Back From the Road, Back to the Fight

Did you miss us? We were off the grid for a minute, not out of distraction, but because even sustained fights demand occasional retreats to recharge and refocus.

At the start of January, I (Jenn) accompanied a friend and their pup from DC on an epic cross-country road trip out west for their new job. We passed through Texas, visiting my parents and stopping briefly at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The calm of the park stood in stark contrast to the long drive beforehand through the Permian Basin, where an industrial stench serves as one of the most persuasive arguments against fossil fuel romanticism.

From there, we headed west: El Paso for a proper lunch, Las Cruces for a local brewery, then across Arizona, where we nearly ran out of gas approaching California—the car read 100 miles left in the tank before dropping to 50 in what felt like seconds, a reminder that logistics matter when your vehicle is sporting a rooftop cargo carrier. In California, winter was greener than I’d ever seen it in Joshua Tree, a revelation for someone who had never visited that park in this season—and likely a rare consequence of a state considered drought-free for the first time in nearly a quarter-century. For a SoCal native, the pull back home was real in a way it hasn’t been for decades. A hike in the Sespe Wilderness of Los Padres National Forest was cut short when Sespe Creek was running far too high to cross, swollen from winter precipitation—an unmistakable sign of a landscape doing exactly what it’s meant to do. Time with friends and a closer look at Oxnard, where my grandparents once lived, prompted the kind of reflection that travel demands. Why hadn’t we bothered with the beach that was always within reach?

While it might seem from the few photos I’m sharing that I was documenting everything, I actually felt less compelled to take pictures. They rarely do justice to what I witnessed. Instead, I tried to be fully present, relying on my murky memory as a touchpoint when needed amid the stress of this work and the pressures of the time. That presence made the pull to relocate all the more real. One good season doesn’t make permanence, but the draw was fierce. The bank account, alas, remained uncooperative.

A visit to the Channel Islands had been slated for the beginning of my time in the Golden State, but winter rain reshuffled the plan and pushed it to the very end. That turned out to be just fine. California was so lusciously green by then I could barely take it all in, and the islands felt like the right place to close out the journey. We spotted some island foxes and island scrub-jays, and pods of dolphins accompanied us on the boat trip to and from the islands. The wildlife and the rhythm of the islands were a vivid reminder that life here flourishes quietly when we take the time to notice.

While I was away, several pieces landed that deserve attention. One from the Los Angeles Times took readers back to a Sierra wildfire burn scar to see the future of fire behavior and landscape recovery, a stark visual reminder of how fire, climate, and land interact beyond the headlines. Another, in The New York Times, offered lessons from recent Southern California fires, urging honest grappling with policy, preparedness, and community resilience if we hope to reduce risk rather than simply recount loss.

These are not abstract concerns. They are lived realities, visible on the ground and in policy outcomes.

And speaking of policy, while in Southern California, Senator Padilla (D-CA) released the Senate companion to Rep. Huffman’s Community Protection and Wildfire Defense Act. We support this bill. We do not support the Fix Our Forests Act, which Padilla again chose to praise alongside wildfire policy, a conflation that obscures the real differences between community protection and industrial logging mandates.

Looking ahead, Congress faces a consequential choice. If full-year appropriations pass instead of another continuing resolution, it opens the door for a second budget reconciliation package under the current Republican trifecta. That process is precisely how sweeping policy changes get pushed through with minimal scrutiny.

The early contours of “Reconciliation 2.0” are deeply concerning: punitive fees on environmental litigation, expanded categorical exclusions for forest management, and broader efforts to dilute procedural environmental protections under the banner of efficiency. These moves are not about resilience. They are about shifting power from communities and public accountability back toward concentrated interests.

It would be understandable, even humane, to feel worn down. This world is chaotic, and too often it demands more from us than we have in the moment. But retreat for rest is not retreat from purpose. It is necessary to sustain the work. That’s why we’re so grateful for our colleagues and allies who keep showing up, carrying things forward when others need time to recharge.

Hope may feel thin. But action, grounded, informed, and relentless, is where anything shifts. The other side has not won by waiting politely. They have organized, leveraged process, and shown no reluctance to use every tool at their disposal.

We owe them the same seriousness.

So yes, we were gone for a bit.
But we are back.
And we are not done.