What We Know Now

Yes, the USDA is planning to move the Forest Service HQ to Utah, which, to be frank, does suck in some ways because Utah is terrible on public land issues. They’re the worst, and everyone should be more distrustful of their politicians than they currently are. However, Forest Service HQ being in Washington, DC—far away from the National Forests—was always stupid. It arguably should have been placed in Wallace, Idaho, after the Big Burn, but it wasn’t.

Moving agencies like this is always risky. Would you rather they put HQ in Denver or Seattle? Think about what kind of employees that would attract. If you’re a right-winger like we are, you do not want that.

Trump’s Options

Realistically, President Trump is left to choose from Utah, Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. He chose Utah, which understandably raises some eyebrows. If you are concerned about that, remember that the positions within the USFS are staffed by bureaucrats, not state-level politicians. Mike Lee, of public land and H-1B infamy, does not get to staff the agency of his dreams (which would just be a few bean counters armed with MLS accounts and some sanctioned arsonists) just because the building is located in the state he represents. Yes, Utahans will have more immediate access and more influence, but they can’t make unilateral changes to land management policies.

President Trump could have chosen to put the USFS in Boise, Idaho, or Bozeman, Montana. A lot of people would be happier about that, but the decision to move it to Utah very well may have been a practical one. Think about something as simple as airports. Neither Boise nor Bozeman has anything close to the capability of SLC International Airport. The airport in Bozeman handles about 3 million travelers a year, versus SLC, which sees about 30 million come and go. The two are not comparable. Then you have to factor in things like inclement weather, which Montana is going to see a lot more of than Utah, and on and on. Utah is also more centrally located geographically. Plainly, it makes some sense to put it there. Don’t lose too much sleep over this.

Reorganization

The widely shared HatchMag.com article claims that this is not, as the administration says, an attempt to restructure the agency. Rather, it’s a first step toward the outright destruction of the USFS altogether. Many are calling this a pure fabrication, and it is, sort of, but the Republican Party and members of this cabinet are nakedly anti-public-lands and have made multiple moves to get rid of them. Lawsuits aimed at transfers (sell-offs by a different name) and Lee’s poison pill in the BBB most recently. Hatch is sensationalizing, but they’re not necessarily wrong about the intentions of some of these people.

President Trump, for his role here, is a real estate guy who grew up in New York and is mostly indifferent to public land. Land is just not high on his list of priorities, which is perfectly reasonable given how much is going on in the world and in this country domestically. He delegates this stuff to people he believes can handle it. Whenever you’re irritated at some land policy, bear that in mind and direct your frustration at the correct person.

Personal example: I was asked to participate in some phone meetings with people right at the top of an agency who are working on land policy goals. They were polite, professional, and well-meaning, but they did have some ideas that would be disastrous for ecosystems in the Mountain West. I told them what I thought, and they must have taken it into consideration because we haven’t seen those plans put into effect. I’m adding that anecdote to show that this administration has a lot of receptive people in it too. They’re not all a bunch of scumbags who hate everything you love, like many online want you to believe. Only a few are like that.

The USFS needs changes. Maybe this plan will bring welcome improvement and faster reaction times for people and businesses that operate on National Forests. Maybe it won’t—we’ll have to wait and see.

As for the science piece of all this, we have a lot more to say, but we want to talk to friends in academia who work in this field before we comment much on that part. But we don’t need another “Queering Our Streams” scientific paper funded by the taxpayer—that much I know. Science is important. The United States has the best wildlife management and science in the world. It is suffering under some decisions that have been made, but it’s not going away because the USFS HQ moved to Utah or because President Trump is changing the current structure of the bureau. Take a deep breath, and reduce time spent monitoring the situation on this one. We’re going to make it.

There will be a Part 2 to this, but unfortunately Substack doesn’t make enough money to dedicate to it full-time, so I’ve got to go back to work. Subscribers are greatly appreciated. Thank you all. The first episode of the public land history show should be finished soon. Excited to get that out to you guys. Thank you for your time, and a blessed Pascha to our Orthodox brethren.

It required runways, trained pilots, expensive aircraft, maintenance crews, and long chains of command. Airplanes were rare, visible, and accountable. When something passed overhead, people generally knew where it had come from and who controlled it.

Today, air power can be purchased online, assembled on a kitchen table, and flown from a smartphone.

The drone age has arrived, and civilian society is not ready.

For more than a century, modern life operated under a quiet assumption: meaningful control of the sky would remain rare, expensive, and tied to states. Drones collapse that assumption. What once required an air force can now be done with a machine that costs less than a television.

War encountered this transformation first. Civilian society is next.

War Proved the Thesis

The war in Ukraine demonstrated something military planners once treated largely as hypothetical: cheap, attritable drones can dominate the battlefield.

In 2022, drones accounted for only a small fraction of casualties. By 2025, analysts estimated that as much as 80 percent of battlefield losses were being inflicted by drones. Ukraine reported producing 4.5 million drones in 2025 and targeting seven million in 2026.

The numbers are staggering. But the deeper lesson is doctrinal.

For most of modern military history, air power remained expensive, centralized, and scarce. Manned aircraft required trained pilots, airfields, logistics networks, and constant maintenance. Even artillery—often described as one of the great revolutions in warfare—still required crews physically attached to the weapon systems.

Drones represent something more radical.

They separate the human from the weapon in ways artillery and aircraft never fully did. An operator can be miles away. The machine itself can be expendable. Designs can be copied, modified, and mass-produced. Software can be updated or rewritten.

In that sense, drones may represent a greater shift in warfare than the combined integration of artillery and manned airpower. Those earlier systems still required humans directly attached to the weapons. Drones sever that relationship.

The Pentagon’s Replicator program reflects this logic. Instead of building fewer and more exquisite platforms, the U.S. military is now pursuing thousands of inexpensive autonomous systems intended to overwhelm defenses through sheer volume.

Cheap air power has arrived.

And it will not remain confined to battlefields.

Cheap Air Power Escapes the Battlefield

The same technology is spreading rapidly through civilian life.

Farmers use drones for crop monitoring and precision spraying. Energy companies deploy them to inspect pipelines and wind turbines. Construction firms conduct aerial surveys that once required days of work in a matter of minutes. Police departments use drones for search-and-rescue missions and accident reconstruction. Logistics companies are experimenting with package delivery by air.

The global drone market is projected to reach $57 billion by 2030.

The economic incentives are straightforward. Drones reduce labor costs, reach dangerous or remote locations, and provide persistent visibility from above. In many industries they are simply the most efficient tool available.

Yet the same characteristics that make drones useful also make them dangerous.

They are cheap.
They are scalable.
They are anonymous.
They are easily modified.
They are increasingly autonomous.

Most importantly, a drone used for beneficial purposes looks almost exactly like one used for malicious ones.

That ambiguity lies at the heart of the drone dilemma.

A delivery drone, an inspection drone, a police drone, a hobby drone, a smuggling drone, or a weaponized drone may all appear identical from the ground. Intent remains invisible until the moment it matters most.

The FAA’s Impossible Problem

Regulators are attempting something aviation has never attempted before: integrating millions of aircraft operated by unknown pilots, running unknown software, and potentially serving unknown purposes.

