When you’ve adopted Senator Mike Lee for greater than 5 minutes, his newest stunt received’t shock you. The person has constructed a whole profession out of making an attempt to dismantle America’s public lands.
Promoting them off didn’t work. Handing them to states didn’t work. Gutting their funding didn’t work. So now, he’s getting artistic.
His latest masterpiece known as the Border Lands Conservation Act. It sounds good, which is at all times how unhealthy concepts begin. The invoice would rewrite elements of the Wilderness Act to permit roads, surveillance towers, motorized autos — and absolutely anything else the Division of Homeland Safety needs to construct inside 100 miles of our northern and southern borders. That features nationwide forests, wildlife refuges, and designated wilderness.
In different phrases, if Mike Lee can bend “border safety” into an excuse to bulldoze wilderness, think about his new private theme music, Ice Ice Child.
Safety as a Scapegoat
Lee swears that is all about protecting cartels and criminality out of our protected areas. He says park rangers are too busy choosing up trash to do their jobs. He says the Border Patrol’s fingers are tied by environmental protections.
That’s nonsense. Homeland Safety already has waiver authority to behave when there’s a respectable safety menace. Businesses already cooperate throughout borders. Lee isn’t fixing an issue. He’s manufacturing one to justify rewriting an important conservation legislation in American historical past.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 was created to protect lands “untrammeled by man.” Lee needs to trammel them with bulldozers, drones, and tactical infrastructure. It’s not about safety. It’s about management.
Sample of Destruction
This isn’t Lee’s first rodeo. He’s been swinging on the thought of federal land administration for years. He’s proposed all the things from promoting off hundreds of thousands of acres to “transferring” administration to state governments, strikes that conservationists, sportsmen, and rural residents alike have shot down repeatedly.
When that didn’t work, he began dressing his assaults in softer language. He’s backed payments about “entry,” “recreation,” and “a number of use.” Each one in every of them reads like an invite for bulldozers and company builders. He’s a grasp at disguising land grabs as public service.
Now, with the border as his prop, he’s making an attempt to sneak in what he’s needed all alongside: a weakened Wilderness Act.
What’s Really at Stake
Let’s speak about what occurs if Lee’s invoice passes. Wilderness loses its enamel. The quiet locations that give wildlife sanctuary and people just a little humility flip into development websites. Roads cut up migration corridors. Helicopters buzz overhead. The identical spots the place you glassed elk or camped in silence change into zones of “tactical benefit.”
It received’t cease on the border. When you carve a gap within the Wilderness Act, the precedent spreads. “If we are able to do it there, why not right here?” That’s how sacred protections die: underneath the burden of political comfort.
And make no mistake, the 100-mile buffer zone isn’t simply the border. Within the north, that’s Glacier Nationwide Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and elements of the Boundary Waters. Within the south, it swallows desert ecosystems that may’t deal with one other tire observe.
The Identical Outdated Tune
Mike Lee retains recycling the identical message: public lands are authorities overreach, wilderness is a waste, and solely deregulation will save us. He’s fallacious on all counts. Public lands are the spine of rural economies, the lungs of wildlife habitat, and the final actually bipartisan worth left on this nation.
Hunters, anglers, and backpackers have all lined up in opposition to this invoice. Conservation teams from Utah to Montana are calling it what it’s: a backdoor assault on the Wilderness Act. No one is fooled, besides perhaps the individuals who need to be.
What You Can Do About It
This isn’t a type of occasions once we shrug and transfer on. That is the time to name your senators. Inform them to kill this factor in committee. Inform them wilderness isn’t negotiable.
Help organizations like Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and the teams preventing this nonsense head-on.
Lee has made it clear he’ll hold making an attempt. So the remainder of us must make it simply as clear that we’re not backing down.
Closing Shot
Mike Lee doesn’t simply dislike public lands. He despises them. He’s spent years making an attempt to promote them, strip them, or rewrite them into meaninglessness. This newest “border” invoice is just the most recent excuse to bulldoze wilderness for ideology’s sake. And to all you residents of Utah: You’ve gotten the facility to vote this thorn out of our sides in 2029. DO IT.
