Snow blankets the landscape of Grand Canyon South Rim in Arizona. The canyon’s winter weather is dramatically different from its sweltering summer temperatures. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
America’s protected spaces are under unprecedented assault from Mother Nature’s greatest adversaries – Big Oil and powerful D.C. lobbies.
A gleaming red blur, our Ford Mustang convertible rocketed across the Eastern California desert.
My brother and I had left Las Vegas a few hours earlier on the boomerang route northwest toward Death Valley. We passed the hinge point of our journey, the former mining hub of Beatty, only minutes before the Nevada state line sign bid us a fond farewell. Now on Daylight Pass Road, heading southwest with the top down and hair blowing in the wind, we topped the final rise of the Amargosa Mountains before making our descent.
The sight before us will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Much like standing at the overlook of Arizona’s Grand Canyon South Rim, the expanse of Death Valley causes an involuntary awe-struck inhale. From our vantage point several miles away, the Mesquite Flat Dunes, some of which reach 100 feet tall, looked like a tiny sandbox framed against the looming Panamint Mountains further to the west.
The valley’s saltpan shimmered sinisterly below us, giving the faux appearance of water. How many parched frontier families had praised the heavens in the very spot we were driving, only to later realize they had been duped by the diabolical desert gods overseeing this literal hellscape? Death Valley is most famously known as both the hottest place on the planet (recording a sweltering temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913) and the lowest point in North America.
Despite its harshness, there’s a mysterious vibe to the valley, a singular alluring energy that can only be felt in the desert. While other natural environments blessed with topsoil and a more favorable climate might be able to disguise their age with the window dressing of vegetation, ancient arid landscapes like Death Valley – well over a billion years old – stand as naked testaments to time’s paradoxical march: Things are always changing, yet they also seem to forever stay the same.
Death Valley, sparsely populated and minimally developed, is an ideal case study as to why America’s national parks and federally protected spaces are so essential to the health of our nation. Obvious considerations regarding environmental stewardship aside, we as a species need wild places and historical monuments to both wander and wonder, to connect with Mother Nature and our past, and to grow in that most unique of human ways – spiritually.
You might believe that there’s unanimous support for keeping these spaces protected from the darkest impulses of capitalism, that the political divisiveness poisoning so much of our discourse has surely found a consensual limit at the federal public lands system.
If so, you’d unfortunately be wrong.
A System Under Attack
Late President Woodrow Wilson, the founder of the National Park Service, was surely rolling over in his grave during the Trump administration.
While media outlets were hard-pressed just to keep pace with the unrelenting chaos generated during his presidency, Trump’s Department of the Interior worked quietly to industrialize large sections of America’s public lands. An investigative report written by The Guardian, a politically center-left publication based in the United Kingdom, in October 2020 put the administration’s “meat-cleaver” approach to removing national monuments and protected spaces in statistical perspective.*
According to The Guardian article, the U.S. has approximately 600 million acres of federal public land. Near the twilight of Trump’s presidency, his interior department had overseen lease transactions on at least 11 million acres, with another 110 million actively on offer. All of those combined 121 million acres of federal land – including historical monuments, wildlife habitats, and (most damning) sacred Indigenous sites – were targeted for oil and gas exploration.
While allowing energy corporations to pollute and destroy pristine wildernesses is bad enough, the intentional defilement of hallowed Indigenous ground is beyond the pale. Bears Ears National Monument in Utah was established in 2016 to protect the traditional homelands of the Hopi, Zuni, Ute, and Pueblo peoples. In an indefensible decision, the Trump administration decided it was one of multiple sacred landscapes that were fair game for drilling.
As the Associated Press reported late last year, the good news is the Biden administration reinstated protections on millions of acres of federal public land left vulnerable by Trump. Included in the order’s provisions was Bears Ears. But make no mistake about it: This was just one victorious battle in a much larger and longer war.
* I use the website AllSides throughout this feature to help determine the political bias of specific news organizations. Although founded by a former Republican political operative, I have found their assessments to be decidedly accurate (i.e., non-partisan.)
Those Behind the Curtain
Where there’s a power vacuum, rest assured: It won’t be there long.
As has been well-documented by (but not exclusively) investigative reporting, books, and television specials, the Trump administration was essentially four years of the executive branch asleep at the wheel. Large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, dependent upon presidential nominations and congressional approvals to fill key leadership vacancies, went understaffed for years, leaving gaping holes in an increasingly complex machine that keeps the nation’s government functioning serviceably.
Here’s a few numbers to illustrate the labor shortfalls. According to an article published in January 2020 by Politico, a center-left news agency like The Guardian, there are 714 “key positions” in the federal government requiring Senate approval. At the time of Politico’s writing, which was three full years into Trump’s term, 170 of those jobs didn’t even have a nominee. That’s 24 percent of the most critical positions at the highest level of government that didn’t even a suggested name to fill them.