According to FAA projections, the United States already has close to one million registered commercial drones, with projections exceeding 1.1 million by 2028. At the same time, the agency is preparing for routine beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) operations that would allow drones to travel far beyond the operator’s direct observation.

This creates an aviation environment fundamentally different from the one that preceded it.

Traditional aircraft operate within a tightly structured system: certified pilots, known points of origin, filed flight plans, air traffic control, and identifiable aircraft.

Drones invert that model.

They may be flown by hobbyists, corporations, police departments, criminals, or eventually autonomous software agents. Some will comply with regulations; others will run modified firmware that disables safety features.

Even identification systems such as Remote ID—essentially a digital license plate for drones—only partially address the problem. They can reveal identity. They cannot reveal intent.

Defense Only Moves the Risk

Counter-drone technologies are advancing rapidly.

Radar detection systems, radio-frequency monitoring, electronic jamming, and directed-energy weapons are all being deployed to protect critical infrastructure and major public events.

But these defenses share a fundamental limitation: they rarely eliminate risk. More often, they relocate it.

A stadium may be able to protect the airspace above the playing field.

But what about the thousands of people standing in line outside the gates? What about the parking lots? The surrounding streets? The fan festivals blocks away?

A venue can draw a legal boundary around where its responsibility ends.

The market cannot.

If people begin to believe that the surrounding area is exposed, the business model itself becomes exposed.

The Future of Open-Air Events

Large outdoor gatherings may become one of the first civilian institutions reshaped by the drone era.

Unauthorized drone flights over sporting events have surged in recent years. Reports indicate thousands of drone incursions over NFL games, forcing repeated interventions by law enforcement and the FAA.

Federal authorities have responded by imposing a 30-mile no-drone zone around the Super Bowl and investing hundreds of millions of dollars in counter-drone technology ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and America250 celebrations.

These measures reflect a growing reality.

The danger is not limited to weaponized drones. It is uncertainty itself.

A drone hovering above a crowd might be a hobbyist filming the event. It might be something else entirely.

In a dense crowd, the distinction may not matter. Panic travels faster than verification.

The threat does not have to be real.

It only has to be plausible.

The Criminal Adaptation

Criminal organizations have adopted drones even faster than regulators.

Along the U.S.–Mexico border, drones already function as logistical infrastructure. Law-enforcement officials report thousands of drone incursions each month used for surveillance, smuggling, and coordination.

Drones carry drugs north. They carry guns and cash south. They monitor law-enforcement movements and identify patrol gaps.

Some models can carry payloads exceeding one hundred pounds and navigate long distances using GPS guidance.

A single drone can cross the border, drop a load, return to its launch point, and repeat the operation again and again.

Walls and checkpoints were designed for ground traffic.

Cheap air power simply flies over them.

Cartels have also weaponized drones for violence. Mexican criminal organizations have used drones to drop explosives on rivals, police forces, and government targets, converting commercially available aircraft into airborne bomb platforms.

Assassinations, intimidation attacks, and cartel battles now routinely include drones.

In effect, criminal organizations have acquired their own small air forces.

The Personal Layer

The implications become most unsettling when drones enter private life.

Privacy debates often focus on digital surveillance: phones, apps, and data collection. Drones introduce something different: mobility, persistence, and physical presence.

A drone can hover above a backyard pool, a beach, a bedroom window, or a playground. It can observe without being noticed and disappear before anyone identifies the operator.

The technology does not need to be weaponized to change behavior.

It only needs to remain ambiguous.

Parents understand this immediately. When an unknown drone appears overhead, the question is not simply what it is doing.

The question is what it could be doing.

Patterns of everyday life begin to shift. Curtains close earlier. Backyards become covered. Children play indoors more often. People grow suspicious of the sky above spaces that once felt private.

The drone age does not merely threaten battlefields.

It erodes the assumption that ordinary civilian space is naturally safe.

The DIY Revolution

Another reason drones spread so quickly is that they are extraordinarily easy to build.

A functional drone can be assembled from commercially available parts: electric motors, flight controllers, cameras, and batteries purchased online with little oversight. Open-source flight software allows hobbyists to program navigation, stabilization, and autonomous behavior.

A teenager with a 3D printer and basic electronics knowledge can assemble a capable drone in a weekend.

Registration requirements exist, but enforcement remains limited. There is no centralized system tracking the purchase of drone components. Even commercially manufactured drones can be modified by skilled users who bypass built-in software restrictions.

The result is a technology ecosystem defined by accessibility.

Millions of people now possess the knowledge required to build and operate drones.

Volume and Ubiquity

The drone problem can be summarized with a simple phrase:

Volume and ubiquity are the enemies of defense.

A single drone can be intercepted if the point of contact is predictable and if appropriate countermeasures are deployed and if you’re lucky. That’s a lot of “ifs.”

Cheap drones can be produced faster than sophisticated countermeasures can be deployed. The same components used in hobby aircraft—motors, flight controllers, cameras, batteries—flow through global online supply chains.

Anyone with basic technical skill can assemble one.

That is the deeper significance of the drone revolution.

It is not simply about better machines.

It is about the collapse of scarcity.

No Going Back

Every major technological shift forces society to adapt.

Gunpowder ended the dominance of armored knights.
Machine guns ended the age of cavalry charges.
The internet reshaped information and communication.

Drones may represent a comparable turning point.

They bring cheap, persistent air power into ordinary life.

Some spaces will harden.
Some industries will migrate indoors.
Some cities will redesign infrastructure with aerial monitoring systems and designated drone corridors.

But adaptation should not be mistaken for control.

Civilian society was built for a world in which meaningful control of the sky was rare and centralized.

That world is ending.

The drone age has arrived.

And the rest of society is only beginning to understand what that means.

This assassination is meant to send the message that it is dangerous for conservatives to stand up in the public square, to speak our convictions, and to organize our people. That is, after all, the aim of political violence. To silence. To intimidate. To break the will of a movement. But if anything, this act of evil only makes clearer our moral obligation. Despite the risk of physical harm, conservatives cannot let up. We must fight for America with greater courage than ever before.

We owe it to Charlie. We owe it to his wife and children. We owe it to the movement he poured his life into and literally took a bullet for. Charlie Kirk built something rare in American politics: an institution that rose from nothing and became a national force. He did not merely create a platform for himself, out of selfish vanity or pursuit of fame and wealth. He built a movement capable of mobilizing millions and influencing the direction of a political party and, ultimately, the nation. Never forget, Turning Point was instrumental in Trump’s 2024 victory and Charlie himself was a huge part of the resurgence in conservatism in young American men.

Builders like him are rare, but more must rise in his place. If Charlie Kirk showed us anything, it is that a lone advocate with vision and resolve can overcome the inertia of our top-heavy political system and influence the trajectory of a generation. Now the responsibility falls to us. Who will carry that torch? Who will lead the next institutions that endure beyond their founders and generate real political power?

We must become intentional about equipping and supporting the next generation of builders. That means cultivating leaders who are not merely pundits or online personalities, but true architects of ideas greater than any one person. Figures who can transform ideas into institutions, and institutions into lasting political power.

Our movement has no shortage of voices, personalities, and organizations. But very few can claim to have built something that transcends its founders, institutions capable of shaping the future of American politics. Charlie Kirk was among those few. His death is a personal tragedy for his wife, his children, and the thousands of young people he mentored. If you work in or around conservative politics, you likely know multiple people that owe their careers to Charlie Kirk. Indeed, his death is a tragedy for America. That is why his loss is so devastating, and why our response must be to multiply his work.

