December 26, 2024
In mid-November, 10 days after 77 million of our fellow Americans chose Donald J. Trump to be their next president, I found myself at the old Navajo Bridge, which spans Marble Canyon and the Colorado River downstream from Lees Ferry in northern Arizona. I got out of my car, stretched and ambled toward the pedestrian bridge, which mirrors the newer one for automobiles.
As I reached the bridge, I noticed some onlookers looking intently downstream with binoculars. I followed their gaze to see a trio of giant, bald-headed, feathered creatures perched on the steel beams of the automobile bridge, looking a bit like the flying monkeys in the old Wizard of Oz film. They were California condors, maybe 10 in all, apparently waiting for an afternoon carrion snack to float by on the slow-moving emerald waters far below.
I wandered back and forth on the bridge for the next hour or so, stopping frequently to snap another photo, meditate vertiginously on the river and limestone cliffs or to gaze again in awe at the magnificent, uncanny creatures. Politics and the election results became irrelevant, at least for a moment, and it was with a newfound sense of serenity that I finally got back into the car and headed north.
My mental calm was quickly shattered, however, as news trickled out about Trump’s Cabinet picks and plans. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are entering a perilous political era in which the federal government’s role is fundamentally altered. This includes a multi-pronged assault on our public lands and the rules, regulations, laws and agencies designed to protect them. Those condors on the Colorado River could be among the many victims.
Judging from the record of Trump’s first term, his campaign platform, his Cabinet picks so far and Project 2025, the right wing’s “presidential playbook,” it’s clear that he will once again attempt to dismantle the administrative state — and he’ll likely be better at it this time. The destruction will include gutting federal agencies, replacing experienced staffers with Trump loyalists and eviscerating protections for human health and the environment. The goal is to shrink the government, slash spending on safety nets and social programs to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy, and (of course) remove regulatory barriers standing in the way of ever-growing corporate profits. With the likes of Elon Musk buying his way into the administration, it promises to be a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.
Trump actually summed up this ethos better than I ever could in a social media post, when he vowed to give anyone who invested at least $1 billion “in the United States of America … fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” He seemed to be responding to global mining corporation Rio Tinto, which is behind the proposed Resolution Copper Mine at Oak Flat in Arizona, urging the new administration to weaken environmental laws and expedite permitting for big mines.
During his first term, Trump made his hostility toward public lands clear as he reduced national monuments and rolled back regulations on fossil fuel extraction. This time, he promises a repeat performance, backed by a GOP-dominated Congress, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and an army of professional ideologues who have been eagerly preparing for this moment for the last four years.
We can expect him to try to shrink or entirely rescind national monuments — particularly Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon — potentially reopening hundreds of thousands of acres of uranium-rich lands to new mining claims during a time when the domestic uranium industry is experiencing a revival.
He will likely reward petroleum companies for donating generously to his campaign by implementing his “drill baby drill” policies. He’ll open up more public land to oil and gas leasing, including in the Alaskan Arctic, and rescind drilling bans on Thompson Divide in western Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. He’ll roll back new EPA rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas and mercury pollution from coal power plants.
If Trump’s hunger for “energy dominance” and corporate freedom don’t come for your public lands, the “Cult of Efficiency” probably will. Musk donated $277 million to Trump’s campaign. In return, he has been chosen to co-chair the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has vowed to slash some $2 trillion in allegedly “wasteful” spending.
What this will actually mean remains unclear. But Trump’s suggestion that he may try to privatize the U.S. Postal Service because it’s not “profitable” and must be “subsidized” gives a good indication of what Musk’s quasi-department will be targeting. The USPS is designed to provide a public good, not a profit, and its priorities are fulfilling that mission, not maximizing efficiency. After all, how could delivering a letter to some remote rural backwater for some 50 cents ever be efficient?
And if the USPS is a problem, then what about public lands and the agencies that manage them? Sure, they provide ecological benefits, stewardship of and free access to millions of acres of stunning landscapes, wildlife habitat and so much more. And yet, they are “subsidized” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year, making them ripe for Musk’s chopping block. Utah, with the support of other conservative states, has offered to make Musk’s job easier with a lawsuit seeking to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal land in its midst. Because those states can’t afford to manage those lands at a loss, they would almost certainly sell them off to private interests.
And what about those condors? For years, industry and conservative politicians have tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act because it stood in the way of development and profits. Project 2025 calls for an escalation of these efforts, which now have more support in Congress — and from the efficiency cult.
The federal government has spent at least $35 million so far on the California condor program. It’s an effort that has so far paid off by helping to bring the species back from the brink of extinction; the wild population is up to almost 600 from an 1980s low of just 22 birds. Public goods such as species restoration simply don’t fit into narrow Musk’s profit-focused vision. And the condor remains fragile, threatened by lead poisoning, power lines, wind turbines and avian influenza, and it is not yet self-sustaining.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve seen a number of pundits, politicians and even advocates calling on land, water and air defenders to take a more conciliatory approach, to forge alliances with oil and gas companies, to abandon calls to “keep it in the ground,” to work with Republicans to speed up permitting reform in order to expedite renewable energy development, even if it does mean more fossil fuel development as well. Yet if ever there was a time not to give in, this is it. America’s public lands are under unprecedented attack from nearly every front. Now we need to be even more vigilant and fierce in our defense of it. [ed. emphasis mine]
Out on that bridge, something compelled me to hang my body a little too far over the rail so I could gaze straight through the empty space toward the river. My vertigo was overcome by the thrill of seeing, just below me on a steel girder, a juvenile condor, its pink beak jutting from a thatch of dark brown feathers. That, I thought, is certainly worth fighting for.
