It Could Happen Here - A New Threat to Public Lands

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

James and Gare discuss Utah Senator Mike Lee’s latest attempt to erode protections on wilderness in the USA. Sources: https://www.energy.senate.gov/2025/10/lee-bill-fights-back-against-biden-s-border-chaos-destroying-america-s-parks-and-public-lands  https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2025/11/sierra-club-statement-trump-s-nomination-steve-pearce-lead-blm https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/kathleen-sgamma-withdraws-jan-6-criticism-came-public--rcna200699  https://recreationroundtable.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ORR-Burgum-Nomination-Letter-of-Support-Final.pdf  https://twitter.com/BasedMikeLee https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/mike-lee/summary?cid=N00031696  https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/0DED04C4-18C7-4C1F-BCE4-DD5B79FB0264  https://www.jstor.org/stable/14646 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is. The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls, came forward with a story.

America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and social. Small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season, ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. CallZone Media. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Ickm could happen here, a podcast where I have just been.

been attacked for my identity as a British person by my colleague Garrison Davis. Hi, Gare. It's going to happen again. I really, I never. This podcast is not a safe space. Not for British people, sadly. Many, many such places for us, including Britain, which is a country which is not doing so well right now, but Britain is still very safe. I don't want to talk about Britain today. I do, incidentally, I guess, because I grew up in a country that has virtually no fucking public land. I mean, enclosure of the commons. It's actually kind of topical.

Yeah, it is. That is a question that actually, so earlier this year in September, I was staying with Quijin people who are indigenous to the northern Alaskan interior, Arctic and sub-Arctic. And one of them was like, hey, how did you guys get so dislocated from your lands? One of my friends who I was talking to, and it was a really inquestined question for me, because they have lived on that same land for as long as human beings have existed in the Americas, like 25,000 years, something like that. Like the answer is the enclosure of the comments, right?

The answer is like proto-capitalism is what removed folks like me from the land and identifying it in a way that those people identify with the land. But in the United States, we do have a little bit, or quite a lot actually, of public land. various different types of public land, various different land and protections that anyone can go to, right? You don't have to be an American or a citizen. Anyone can go to public lands and enjoy them. Unfortunately, Utah Senator, quote unquote, based Mike Lee, is once again attempting to weaken protections on wilderness, which will render some of the small parts of the USA that have not been fundamentally damaged by capitalism permanently and irrevocably. changed. Are you familiar with Mike Lee? Yeah. He's the senator from Utah. The senator from Utah,

yeah. And he's based, as you have said. Yes, he's based, right? He's a hashtag poster. He's a poster, yeah. He operates a Twitter account, which some might deem as offensive and tweets about current events in a very provocative way. Yeah. Usually in line with some kind of partisan sentiment. Yeah, that's pretty fair. Specifically following. the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband made a series of tweets that were, I guess, kind of

insensitive, if not actually if not laying blame at the governor of Minnesota in a kind of ironic, joking way where you have plausible deniability, but in general handled that situation very grossly. And I think

that's what most people might know his tweets for, but he's very active. He tweets about many Many a thing. Yeah, yeah. If he thinks that he posts it. But yeah, yeah, most people will know him as a guy who made the extremely poor taste posts following those murders. Nightmare on walls the street.

Yeah. Just not nothing to be posting when some people have been murdered. I think in general, when people are murdered, I think we assume it should post less. Yeah, yeah, right. If somebody has died, like, just don't post. You know, it may be nice to say this is terrible, send your condolences or whatever, but realistically, their family aren't looking on Twitter.com to see who's sending their condolences. But they sure as fuck, we'll find out if you try and make a funny about it.

So just don't. Just resist the urge to post. Another urge that Mike Lee sadly have is... I don't like this at all. Yeah. You don't like that we're talking about Mike Lee's urges. Okay, it's in the broadcastable space. Mike Lee has the urge to sell off public land. He has tried twice this year.

We spoke about this a little bit on ED, right? We talked about it in the context of the big beautiful bill or the one big beautiful bill act. Yeah, he did try that like half a year ago. Yes, he did. Well, Garrison, I regret to inform you that Mike Lee is back. Somehow Mike Lee has returned. Yeah, and this time he has got a new thing.

So last time, if you remember, he talked about selling off the public land to make affordable housing. Sure, sure. Yeah. Not going to look into this any further. That was exactly what he was relying on. That no one gave a shit about the millions of acres that we all get access to, and they would just trust him on that one.