A giant is gone. But the cause he championed, and the institutions he built, must endure and grow beyond what they are today. The surest way to honor him is to make certain that his vision permeates every corner of this country, and that political violence never succeeds in silencing American conservatism.

Be like Charlie. Build something bigger than yourself.

Verhoevern’s adaptation serves as an assemblage of all leftist criticism of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It intentionally misrepresents the source material, while not even understanding why readers love it. The clearest illustration of the difference between the souls of novel and film, is the scene that sets the entire plot in motion. More specifically, the scene where protagonist Juan "Johnny" Rico hands his papers to his recruiter, and learns he's not destined to be a Star Pilot, but is instead bound for the Terran Federation's Mobile Infantry.

In the film, Verhoeven plays the scene as a sight gag. When the recruiter sees that Rico has failed to qualify for every other job in the Federation’s military, he grins, and heartily informs Rico that "Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today." The camera then lingers on his missing legs and prosthetic arm, before briefly flashing to Rico's sudden look of uncertainty.

The rest of the film—an impotent, leftist tirade against militarism, fascism, and any other "-ism" the director could accuse Heinlein's novel of advocating—attempts to frame Rico's enlistment as a cruel joke. He's a dupe; a fresh piece of cannon fodder that's too stupid to realize he's being had. By the movie's final reel, this poor clod has completely bought into the fascism and militarism, and is not simply marching along. He's giving the orders.

That Verhoeven doesn't think highly of the novel (which he admittedly didn’t even read), its characters, or the fictional society they inhabit is appallingly clear. Indeed, he openly admits to placing Heinlein's characters in Nazi-like uniforms as a "subtle" signal to the audience that these characters are "bad." We are not meant to like them, we are not meant to look up to them, and we are not meant to agree with anything in their worldview.

It's an attempt at undermining everything Heinlein's novel stands for, but one that ultimately fails like nearly all other criticism of Heinlein’s story, because the novel's themes of heroism, sacrifice, and selfless dedication are timeless.

In the novel, Rico does indeed have intentions of becoming a Star Pilot, a decision he makes on a whim to impress a pretty female classmate. As in the film, Rico tests too poorly for nearly anything but Mobile Infantry. Not knowing much about the service, he does indeed see it as a spot of rotten luck.

But it's the reaction of the amputee recruiter that makes the difference.

The recruiter, upon learning Rico is bound for the Mobile Infantry, shakes Rico's hand. He proudly tells Rico the infantry is the military, and that all other services are little more than paper pushers or bean counters who are there to get the Mobile Infantry to the fight. He tells Rico the infantry will make a man out of him, or kill him in the process.

In other words, Rico isn't being turned into cannon fodder. He is being given an opportunity to join an elite brotherhood. And it is a brotherhood. In Heinlein's novel—and until recently, in real life—the infantry is exclusively male. This flies in the face of the current-day, leftist belief in equality über alles. There are no exclusively male places or tasks in the leftist worldview, and anything that even hints at their necessity is deemed sexist, regressive, and "toxic."

This is one of the strengths of Heinlein's novel, and one of the deep truths that Verhoeven tried—unsuccessfully—to erase in his film. Starship Troopers is a coming-of-age story, the tale of a young man leaving the safety of his home, earning his place among his fellow men, and learning the value of sacrifice, duty, and camaraderie. Against the backdrop of an interstellar war with the alien Arachnids, Rico learns what it means to be a man, a soldier, and a citizen.

In short, it's an old-fashioned boys' adventure tale, one that's wholly unapologetic in its embrace of masculine and martial virtue. A story no amount of Hollywood self-loathing, sarcasm, or mockery could stop viewers from loving.

A Coming of Age Tale

Born to an affluent family, Rico is a "golden child," a young man with a guaranteed ticket to Harvard, and a cushy executive position in his father's business waiting for him after graduation. Military service isn't even a consideration for him. The only real benefit a completed term of service offers is it confers the right to vote, and the right to hold public office. Military service is regarded as a low-status occupation, a waste of time and talent for otherwise promising young people. Rico’s successful civilian father is aghast at Rico’s decision to serve, and refuses to speak to him for several days while he ponders what cover story he will tell his friends to hide his shame at his son’s decision.

Without his father's approval—but ultimately not needing it—Rico willingly rejects a remora-esquire life of comfort and embarks alone on a journey which would be universally jeered at by the liberals of today. The Mobile Infantry is the most difficult, demanding branch of service in the Terran Federation. Rico lives and works in the most Spartan of conditions, and slowly transforms himself from a carefree civilian to a recruit, then to soldier, and finally to battle-hardened officer.

In the film version, Verhoeven cynically tries to paint this journey as one of Rico gradually becoming more brainwashed, more indoctrinated into a system that is using him. Yes, he becomes an officer, but it is a hollow position. Rico is just a slightly bigger cog in a mindless, soulless machine. He becomes an officer not because he's earned it, but because everyone senior to him is killed in action.

In the novel, Rico is not only encouraged to think for himself—he is required to. Before the Mobile Infantry will trust him with command, he must demonstrate both his understanding of how and why to fight. The Terran Federation doesn't want obedient robots. They want physically strong, thinking, moral warriors.

That isn't the only difference between Heinlein's creation and Verhoeven's poorly-trained, gender-neutral army of establishment dupes. The Mobile Infantry of the novel is a highly selective, highly technical, and highly specialized fighting force. The average grunt is required to possess enough competence, skill, and subject-matter expertise to rate him as a master in any other trade. They're a science-fictional airborne corps, dropping from Federation Starships in one-man reentry capsules to assault hostile planets. These capsules give the Mobile Infantry their preferred nickname, Cap Troopers.

Once on the ground, Heinlein's Cap Troopers don't fight with the flimsy armor, ineffective rifles, and communist-like human wave tactics of the Verhoeven film. They use fully-mechanized suits of powered armor, armed with flame throwers, missiles, and small nuclear weapons. Each armored Cap Trooper is a one-man army. They're equipped with jump-jets, enabling them to leap over battlefield obstacles, and rain death on the enemy below.

It's this maneuver that gives birth to a bit of soldiers' slang, oft-repeated in the novel, a phrase that cuts to the heart of what it means to be Infantry. From the moment he joins the Cap Troopers, everything in Rico's life is done "on the bounce," meaning with intent, purpose, and intensity. This is the antithesis of the modern, media-driven trend that encourages men to permanent, helpless adolescence. In the Mobile Infantry, impossible goals are set and regularly achieved. When two recruits are killed in training, Rico does not mourn as the men are buried. He is proud because they died “on the bounce”, still trying.

In sum, Rico’s journey is the kind of story mocked, undermined, and subverted in the current elite circles of today, because it is the story those circles fear most: if young men learn the value of hardship, brotherhood, and critical thinking, they will not need the elites to lead them, or the mechanisms of the state to nurture them.

They will become, like Rico, free men.

Citizen to Civilian

People in the Heinlein's Terran Federation are divided into two groups: civilians or citizens. While this system—where military service is the only way to full citizenship—is often misread as "fascist" by critics of the book, this criticism overlooks a key point.

