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Preserving the Sanctuaries That Ground and Uplift Us All When I first arrived in Washington D.C., over a decade ago, I noticed how the first question after “What’s your name?” is often “Where do you work?” It reminded me of my time in Uganda, where the question was always “What’s your name?” and “Where do…

Edited Out of Context: A Millennial in the Media Machine I recently participated in my first on-camera interview, for a segment on Stossel TV that had been pitched to me as a conversation about whether public lands should be sold for housing. In the interview, I explained that this is a manufactured crisis, and if…

Tomorrow, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing titled The State of Our Nation’s Federal Forests. The title alone sets the tone: as if our forests are in crisis, waiting for Congress and industry to swoop in with chainsaws and prescriptions. This isn’t the fault of a single administration or party. For decades, political…

When abstract reasoning ignores the science: how lofty ideas about wilderness mislead wildfire policy. Last week, the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Haggerty published a Boiling Point newsletter piece titled, “To solve the wildfire crisis, we have to let the myth of ‘the wild’ die.” It argues that John Muir’s belief in protecting wilderness as “untouched”…

Washington’s Climate Plan: A Step Forward on Forest Protection, but a Step Back on Fire and Bioenergy. Washington state is often a leader in climate policy, so it was encouraging to see its new Draft Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP) recognize the crucial role our forests play in fighting climate change. The plan correctly identifies…

Across the globe, people hold countless ways of seeing the natural world. Some draw meaning from scientific understandings of evolution, others from religious or spiritual creation lore, and still others from cultural traditions that see land, water, and all living beings as kin. What unites these varied worldviews is an understanding that the natural world…

The Science, the Stakes, and the Urgent Call to Defend Roadless Wildlands By John Muir Project, Western Watersheds Project, and Eco-Integrity Alliance Our National Forest system contains over 58 million acres of roadless wild lands. These areas, rich in biodiversity, are among the last strongholds of wilderness in the lower 48 states. But today, these…

Each year, the dominant narrative around wildfire focuses on trying to control wildfire “out there” in the backcountry. Logging and vegetation removal are touted as the solution, rooted in the misbelief that if we can just remove “fuels,” aka the trees and shrubs that create forest habitat, with these extractive activities, we can keep fire…

Breaking the myth of “wildfire” and facing our roles in the flames. The word wildfire sounds dramatic — raw, “natural,” something beyond our control. But there’s nothing natural about fires sparked by fireworks, power lines, or abandoned campfires. These aren’t wilderness events. They are human-triggered disasters, made worse by failing infrastructure, reckless development, and negligence.…

From Galileo to Groundtruthers, history shows us what happens when evidence threatens empire. For more than a century, U.S. forest policy has treated wildlands as a malfunction to fix: too dense, too flammable, too untidy. Fire was cast as an enemy to be crushed, not a partner in the oldest ecological dance on Earth. This…