Imagine a Fortune 500 company running with a similar manpower deficit; viability immediately comes into question. Nevertheless, many staunch proponents of a smaller federal bureaucracy would likely contend that the long-term vacancies were a sign of progress. After all, isn’t less government for the better? The argument paints a too broad and careless brushstroke.
To be sure, the Trump-coined “D.C. swamp” is notorious for its frequent infractions of fraud, waste, and abuse, including manufacturing plum yet unnecessary jobs for the well-to-do and politically connected. Moving past cynicism, however, the practical reality is that government must grow and evolve proportionally – albeit responsibly – along with the nation.
And as government expands, oversight and new policy formulation/administration must also follow suit. Using the law of averages, there’s little doubt that several of the 170 key positions left cobwebbed by Trump were charged with calling balls and strikes in specific areas of the bureaucracy. It’s also safe to assume that many of the other vacancies in question were designed to create strategies to move the government forward in coherent fashion.
Unfortunately, coherency was never part of the equation when it came to Trump, who ran his presidency on personal whim and individual instinct. Here’s him explaining away the staffing issues that plagued his four years in office:
“Let me tell you – the one that matters is me,” Trump is quoted as saying in a 2017 article by NPR, another center-left news source. “I’m the only one that matters because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that, and you’ve seen it strongly.”
Considering Trump’s well-documented failures as a businessman, his philosophically monarchical approach to overseeing the executive branch was quite frankly terrifying to those on both sides of the political aisle not drinking the “Make America Great Again” Kool-Aid.
The plan was there was no plan, at least not in the sense of a well-defined, sustained policy strategy. It was basically one solitary, rudderless man, blowing back and forth like an air dancer inflatable tube man outside a suburban department store.
Without a concrete vision and lacking the administrative manpower in critical areas of the government, the power of Trump’s office was open for interpretation and execution to the most persuasive individuals and organizations in Washington.
Where Trump landed on a particular day largely depended upon who managed to capture his fleeting attention span. There was one group, however, that never appeared to fall out of favor.
Enter one of the largest shadow powers in America, veritable royalty of the dreaded D.C. swamp: the oil lobby.
Trouble With a Capital ‘K’
Standing at the pinnacle of Olympic National Park’s High Ridge Trail in Washington state or at the basin of Little River Canyon National Preserve’s Eberhart Trail in Alabama, all of civilization’s ailments seem worlds away. The two hiking routes are among my favorites in the federal lands system, the forest trail to Little River holding a particularly special place in my life.
Moving to the Deep South for a moment, I spent countless days as a child and young adult in Alabama walking to the bottom of the canyon, letting the soft sound of the flowing river soothe my mind after a long day at school or work. I hiked Eberhart Trail in all its seasons, smelling the wildflowers as they bloomed in the spring and watching the leaves turn to all those vibrant fall colors in autumn. Whether it was a blazing summer afternoon or a bone-chilling winter morning, the bottom of Little River Canyon seemed so wild and untouchable to my younger, less worldly self. Who would ever consider ruining this or any other place like it?
The master political manipulators of D.C.’s K Street, the epicenter of America’s sprawling lobbying apparatus and the power source behind the oil industry’s stranglehold on our increasingly antiquated energy sector; that’s who. As it turns out, the oil lobby – which politically facilitates the destruction of every inch of prospective ground made available for drilling – had been waiting decades for an ideologically pliable character like Trump to ascend to the presidency.
In a January 2017 article by Reuters, perhaps the most politically neutral news service in the world, oil lobbyist Jack Gerard called the incoming Trump administration “maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity” to dip their black-stained hands in federal public lands that had been off limits for years. And although my beloved Little River National Preserve was fortunately overlooked (or more likely deemed an unlikely place to strike oil), the previously mentioned 121 million acres opened for lease – most of which was in western states – proved him right: That’s one-fifth of all of America’s federal lands that were left vulnerable to drilling.
While sacred ground can be defiled in an instant, wild spaces exist in a similarly precarious state. John Ewing, a conservationist from southern Utah, succinctly explained in the Reuters report the impendent disaster associated with drilling in fragile ecosystems: “It would take only one serious mistake – one well to go bad – for our town’s water supply to be damaged.”
His statement could just as easily apply to other water sources like the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River or the Southwest’s Colorado River. The problem is the oil lobby doesn’t care about hallowed ground or pristine wildernesses. They exist solely to guard the lucrative revenue streams of their corporate customers and – more importantly in relation to the recent rise of renewable energy – keep the industry from becoming a rightful relic of the past.
The only way to accomplish their goal is through an elaborate campaign of lies. Folks, it’s working.