Civilians enjoy all other rights, privileges, and protections the Federation offers. They can live their lives in peace, prosperity, and safety, and nothing will ever be asked of them in return. They are not an underclass, nor are they treated as such. The Federation does not lie or entice people into a life of dangerous service. Indeed, it seeks to actively discourage enlistment. Not only does it station gruesomely wounded men at the recruiting stations—remember the amputee recruiter—the law gives all potential recruits a mandatory, punishment-free period to rethink their decision. Anyone can walk away after signing the papers, and there are no legal repercussions.

But if the civilian is still set on serving, the Federation is required by law to take them. Anyone can serve. Man or woman, weak or strong, able-bodied or crippled, the Federation will find the best service for you. If none-such exists, it will be created on the spot. Heinlein’s novel openly mocks the notion of “equality of condition”. In the lethal brutality of intergalactic combat, there is no pretense someone weaker or less intelligent can magically perform to a standard to which they are not capable: and there is never a compromise of the standards. It is a ruthless selection, but service—and the opportunity to earn the franchise—is an inalienable right.

The failure to understand the true meaning of this dichotomy is what draws the loudest screams from critics. How could you take the right to vote away from people? How could they have no say in their lives and the government in which they live? The answer, eloquently stated by one of Rico's History & Moral Philosophy professors, is that voting is power. It is the application of the majority's will over the minority, and with that power comes responsibility. The book openly states if something is given, then it has no value. This privilege must be earned in Heinlein’s vision of the Terran Federation, by proving the prospective citizen is willing to shoulder responsibility of defending its civilians, up to and including at the cost of his own life, if necessary. This "yin and yang"—perfect responsibility in exchange for perfect authority—is presented as the reason the Terran Federation's political system was able to climb out of the crumbled wreckage of the failure of the past system, and work.

It's a philosophy that flies directly in the face of our current, utopian belief that everyone can exercise power responsibly, one which has arguably led us to the doorway of our current dystopia. At a minimum, it challenges the core tenets of modern liberalism: that everyone is equal, nothing should be earned, and that an individual bears no responsibility—and suffers no accountability—for his actions.

Bands of Brothers and Accountability

But a band of warrior elite like the Mobile Infantry thrives on accountability, both to one's self, and to the other members. Indeed, it's at the root of all martial codes, from Bushido, to Chivalry, to the Ranger Creed. The strength of the individual is exponentially amplified by subjugating that individuality to a worthy team, and that team draws its power from the strength of the individual.

Rico learns an unforgettable lesson in accountability in his first months of training, when a deserter from his Regiment is convicted of murder. Instead of letting a civilian judge carry out the death sentence (common for capital crimes in Rico’s world), the prisoner is brought back to the Mobile Infantry, and hung in front of his former brothers.

Not only is the prisoner swiftly punished for his crimes, but the Mobile Infantry willingly takes responsibility for their failure. There is no obfuscation and cover up, nor is there any political wordcraft. The honesty and willingness of the team to suffer accountability, to bear the stain on their honor, is one of the more refreshing aspects of the novel, especially when held up against the Grand Kabuki of contemporary military failures.

This grim lesson in accountability and shame stays with Rico, and shapes his character for life. You do not only own your successes. You own your failures. And you own the pain of those who suffer for those failures.

If that lesson is forged on the training field, then it is proven on the battlefield.

The ever-simmering conflict with the Arachnids goes from cold to hot while Rico is in training, and he earns his baptism of fire almost as soon as he joins his first unit. As the war progresses, Rico bonds with his fellow Cap Troopers, learning the meaning of brotherhood and camaraderie. There is no loner’s path in the Infantry. The platoon succeeds as one, or they die as one.

In choosing the life of a Mobile Infantryman, Rico refuses the desperate isolation and parasitic weakness our present-day media pushes on men. He grows stronger as an individual, and as a competent, valued member of his chosen brotherhood. He forges his own beliefs, reinforced by his brotherhood, rather than allow himself to become the blank slate for someone else to write their version of him on.

The ultimate test of that brotherhood comes during his first operation as a (probationary) officer. Rico's platoon sergeant goes missing, having disappeared down an Arachnid tunnel, and so does the section that went looking for him. Rico is scared at the prospect of going down after them. In the entire war, no Mobile Infantryman who has entered an Arachnid tunnel has ever emerged alive, but the men in that tunnel are his brothers. More than that, they are his responsibility. He would be deeply and rightly ashamed NOT to go in after them… so he jumps in, before his nerve can break, and helps turn the tide of the war.

This scene, more than almost any other, is one of the reasons Starship Troopers continues to resonate with young men six decades later. Heinlein’s hero is a hero of old. A hero who knows what needs to be done, and has the moral and physical ability to see it through. This is also why Starship Troopers draws such revealing vitriol. It rejects the weak, broken, male archetype, where even heroes need to be sullen and guilt ridden, painted more as anti-hero than hero. Rico is none of that, he dedicates himself to improving both himself, and his surroundings, not relying on someone else, or the government to do it for him. He lives his life on the bounce, where everyone fights and no one quits, and puts service to others ahead of himself.

This is also why the Verhoeven film, and nearly all the rabid hordes of social and literary critics, fail to undercut Heinlein's message. The themes of the book are too true, too universal, and too powerful to crumble under the weight of Verhoeven's dripping sarcasm. The audience understands that a man who jumps down a hole to rescue his buddies is a hero, regardless of how much pseudo-Nazi regalia you dress him in.

Heinlein believes that this call to service is not universal to all people, but it rings in the ears of the honorable until it is answered. The novel illustrates that point with a powerful, unforgettable scene. Rico, who was absent and out of touch with his family since the war began, runs into a familiar face while in transit back to his ship. A familiar face, in an unfamiliar uniform. His own father, who had so scoffed at his son’s decision to serve, has chosen to enlist. Not only did he enlist, he volunteered to endure the extreme hardship of Mobile Infantry training. He admits it had indeed been shame that drove him into anger after his son’s decision to enlist, but not shame at what his society friends might think. It was shame at himself, for never having had the courage to serve. It took his son’s sacrifice to show him how to be a man in his own eyes.

Yes, service guarantees citizenship.

But hardship, camaraderie, and accountability forge a citizen.

Time is different for me now.

Twenty years ago, I’d thought twenty years was a long stretch. I guess maybe it is depending on who and what you might be. The red-tail hawk above me turning a circle against the washed-out late summer sky probably figures that’s a long time. That Hereford bull out there amongst the rolling sage might think as much too. But somehow to me, on this particular day, it sure doesn’t feel like much. Twenty years ago, I’d have been coming home from a day of cowboying on this same blacktop road connecting two little ranching and farming towns in the panhandle of Oklahoma. No Man’s Land, they once called it. But that wasn’t true. It did belong to men. Either by blood-right or spiritual kinship, this land belonged and still does belong to men. They were men like the man that was put to rest today at the cemetery in Laverne, Oklahoma. The population of the town is round about a thousand and the population of the funeral must have been at least five hundred. Standing room only, me and my brother leaned against the wall in the overflow fellowship hall along with several other men and boys who had cowboyed either with or for the man in the casket in the sanctuary.