Based Mike Lee in his abundance agenda here. Yeah, exactly. It's him and Zoran shaking hands when it comes to affordable housing, but something they care about very much. much. I'm sure something that Mike Lee has campaigned on for years. He did not stick landing on that because people read the proposal and they noticed that it was going to do nothing for housing, affordability whatsoever. If it did create any housing at all, it was going to be like super rich people's McMansions. This was not going to do anything

to move to the need and affordable housing in the US. This time, he has found a cause which receives even less scrutiny, can you guess what it is, Garrison? For why we need to sell the public lands? Yes. I'm trying to not just look ahead on your script. Yeah, there is a document in front of you which has the answer.

So close your eyes. I feel like there's like two or three things in the US where everyone just seems to turn a blind eye to like... I mean, is it for like, is it for like developing land for like oil, data centers? That probably is what's happening, but he's smart enough not to say that, right? Super gold magic harp, as in the film Eddington. I mean, I would guess the data centers, but that's, I could be wrong. It's border security.

Oh, great. Of course. Right, you could have said anti-terrorism and probably got there too, but no, it is. It is securing our southern, well, all our borders, actually. Southern border, northern border, eastern and western maritime borders. Obviously, they're looking to prevent any more people coming in from Canada. Utah's not a border state. That is correct.

That's why I didn't say borders. I saw you go to search something. I literally pulled up a map of the United States. I was like, I don't think Utah's a border. Maybe I misremembering, but Utah's. is not a border state, isn't it? Yeah. Utah is absolutely not a border state, Garrison.

It's in fact not a border state. It is above Arizona, which is a border state. Yeah. So that is perhaps what's going on here. Mike Lee has found a way to sell off public lands without selling off Utah public lands. Oh, in this case, not really sell off, but destroy and degrade in a way which is very clearly going to lead to commercial exploitation, right? What Lee proposes, what leads Bill has a bunch of co-sponsors.

I believe the only border state senator co-sponsoring it is Ted Cruz. Yeah, makes sense. Big public land respecter. But Lee's bill would allow the Department of Homeland Security to, quote, inventory, illegal roads and trails on public land within 100 miles of the border, and then convert them into navigable roads. That is the part that makes no sense, right? Like, when you look at Lee's statements, and I will read one of you.

these statements here. So this is a statement on the Senate Energy Committee web page where they talk about Energy Natural Resources Committee. Here's a quote from Mike Lee explaining his bill. Quote, Biden's open border chaos is destroying America's crown jewels. I'm going to pause here to note that. According to my watch, we're at November 7th, 2025. Well, your watch is rog. Yeah, we are we're once again asking the most important question of our time. Who was the president? Who is?

He used the president. It's not even like talking about 2020 and pretending that Trump wasn't president. He's doing it right now. FDR's border policies are destroying our natural lands.

Yeah, like we were a year after the election. You've had time to come to terms with this. You can't just keep pointing at Joe Biden. But apparently, I guess you can. They're going to keep doing that for three more years until there's a new guy. Yeah. So let's go on with Chairman Lee, his chairman of this Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee read. Families who want to enjoy a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles, burned landscapes, and trails closed because rangers are stuck cleaning up the fallout. Cartels are exploiting the disorder. You think

these lands as cover for their operations. This bill gives land managers and border agents tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve. He's doing the thing where he says one thing and then his bill does something completely different. Yeah. What he is saying is on the face of it somewhat ridiculous,

but what he's claiming he's going to do is protect these lands, right? What the bill allows them to do is to find roads that are not permitted and turn them into navigable roads. So just actually paved roads Yes. In the protected wildland. In the, yeah, well, crucially, in wilderness areas, right? So the 1964 Wilderness Act does not allow for there to be any mechanized access.

Lee's bill proposes not just to amend the Wilderness Act for within 100 miles of the border, but to amend it entirely to allow for the construction of roads. So that they can police the public lands better? That's what he's saying. Yeah, right. Well, one of his claims is for search and rescue that there are already exemptions that allow for mechanized search and rescue access, right?

Yeah. Things like helicopters, right? Helicopters. Yeah, even like you get like motorized gurneys, you can use for SAR, things like that, right? Like even ATVs, right? There's a threat to human life. A Toyota Tacoma.

