newspaper, The Willistonian. He will be attending Tufts University to study political science in the fall.