Probably my dad would have been driving twenty years ago and I’d have been watching out the window and seeing a different red-tail hawk, and a different Hereford bull, ancestors of these now. Here these twenty years on, as I drive home in silence seeing these same sights I took in as a younger man, I reflect on these old cowboys that we’re burying in the very earth they put their claim to.

He is yet another in a personal list for me from the last few years. They were all men that had a hand in shaping me in my youth. Cowboys all. All of them the same and all of them different. I watch as my father puts his many friends and neighbors to rest, and they fade off like riders in a morning fog. What must that mean to him? I can’t puzzle it, but it must be a much heavier thing than I in my mid-thirties can quite grasp yet. Still, I watch and I wonder, growing more pensive and poetic with my years. These were all men that shed their blood, sweat, and tears into the actual earth on which they stood and, to them, that shedding must have meant a claim of great magnitude. This “No Man’s Land” belonged to them by the most ancient and primeval rite that ever a man might claim. A stewardship they performed as best they could, directly from their worn and yellowed Bibles. That concept belongs not just to my little slice of the American West but is a notion that many rural Americans share. From Texas and the Plains, to the Deserts out west and the Rocky Mountains, the Western Cowboy culture is monolithic in this and many other things.

You hear “blood, sweat, and tears” often as a sort of idiom, but that is not what is meant here. It is meant in the actual and in the literal. Up on the Cimmaron River, just north of where I live, there is a little bend along a creek that feeds down to the river that I’ve driven by many times over the years. I’m not certain exactly the location, but in the 1870s a group of surveyors was attacked by Comanches and slaughtered. One of them had his brains smashed in by his survey transit on the banks of the creek. Just south of there an entire family was murdered in their home, also by Comanches, just a couple years later. There are hundreds of stories such as this, both recorded and unrecorded, of this land. This spilling of blood during the westward expansion of settlement is no trivial thing in my mind. It laid a claim to this land that most people can’t grasp.

Just a few years later, along Clear Creek (just a couple hundred yards from where I killed my first deer) one of the Healy Brothers, who had brough a herd of cattle all the way up from South Padre Island in Texas to No Man’s Land to start a ranch in the 1880s, wintered with his horses in a little sod dugout and subsisted off of potatoes he buried in the floor while accosted the winter long by blizzards and wolves in a time where the latter outnumbered men in the country. I’ve no doubt there is a trace amount of blood and sweat beneath the ruins of that dugout, the foundations of which are still visible to this day.

There was never a full day of working calves that I can recall that ended without at least a couple drops of a man’s blood. Needles, knives, and rambunctious calves. Sweat was, of course, a given. And tears? The tears were not the frivolous sort. The tears of these old cowboys, rare as unicorn blood, held weight and meaning only to be measured in the cosmic sort of sense. In those sort of tears, a young man might see the weighty truth of sin, death, and the human condition from the Garden of Eden and the fall of man until the year of our lord circa about 2005. There’s a lot of historical real-estate between creation and now is what I’m getting at and the precious few times I saw my father, or these other old cowboys shed a tear in my youth it was like the thing was comprised of tungsten. They fell with a weight you might feel through your boots if you were paying attention.

And so, I think about that. About that blood and sweat and tears. About the land and the earth and the dirt. I think that this ancient claim that these men have laid upon their land means something. Hell, it means more than just something. Not only for themselves, but it means as much to their children and grandchildren and their neighbors and anybody who ever came to their branding fire to share their work with them.

It strikes me that this concept is not something everyone instinctually understands. Perhaps they come from a place where they can’t see the rolling hills of grass and sage, or the mountains, or the deserts, and instead they only see concrete, buildings, and asphalt, or perfectly manicured lawns and golf courses free from any yucca, sagebrush, or native buffalo grass. Maybe if they bleed it is a rarity and that blood drips on a sidewalk to be washed into a storm drainage system, never to touch the dirt beneath them. Maybe they see frivolous and copious amounts of tears, where the sheer volume waters down the weight of them. I’m not sure. But whatever the reason, there is a sort of mystical and romantic quality to the land that they are ignorant of. It seems a language they can’t even perceive, let alone read. Or like one of those pictures you have to focus on the correct way to see the image…and they can’t see it.

I am sure though that it does mean something to me. At the funeral I also see other men my age and younger that understand these things as well. Two, three, generations of them and more to come. I see it as plain as I see the blacktop road turn to dirt a mile before I hit the house, and I am filled with reverence and hope for what has been and what will be. Time bleeds together from then to now and I know to a certainty that, although the old cowboys of my youth are now giving their bones to the ground to bookmark their investment of blood, sweat, and tears, there are men standing there to continue that tradition for another hundred years at least. This warms my blood and lightens my heart. We are going to win.

These iconic words written by early 20th century industrialist Henry Ford are more than just a catchy marketing slogan. The man who wrote them was one of the second generation of American founding fathers—men who shook America from a sleepy rural backwater and dragged it into the industrial era. Men who laid the pathway for American global supremacy. They were innovators and builders, and modern day pioneers. But above all, they were businessmen. They valued the dollar.

Ford’s insistence on a single color was not about aesthetics or any particular brand image. It was about cost. Fewer variables mean lower costs. It means simplicity and speed in logistics and manufacture, and it means lower prices to consumers. Lower prices means the product is more available, and access to revolutionary products and technology means a civilization grows.

Ford would not recognize the state of the automotive industry today, where decades of government overreach and environmental wishcasting have strained the industry that moves and feeds America nearly to the point of rupture. While some government interventions have been necessary and consumer and public oriented, others have wasted untold millions of dollars, driven up costs, and perverted natural innovation cycles. They have cost Americans jobs, and put at risk our position of primacy on the world stage.

But, after nearly two decades of free fall, a light has appeared at the end of the tunnel. The Trump administration’s willingness to not only roll back federal policy, but go to war against the chief architects of the campaign against America’s industrial might has given the people of the United States one last chance. It will be a long and complex road—and the complex chains of one of the most interwoven and shaky industries in the world will be difficult to unknot—but the Trump Administration can, and must, bring the tyranny of the green menace to an end.

Both the commercial and personal auto industries are beset by a common refrain. Vehicles are too expensive, they are packed with too much technology, they can not be maintained by the owner, they don’t last long, and popular models are no longer available. The explosion in price with no apparent explanation of every vehicle from a minivan to a massive dump truck has followed the trend of another critically important societal commodity: housing. Neither was caused by a single factor, rather a myriad of reasons from governmental interference to corporate legalese. These factors have colluded, often unintentionally, to create the problems of today.

Each of these factors, whether a primary influencing factor or a reactive one, was born with the best of intentions. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were created in the 1970s, when crippling gas shortages gripped the United States. It was an effort to make Americans less dependent on foreign oil which in turn would allow us more flexibility and power in international statecraft. It succeeded. The range of motor vehicles today is more than double their 1970s counterparts.

The same is true with NOx regulations and carbon dioxide emissions limits. A vehicle built in 2025 puts 98% fewer particulates of all sorts into the air than its 1970s counterpart. This has been vitally important in cities, where the narrow confines of high rise buildings, combined with higher rates of vehicle traffic are less able to sustain high levels of pollutants than open plains and mountainous countryside.

The initiatives taken to clean American air, reduce dependency on foreign oil, and to generally improve the lives of all Americans were a rousing success, a wave of innovation and engineering greatness rarely duplicated in the modern era.

