The Future of Conservation is Sagebrush Green
Why we started the Sagebrush Institute
The future of conservation will not be funded by a suit-and-tie event in Washington.
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veterans, and citizens with an X account and a conscience who flooded Congress with outrage until the provision was withdrawn.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.