This is a guest column which is well worth reading.
By SOREN JESPERSEN
Public lands are the backbone of the Western Slope. They supply our drinking water, sustain our wildlife populations, support our local economies, and, most importantly to me, offer us places to roam and enjoy in whatever way we so choose. It’s hard to find any resident on the Western Slope who wouldn’t list public lands as a primary reason they’ve chosen to live, work or raise a family in this spectacular place or who doesn’t feel some sense of responsibility in how they’re managed.
Like many Coloradans, my life and work are rooted in public lands. A lifetime of living in places dependent on public lands has shown me how much these lands rely on engaged communities. Across the West, people consistently step up to do the quiet, often tedious, work of showing up, speaking out, and engaging in public processes to ensure that their voices are heard and that our public lands are managed fairly and responsibly. Despite those opportunities, we’ve still seen losses: habitats bulldozed, rivers depleted, and our dwindling wild places straining under the pressures of increased visitation and decreased budgets.
What’s happening today isn’t death by a thousand well-meant cuts, or the unintended harm of loving the land to death. It’s a deliberate and cynical attempt by powerful interests in Washington to get rid of our public lands altogether. Utah’s U.S. Sen. Mike Lee clumsily exposed this agenda earlier this year when he tried to sell public lands outright. But the Trump administration is taking a more devious path to the same end proposed by Sen. Lee.
By slashing budgets, gutting staff, and dismantling the laws and policies that land managers rely on to balance the many uses of our public lands, they are attempting to drive public land management into the ground. It’s a deliberate effort to weaken federal land management so that they can claim it has failed, and then use that manufactured failure to justify getting rid of public lands altogether.
Meanwhile, they’re making it harder for the public to engage, or even monitor what is happening, ensuring that these efforts are undertaken in the dark, with little scrutiny or public input.
These attacks are already being felt. Trump’s 2026 budget cuts more than a third of funding from a budget that was already at starvation-level numbers. Forced retirements and layoffs pushed staffing to some of the lowest levels in modern history. These aren’t abstract numbers, they are people in our communities. Many of us on the Western Slope know someone who’s been affected. Or we’ve seen the consequences of these cuts in uncleaned campgrounds, trail projects delayed, or a palpable absence on the ground.
And it’s not just seasonal crews or recreation staff being pushed out. Long-time biologists, archaeologists, planners and field managers are leaving or being sidelined. These are the people who carry the institutional memory that keeps forests and river systems healthy, and who have long-term relationships with our community partners and organizations working for the betterment of our public lands. When their expertise is replaced with political directives, the West loses the expertise and know-how that have helped create the public lands that we know and love today.
Now, Trump is working to replace that expertise with ideology. His nomination of a former congressman and noted public lands opponent, Steve Pearce, to lead the BLM should alarm every Coloradan. Putting somebody in charge who has previously co-sponsored legislation to sell off our public lands, and who is clearly opposed to the idea of balance, is dangerous and irresponsible.
At the same time, the administration and certain members of Congress are working to weaken the public process itself.
Communities across the Western Slope of a variety of opinions and political stripes have spent years crafting the public land management plans that shape how we experience these lands today. Yet, those plans are in jeopardy as Congress and D.C. attempt to use legislation or the arcane Congressional Review Act to undermine or even rescind these plans altogether.
While we all can find something we don’t like about how our public lands are managed, at least we know that that management was created through years of conversation and input from the local level. Giving all of that up to the whims of Congress or D.C. political operatives will undoubtedly be a loss for all of us.
Yet another troubling concern is the effort to roll back the Public Lands Rule. The rule simply ensured that conservation and restoration were considered alongside drilling and mining. This is a balance long overdue for our public lands. There is a reason that The Daily Sentinel editorialized in favor of the Public Lands Rule. Undoing it opens the door to more oil and gas leasing in cultural sites, more pressure on wildlife corridors and more strain on our watersheds.
All of this is happening while Colorado’s most iconic landscapes are already under immense pressure from the parallel and related threats of climate change and habitat loss. What is happening now at the federal level will determine whether these lands can recover, or slip closer to a breaking point.
Colorado’s public lands have faced many challenges, but never a threat as coordinated and intentional as this one. We cannot afford to trade away the myriad benefits that public lands provide for short-term political gains or ideological experiments.
We need leaders who will defend public ownership of our public lands, restore agency capacity and expertise, uphold science-based management and keep communities at the decision-making table. And we need leaders who will work with us to secure lasting protections for the wildlands we have left, so that future generations inherit a West still defined by public lands, rather than the loss of them.
Soren Jespersen is director of the Colorado Wildlands Project, an organization working to protect and steward wild public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
This column was originally published in the Grand Junction Sentinel.