That is, until they were carried too far.

Be it through malice, or the natural inertia of government, or our apparent inability to end government programs once they are started, or even a true belief in the mission, both CAFE and emissions regulations have passed the point of practical and achievable advancement and entered the realm of fantasy.

To meet ever increasing regulatory standards, automotive manufacturers have been required to not only develop innovative engineering solutions, but also administrative ones as well. The rise of the SUV in the 1990s was not just a revolt against the tyranny of the minivan, but a direct result of more stringent CAFE standards. By reclassifying every vehicle possible as a “truck”, to include station wagons and even cars like the PT Cruiser, manufacturers increased their fuel efficiency numbers.

When these steps weren’t enough, they were forced to turn to more extreme measures. First automatic engine shutoffs at sustained stops became common, followed quickly by the death of the much loved manual transmission. Manufacturers needed to squeeze every possible mile out of every available gallon, and limit every particulant expelled. With increased automated control over the vehicle, technological complexity skyrocketed. Gone are the days of a father and son popping the hood of the family car to replace gaskets.

But these annoyances didn’t arrive alone. Lurking behind them was skyrocketing research and development budgets and materials costs. In a world where entry level vehicles with a profit margin of $3,000 have the same production and development costs as luxury ones whose profit can be ten times greater, the business decision is simple. Manufacturers almost uniformly stopped making lower cost, lower complexity vehicles as a survival mechanism.

Every possible revenue source was added to every possible vehicle, and prices skyrocketed. The vast majority of these additions were technological, exponentially increasing the vehicles complexity and lowering its reliability, creating a feedback loop which would have driven Henry Ford himself out of the industry.

Even before the green cult began to hold sway, demanding every vehicle be a zero emissions EV, America and its auto industry was in serious trouble. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the green fanatics at the EPA continued to push, while automotive executives—fearful of missing out on disruptive innovation—told them anything in their imagination was possible. The total amount of money wasted on developing a zero emissions solution for every use case likely will never be known, but tens of billions in the United States and Europe would not be out of the ballpark.

While the executives at these companies bear their fair share of the blame for telling both the EPA and the public they could build a battery powered cement mixer capable of functioning perfectly on the north slope of Alaska, the fault is not theirs alone. Without the impending regulatory cliffs CARB and the EPA were pushing the industry too, they might not have had to.

CARB, backed by EPA waivers enabling them to effectively mandate regulations nationwide and industry products, eventually pushed too far. As more and more states were duped into following California’s lead, the nakedness of the green emperor became difficult to hide. When in late 2024 it became clear that the heavy truck industry was not ready to meet the CARB inspired regulations of a dozen states, and states like New York couldn’t procure dump trucks or snow plows, states started running towards the exits.

At first, these states implemented “delayed enforcement” of the impossible regulations. Once given overhead cover by President Trump eliminating nearly all of California’s EPA waivers, they barely protested as they slipped back towards sanity.

President Trump’s team has already broken CARB’s stranglehold on America, and has smashed the Obama era “Endangerment Finding” which kicked our current trajectory into overdrive, and is setting its sights on the upcoming EPA27 regulations and CAFE standards: but like the problem, the solution is also multi-faceted.

An industry as large as America’s automotive sector can not simply turn on a dime. With research, development, and integration timelines measured in years and decades, Henry Ford’s mantra seems more like a warning than a business strategy. Tens of thousands of parts, suppliers, and other engineering challenges need to be developed, tested, sourced, and procured, and integrated into complex manufacturing systems before a single newer offering can reach a customer. But all of that exists in a world where there is no need to try and recoup the previous decade of disaster.

To be compliant with CARB and the looming EPA27, Cummins, America’s largest engine manufacturer, had totally redesigned its entire product line, while canceling more popular, less compliant options. To ask them to undertake this arduous burden again, before even recouping a dollar from these compliant engines, would put the company, and many like it, into bankruptcy.

The administration is doing the right thing by dismantling the complex regulations of the green dictatorship, and should continue to do so. EPA27 regulations need to be cancelled in their entirety, CAFE standards need to be revised, and California’s grip on America needs to be put to a permanent end. But Americans need to brace themselves for a long siege.

The road back towards a lean and profitable automotive industry that produces passenger vehicles and trucks that transport American dreams and build an American future will be harder than most of us imagine. But, as history has taught us, when government gets out of the way, you can always bet on America.

The most competent and ambitious of society have always drifted upward, that is not disputed. Transformational talent will always feel a pull towards the centers of gravity in their field, be that D.C. for politics, New York for finance, Los Angeles for entertainment, etc. In years past, however, local communities and regional hubs had far greater retention of talent.

In 2025, however, talented and ambitious individuals almost always aim for the top. With nearly unlimited access to human knowledge at their fingertips, the lure of national discourse, and constant connectivity, they feel drawn toward the perceived centers of power. Today, success and ambition are typically defined by proximity to influence and authority.

We misunderstand ambition.

These cities became magnets because ambition is now mistaken for position, with the height of the professional ladder valued more than the meaningfulness of the climb.

In places like D.C., you can build an entire career accumulating prestigious titles and recognition without genuinely transforming a single person's life for the better. The structures of power and prestige often reward symbolic victories and political survival rather than tangible improvements in people's day to day lives.

Look no further than the vast network of political institutions in Washington that collectively raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars, yet produce seemingly nothing tangible. And that’s to say nothing of our actual government!

The result is actually ironic: the higher someone climbs within systems that reward titles and symbolic victories, the clearer it becomes how disconnected that life is from genuine impact.

As you climb that conventional ladder, you may gain prestige or superficial power, but eventually you also reach a vantage point that starkly illuminates just how hollow those achievements can be.

Atop that vantage, it is abundantly clear how many policy announcements never translate to real impact and how many awards reflect popularity rather than progress. The irony deepens precisely because at lower, supposedly "less ambitious" levels like local government, the line between your effort and tangible impact is direct and visible.

Impact often starts local before scaling upward. Civil rights, environmental protections, educational reforms are just a few examples of historically successful national movements that were first incubated locally. Recognizing and harnessing that truth is genuine ambition.

Fortunately for these ladder climbers, reevaluation of what matters is common. I optimistically believe that people usually realize that maximizing tangible impact is the true measure of success, not blind careerism.

That said, local ambition demands courage and deep commitment. It often involves fewer immediate accolades and requires greater resilience against frustration. Yet it yields something uniquely valuable.

Teddy Roosevelt said: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” Chasing prestige is not the difficult path. It is not a sacrifice to participate in the manufacture of influence that happens at the top.

Real ambition isn't measured by how high you climb the ladder, it's measured by how many lives you touch. It's hard to have an impact from above everyone else, disconnected from their daily realities. You must build your legacy among the people, on purpose and measurable good, not on status or prestige.

It will not be forged at a think tank in Dupont Circle or secured at a “summit” where the room is full of foundations more interested in carbon metrics than mule deer. The future of conservation will be decided by the people, not D.C, and it will not be comfortable.

For too long, the conservation movement has sold out its roots and its soul for prestige. What began as a land ethic led by people with callouses on their hands has metastasized into an ugly arm of the American nonprofit industrial complex. A bureaucracy of cookie cutter credentialed managers parroting solutions they can barely articulate that rural Americans can’t afford and didn’t ask for.