Yeah. I mean, you'd struggle in most wilderness lands with a Tacoma. But, yeah, you could give it a college try. But it's ludicrous. He hasn't even made an effort to join the dots, you know. It also calls for fire mitigation by clearing fuels and building fire breaks and includes a provision that would, quote, address invasive or non-native species.

In the wilderness area? Yeah, like, what are you going to go in there and round up? Because everyone's planting and spreading invasive species. Yeah, I mean, of course, they're invasive species, right? Like, if you go to parts of where I live, you'll see mustard, which is not an indigenous species, because the climate's changing and people move around the world. And, like, lots and lots of animals that weren't, like, here 20,000 years ago are here now. I mean, you can make an argument for managing these areas.

I don't think he's coming at this from an environmental conservation standpoint. Yeah. I don't know what the non-native species thing is about, other than just, like, nativism for plants. Like, I genuinely can't work it out. If anyone has any ideas, please, let me. me know. It also attempts to inventory damage done to public lands by migrants. Like, what wildfires are caused by migrants? How many national parks are trashed by migrants? Oh my God. Yeah. As opposed to the American citizens who treat these areas like dog shit.

Yeah, like the park rangers who simply just don't do their jobs because they're too lazy. Yeah. And like the literally thousands of people a year who fucking drag their refrigerator or television onto public land and execute it by firing squad. Yeah. Like maybe make a bill about that. I mean, you want to do something nice for public land. I want to give a definition of wilderness from Howard. I think it's Zanisar. If any ever read his name, but the Wilderness Society who more or less wrote the act, it defines wilderness as, quote, a wilderness in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and who does

not remain. I don't actually really like that definition. I don't actually really like that definition. Like, wilderness, but I'm not a big fan of the idea of, like, quote, unquote, untouched wilderness, right? Like, every bit of what is now the United States is a place where indigenous people have been living and surviving for 10th of thousands of years. Before it was the United States, it's not untouched. It's just not fucked by extractive capitalism in a way that a lot of our land has been in the last 200 years. There could be touching without a fucking is what you're saying. I saw this mischievous look come on their face, and I didn't know which direction they were going to take it.

I didn't expect that one. Now this is podcasting. Yeah, wow, yeah. We've just left the newsreel. Let's do an advertising break, isn't it? We can't come back from that. your squad relies on you. Don't let them down.

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until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy. killed her. We know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn, or any of that other stuff that y'all said it. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.

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Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we've returned I have de-scandalized myself. Lee is currently making his claim. right, that this will somehow make the border safer and make people on public land safer. This is such the thinnest justification that you're throwing in, like, this is so,

I severely doubt he sincerely even believes this. Yeah, I mean, the Border Patrol have access to all these lands, right? Like, I see, I think the Hacumba Wilderness, the state wilderness, I see Border Patrol in there all the time. I can see there's many reasons for why a Republican might be interested in like building road infrastructure in these places and border security, frankly, is insulting that he's even trying to use that

as a zeitgeist justification. Yeah, it's fucking ludicrous. Like, the Trump administration is speed running extractive capitalism on our public lands, right? Just yesterday, when we're recordings, recording on Friday, Joe Biden is president, as you will remember. Friday, 7th November 2025. The Trump administration nominated, okay,

I've outed myself. I'm not a Biden. I'm not a Biden truther. The Trump administration nominated Steve Pierce to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Pierce is a former New Mexico congressman who has supported drilling and fracking on federal land. He's also a serial loser in congressional and state races in New Mexico. I think he lost a Senate and a gubernatorial race. And he has voted to shrink existing public lands.

The Trump admin did this before. right? People will probably, if they're engaged in public lands advocacy, will remember the attempts to save the Bears' ears national monument from oil exploitation, which again is in Utah. Utah is, for whatever reason, Utah is a hotbed of anti-public lands settlement. Amusingly, the previous nominee for the leadership of the BLM had to be removed when emails condemning Trump's response to January 6 came to light. She, I guess, failed the loyalty test. Trump has also put Doug Bergam

at the head of the Department of the Interior, right? You're familiar with Bergam's schtick, yeah? His name sounds incredibly familiar. Yeah, he was governor, I believe, in North Dakota. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, like, he did this pivot on, like, culture war issues where he had previously been not opposed to abortion, for example, And he just like took a massive swing to the right in order to kind of align with the Maga position over time.