Don’t Believe the Science
Years ago, I bookmarked the weblink to an executive summary entitled “A Climate of Corporate Control.” The 12-page report, which was written by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based Union of Concerned Scientists in 2012, provides a glimpse into how energy companies – particularly those in oil and gas – have worked to misrepresent and/or discredit climate science.
The scientists who developed the executive summary are forthcoming regarding the limitations of their study. Corporations sit comfortably behind a high wall of friendly regulations that minimize their disclosure requirements on key line items like political contributions, largely freeing them to work cloak-and-dagger to fight back against unfavorable scientific findings.* Obstacles aside, the report does a fabulous job of synthesizing publicly available information (press releases, government filings, etc.) into a clear, graphical picture of how energy companies have distorted climate change data.
In one graph, the scientists categorize select S&P 500 corporations’ statements and actions on climate change during a two-year study window. They label each company either favorably “consistent,” dubiously “contradictory,” or hostilely “obstructionist.” To their credit, companies like Nike and NRG were found to be consistent in terms of supportive messaging and action while other businesses like Boeing, General Electric, and Exxon were labeled contradictory (i.e., publicly speaking favorably, privately acting unfavorably.) Finally, well-known oil and gas giants like Murphy, Valero, and Marathon landed in the obstructionist category.
The most hostile corporation toward climate science amongst the sample was discovered to be Peabody, a coal-mining business headquartered in St. Louis, MO. The scientists singled out the company in a separate illustration, contrasting their obstructionist activities with Nike’s favorable actions. Although Peabody is not an oil and gas company, the statistics in the graphic are telling in terms of shedding light on the standard energy corporation playbook for discrediting climate science.
Peabody spent $33.4 million on anti-climate lobbyists, a full 10 times what Nike spent on the same line item. Peabody also supported four times the number of anti-climate members of Congress compared to pro-climate, and their political contributions designed to discredit scientific data on global warming was four times what Nike spent to counter.
Money damn sure talks, and numbers don’t lie. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report strips back the curtain and sheds light on the large-scale, drawn-out war I referred to earlier: the great conflict over the hearts and minds of the electorate. On one side of the battlefield is the data and reason of modern science and the promise of a new era of clean power. On the other is the propaganda of the energy sector’s old guard, aided along by their lobbyists and politicians.
“The greatest crisis society confronts is not a future environmental crisis predicted by computer models,” reads a 2011 statement from Peabody’s website quoted in the executive summary, “but a human crisis today that is fully in our power to solve… with coal.”
In other words, don’t believe the science. Like Trump, just go with your gut.
* The executive summary, now a decade old, is rather dated. However, paying close attention to the behavior of today’s oil and gas corporations, I believe the data is still relevant to the present day.
Line in the Sand
It should be acknowledged that the Trump administration isn’t the first to cozy up to the oil lobby. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s connection with Halliburton during George W. Bush’s presidency is another immediately available example of the perpetual power that oil and gas has wielded in the modern era of American politics.
It’s the scope of the oil lobby’s influence under Trump, however, that’s most concerning for the future of federal lands, particularly those out west. As the U.S. political environment becomes more polarized, an increasing number of conservatives have fallen deeper into the pit of fearful traditionalism. This plays right into the hands of oil and gas corporations who are positioning themselves – just like Peabody’s 2011 statement on coal – as tangible, tried-and-true solutions that can be trusted.*
The quixotic “Made in America” obsession amongst much of the conservative voting bloc also means future Republican presidents and legislative majorities will attempt to expand drilling rights in our public spaces with the advertised goal of making us oil and gas independent. Moderate conservatives and liberals must stay vigilant and active with both our voice and our vote, lest we lose an increasing number of indigenous sacred lands, historical monuments, and wildernesses to petrol raiders.
In conclusion, a personal observation from my time spent wandering the forests, mountains, and beaches of several of America’s national parks. Whether it’s the night giving way to the day, one season succeeding the next, or the tide ebbing then flowing, nature moves forward in a varied succession of circles and oscillations. In total contrast, the dark-art capitalism practiced by organizations like the oil lobby is based on the premise of the most unnatural of geometric shapes in terms of the intended relationship between existence and time: a straight line, one that graphically leads to infinite profit, infinite drilling, and infinite destruction.
The only line that should be drawn is in the sand, between federal lands and their filthy hands.
* The stakes of the conflict between climate science reality and energy sector disinformation couldn’t be higher; the fate of the planet literally hangs in the balance. I will go into greater detail on climate change, including my own firsthand observations from my travels, in a later series of features.
Related Content
– Click to browse my high-resolution photo gallery featuring collections of images from several national parks.
– Click to read my feature article “Seattle: An Indictment of American Plutocracy,” the first half of a series on imminent geopolitical and societal threats facing the Western world.
– Click to watch my high-definition video of the West Rim Trail at Zion National Park.