At the Sagebrush Institute, we see this as a useless prestige economy of performance and power. We didn’t come to win favor with the prestigious. We came to fight.

We were born not out of theory or a wishcasting desire to make everyone feel good, but out of a righteous cause. Specifically, the fight to protect millions of acres of public land from being sold off under the guise of “affordable housing.” That attempt would have gutted access to public land, erased hunting and grazing heritage, and sold off the future of the West to the highest bidder. And who stopped it? Not the elite foundations on the East Coast. Not the lobbying class. It was cowboys, veterans, and citizens with an X account and a conscience who flooded Congress with outrage until the provision was withdrawn.

That victory was real. But it was temporary. And that is the lesson: without a permanent, values-driven institution behind them, our wins could be rolled back one by one.

That’s why we built Sagebrush.

We are unapologetically conservative. We believe conservation is a patriotic duty and a moral obligation to God and country. We believe in lasting stewardship rooted in the traditions of those who live closest to the land, not dictated from city offices by people who couldn’t bear to spend more than a comfortable vacation in the country they claim to save.

And we reject, outright, the donor-driven corruption that defines so much of modern politics. We will not take major gifts that come with ideological strings. We publish our finances. No one here draws a salary. No one here is here for the resume line.

We believe that expertise lives and dies with the people. Expertise and authority does not live with the Beltway. And certainly not with the billionaires funding bureaucratic environmentalism. Hard working Americans working the land don’t need a Harvard paper to know what needs fixing. They need a voice. We exist to hand you the microphone.

The conservation movement must undergo a revolution in jurisdiction. The decisions must start flowing from the ground up. We are flipping the pyramid. State chapters. Local leadership. Rural control. A national office that exists only to empower the edges. This is what conservative subsidiarity looks like in action.

They won’t like us. That’s fine. We do not seek access to Washington cocktail hours. We just want to take care of the land we’ve already earned—paid for in blood by the great men of American history who came before. Men who knew that we have a moral obligation to defend God’s creation, not the GDP. We own this land; we protect it, use it wisely, and pass it on.

And we refuse to break that covenant, even if it costs us “credibility” with the foundations and networks that built the current house of cards. Foundations and networks flush with special-interest money, with leadership that doesn’t even live in the land they proclaim to defend. Leadership whose understanding of the American West is a fly-in conference in Aspen.

We will be called extremists by those who think the only serious conservationist is a salaried lobbyist. We will be called unserious by those who can’t imagine a world where conservation is divorced from climate orthodoxy and solar subsidies. We will be told we cannot win without Washington.

But we will win without Washington. We already have.

And we will again.

Because the future of conservation is a grassroots revolt that ignores the grant cycle. It is land-rich and money-poor. It is principled and unrelenting. It is everything the current system fears and everything America needs.

The future of conservation will not be funded. It will be fought.

Many people have, by now, heard of the “corner crossers” case. Backing up a bit, and like most stories in the West, this one begins with a story about trains. For those unfamiliar with the checkerboard pattern of public and private land in the inter-mountain West, it originates from the 19th century expansion of the transcontinental railroads. The U.S. government sought to encourage the building of railroads westward by granting land to railroad companies, with alternating parcels remaining public. Why keep those parcels public? Our ancestors wanted what was best for us, they wanted us to have access to them and they didn’t want the railroad companies to have exclusive ownership of the land. Likewise, this also meant that the American people (managed in public trust by our government) retained control of timber, minerals, and water on those parcels, with the American people owning those resources while also benefitting economically from railroad development.

In Wyoming in 2020, four elk hunters from the state of Missouri used a ladder to cross from one corner of public land to another. The Missouri hunters wanted to access about 6,000 acres of public land that is “corner-locked” with private parcels. One of the men is a surveyor by trade, so the group’s GPS coordinates were accurate, and the use of a ladder made it so that they respected private property, knowing that corner crossing falls under a gray area of the law. The private corner was owned by Iron Bar Holdings LLC, where the 22,000 acre Elk Mountain Ranch is located. Elk Mountain Ranch is owned by Fred Eshelman, a North Carolina businessman who made his money in pharmaceuticals, who spends most of his time in North Carolina.

The ranch manager called law enforcement on the hunters, and personnel from Elk Mountain Ranch tried to disrupt the hunt. Shortly thereafter, the corner crossers had civil and criminal trials. The criminal trial was for trespass, for which they were found not guilty in 2022. Elk Mountain’s owner filed a $7 million civil lawsuit in 2022, arguing that people corner crossing reduces the value of the 22,000 acre ranch so much that significant fines had to be paid. A district judge dismissed the case in 2023, saying that corner crossing that doesn’t touch the private parcels is not trespass, citing the 1885 Unlawful Inclosures Act, the law prohibiting blocking public land. The ranch owner appealed to the Tenth Circuit in 2024, where a three judge panel unanimously upheld the district court. This ruling made corner crossing legal in the 6 states in the Tenth Circuit (Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Utah) so long as the crossers are careful not to touch private land.

In July 2025, the ranch owner petitioned the United States Supreme Court to review the Tenth Circuit’s decision, arguing that allowing people to cross from public corner to public corner constitutes an illegal “taking” of private property without just compensation. We are waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will hear the case, thereby setting a national precedent which would ensure national (not just states under the Tenth Circuit) access to millions of acres of public land.

Before the corner crossers case, the legality of corner crossing in Western states had no clear legal precedent with no definitive state or federal laws addressing the issue, with many states choosing to punt the issue due to its controversy. What’s going to be important if the Supreme Court hears this case is their interpretation of the Unlawful Inclosures Act, which prohibits blocking public land. Outdoorsmen and conservationists need to keep an eye on this case, as it is the most important issue relating to public land access in 2025, especially on the heels of Senator Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off millions of acres of public land through a backdoor Congressional budget reconciliation process. Senator Lee’s land grab would have enabled land owners like Fred Eschelman to purchase checkerboard parcels in greater numbers than other everyday people looking to purchase public land. If either of these cases were to move ahead, millions of acres of public land would be lost to Americans.

One thing that you can do to try and enshrine corner crossing in the law is push your state legislators to clarify corner crossing in your state, independent of the Supreme Court. Reach out to your state representatives and let them know that you want to be able to cross from corner to corner, mentioning the Tenth Circuit and your concerns about the impending Supreme Court case. Likewise, at the local level, through county board meetings or town halls you can make your voice heard to local officials and your sheriffs. When the ranch manager called local law enforcement on the corner crossers, who went on to issue them citations to appear in court for the initial criminal trial, the sheriff could have refused to do so depending on how they interpreted the law. Therefore, making your local leaders aware of your community’s views on corner crossing could assist with these types of decisions on the ground. Most importantly, stay active and engaged, and look out for news on the Supreme Court this summer.

- Sagebrush Institute

Depending on your age and geographical location the first time you heard the term “Endangered Species Act” (ESA) was probably during the spotted owl fiasco of the 80s and 90s. By the 1980s logging had begun to impact old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, home of the Northern Spotted Owl. By 1990 Fish and Wildlife Service had determined the species needed to be listed as “threatened,’ the result of this decision was a forest management plan for the entire Northwest region called, creatively, the Northwest Forest Plan (1994). This plan slashed timber harvest operations by 90% across 24 million acres of Oregon, Washington and parts of the Idaho Panhandle.

Logging towns entirely dependent on timber harvest throughout the region had their livelihoods stripped away from them. Mills closed and 30,000-50,000 people lost their jobs. Towns were ground into poverty by the heel of government. The timber industry, and the United States itself, lost billions of dollars. Real American people and families in despair- virtually overnight. Pickup trucks parked outside the local taverns sported bumper stickers that read “Save a Logger, Eat an Owl.” Perhaps the worst of all is, it did not have to be this way.

In 1973 Nixon, with about 100 years of American conservation history behind him and the best of intentions, signed the ESA into law. Within 5 years he had the Tennessee Valley Authority and a bunch of angry southerners cursing he, the Act, “those gall dammed environmentalists” and a 3-inch-long minnow called the Snail Darter.

The federal government and Tennessee had spent roughly 100 million dollars to build the Tellico Dam across the Little Tennessee River. The project was meant to serve power and flood control to 7 states still recovering from Reconstruction and the Great Depression, as well as send a much-needed jolt into their local economies. Then, in 1978, when the project was near-to completion, environmentalists and some guy named Hiram Hill sued the TVA to halt construction in the name of the Snail Darter.

At the time, the fish was only known to exist on about a 17-mile stretch of the Little Tennessee. According to studies, 20,670 physicians hired by Phillip Morris, said the “best available science” proved the dam would flood their habitat and wipe them out. 6 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices agreed, the ESA is a clear mandate to prevent the extinction of any species if the best available science says it is in danger of or could be threatened enough to become at risk in the future. Problem is, the science was wrong. The species was later discovered in other tributaries.

Back to the spotted owl. From a scientific standpoint one of the important questions, they were trying to answer is whether these owls could adapt to second growth, or even younger forests. Mature forests, the owl’s native habitat, can be thought of as roughly 80-200 years old. Second growth forests are those that have been logged and grown back but haven’t yet reached maturity. Young forests in this context have been logged are just starting to grow back. If you are anything like me, right now you are thinking you’re on the side of the environmentalists here because you love old growth forests. Me too, bear with me a minute and keep the Snail Darter in mind. We will get to that.

Timbermen had reported seeing these owls in second growth forests to virtually anyone who would listen, but scientists claimed the prey base was not robust enough in these habitats, and the complexity of the structure of the trees wasn’t sufficient to get the species delisted. The Northwest Forest Plan focused on protecting old growth forests; late successional reserves (mature forests that may reach old growth status), and matrix habitat, where some logging was allowed under strict rules. Alternative options were ignored, those who argued for selective logging to save both bird and man were scorned and shunned, seemingly out of spite for rural Americans alone.

It's 2025 so where are we at in the Pacific Northwest now you may be asking? Well, we’re arguably even worse off. The Northern Spotted Owl is still listed. Turns out the barred owl, an invasive, was outcompeting them for resources the whole time. Wildfires and other stressors haven’t helped the forests much. Fish and Wildlife aims to cull about 500,000 barred owls in the region in fact, and somewhere, in a mill town, I’d wager you can still find a few faded bumper stickers.

Those are the two most important ESA cases in American history. (We will get to wolves, grizzlies, jaguars, and lions in another piece.) It isn’t all bad though, and there is a solution. Agencies like the BLM, USFS, USFW, and State Fish and Game agencies are imperfect, but they have saved the; Bighorn Sheep, Black Footed Ferret, Desert Tortoise, Greater Sage Grouse, California Condor, Lahonton Cutthroat, Gila Trout, Bonneville Cutthroat, Colorado River Cutthroat, and more. They did this by developing interagency relationships, cultivating public interest, and building relationships with local and regional businesses. Yes, I know that some reader in Northern Arizona right now is thinking ‘piss on them damn turtles, but I do love my gila’s.’ That right there is the crux of it, give and take. Extinction is forever, and we owe our kids these species.

Enter our hero of the day, the Greater Sage Grouse.

For most of my life non-governmental organizations or NGOs and their lefty environmentalist friends have wanted sage grouse listed on the ESA. Around the beginning of Trump’s first term it was looking like they may even get it done. Under the current system anyone, citizen, NGO, or government agency can recommend a species be listed. They just have to show evidence of population decline and then clear the ‘best available science’ bar set by TVA v. Hill (1978). In other words, an NGO can commission a study, cherry-pick data, or even have genuine hard science in their favor, and recommend a species to be listed. Then it falls on hunters and anglers, private interest, USFW, BLM , and so on to either prove them wrong, or come up with a mitigation plan. Which is a tall order for groups who don’t have the deep pockets some of these NGO’s have. In truth, it seemed downright implausible until the Greater Sage Grouse story played out.

In this case, hunters, oil and gas companies, and the Mountain West States all wanted to keep them off the list. Hunters because they like to hunt, oil and gas companies because they and their employees all like making money, and the intermountain west states because their relatively small economies were looking at losing billions of dollars. $1-5 billion in alone Wyoming for example. A huge sum for a population of roughly 600,000 people. What happened here that was different than with the spotted owl or snail darter was the federal government, spurred to some degree by each of those groups, went to private industry and said they would not list Greater Sage Grouse if private industry and state governments came up with an acceptable mitigation strategy. It isn’t every day the federal government runs interdiction for private industry and sportsmen. Thankfully locals capitalized on the moment.

Private companies, working with state agencies voluntarily limited roads and road use, agreed to build fewer well pads, and placed pipelines in areas that prioritized habitat protection, such as breeding and nesting areas. They let each state affected by the problem handle it their own way. Federal wildlife managers provided flexibility and a new model of working with the ESA emerged. My home state of Idaho put together a Governor’s Task Force, Utah DWR used its RAC system for public and expert input, and then went a different way with their plan and so on. The plan worked. Jobs were saved, and so was the Greater Sage Grouse. For the first time in my life the Endangered Species Act, an important but oft times callously wielded tool, worked in practice the way it was always meant to in spirit.

The truth is people come from all over the world to study at our American universities and learn how we recovered and are recovering species. We have tweaked the levers of science, policy, and management techniques, including the North American Wildlife Model which sets hunters as a keystone partner, to the point where we are the best in the world at species management. And, some of the best of that wildlife management and science in the country is done in the West, where these groups seem to meddle the most. With a little oversight, and interstate compacts where necessary, we can do incredible things. Truly best of both worlds kind of outcomes can, and should, be happening more frequently.

This latest attempt at a landgrab came closer to succeeding than any I had seen in the past, in no small part due to abuse of the ESA. We won though, despite the odds stacked against us, and if we play our cards right, we can keep winning. We have a golden opportunity to recapture right-wing love of conservation and save both endangered wildlife and our rural industries and communities. We learned from the snail darter and spotted owl. We cannot let that happen again unless in the most extreme cases, and we better be damn sure we’re right about how dire the situation is before we put American families out of work next time. Every person in America saw videos of laid off State Department employees last week. Why can’t we have similar levels of sympathy for rural economic hardship that we are asked to have for elite coastal residents? Despite its checkered past, the ESA doesn’t have to be a cudgel wielded against rural towns, sage grouse have shown us it can be made into something that conforms with the longstanding identity of the American Conservationist, who puts his land, wildlife, and his People above all else in the world.

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