So he's now leading the Department of the Interior. I wrote about this on my little newsletter that I write because when he was nominated, he received a letter of support from the outdoor recreation roundtable, a bunch of outdoor brands. Notably, R.E.I was one of the brands that supported his nomination. Bergam is another big oil and gas guy, right? He's a guy who has talked about the need for energy exploitation on public land. I have a whole scripted series that I'm working on about specifically drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

But this goes far, far beyond that, right? This could potentially affect every piece of public land, every national park, every national monument in the United States. Drill Baby Drill. Yes, Drill Baby Drill is pretty much our approach to public land these days. Amusingly, RIEI was shamed into rescinding their support of Bergam. Good for them.

Yeah, one of the few instances where people probably posted their way to a change in in some kind of policy, I guess, even though it's only R-A-I policy. I want to talk a little bit about, like, how we got to this idea of public land. And the sort of way that it's sometimes referred to and where I would prefer we talked about, I guess. The idea we have right now is that there are various tiers of public land, right? There's Bureau of Land Management land, which is often the least protected. We have national parks. We have national monuments. We have national forests. And we have wilderness, right? Wilderness being among the most protected. The problem with this approach is the ecosystems don't necessarily

respect property lines, right? So let's take, for example, the Gwich Inn in Alaska, right? They have hundreds of thousands of acres of their own. But their traditional way of life and indeed their existence depends on the existence of the porcupine caribou herd. The porcupine caribou herd makes the longest migration of any land mammal on earth and it carves on the coastal plain. The coastal plain, the Gwichian way of saying it would be, I have heard this said a lot of times. My sincere apologies if I don't get it right, like I'm trying my best. It means a sacred place where life begins. It's a very sacred place.

Gwitchin don't go there themselves because it's a sacred place, but it is not in their land. It is part of the Arctic Refuge, a place where the Trump administration is selling oil and gas leases, right? So if the caribou can't carve, then it doesn't matter, it still matters that the Gwitchin have all this land, but they won't have their caribou, right? Because the herd will be so disrupted by oil and gas drilling where it's carving

that it will then disrupt that whole landscape, right? Without Caribou, that landscape would be fundamentally different. So right now, the way we talk about public lands, I think we talk about them like in terms of leisure, right? Like, often they're seen as having a value. Like, I guess the classic example would be, maybe you don't remember this gig. Patagonia ran an advertising campaign called The Places We Play

in the last Trump administration, that's not it, right? That is not cool. I think if we only see wilderness as a place where, like, folks go outside to do, send the gnar on climbing routes and fucking shreds some mountain bike trails, bro,

then we fundamentally, like, miss the value of it, right? Yeah. This goes back a long, long time. For instance, if we look in, like, back in 20229, specifically with the protection of the Arctic Refuge, we can see this piece that Bob Marshall wrote Bob Marshall was a forester at the time, but he's kind of important in creating this idea

of wilderness or wilderness protections. He talked about the quote-unquote emotional values of the frontier being preserved in the wilderness, which again, I think, kind of tells us a lot of what's going on here. It's a very, very Theodore Roosevelt's brained approach to conservation. Yeah, right. We can go out there and we can all pretend to be like the guys who participated in a genocide of indigenous peoples of North America. I guess, like he also, he considered using the definition attractive solitude and savageness, which again, like it says a lot about like, it is removing the people from the land, right? Like both literally and in our conception of it.

And I don't think we should do that, right? When we talk about wilderness, we need to talk about it hand in hand with the indigenous people of this country and their traditional management practices, which allowed this place to be unspoiled until folks started to exploit it in the last couple of hundred years. To take an ad break, hopefully we get something for like fracking or some other petrochemical industry

and we'll be right back. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming and performance that won't quit. Push your game.

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I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people.

Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats

and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We'd have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what?

They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All I know is what I've been told. And that's a half-truth is a whole lot.

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.

They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus

on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atone for an armed, robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.

Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Listen to Heavyweight on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back and we are talking about Senator Mike Lee again. Garrison, would you like to guess which industries have emerged on the top of Senator Mike Lee's donor list when I cruise on to Open Secrets. Is it fracking and drilling?

It's actually real estate. He's got a ton of money from real estate, about $665,000. $665,000 is not that much money when you consider the millions of acres of public lands, which would be completely and permanently altered by this, right? Yeah, he really should be asking for a lot more money to sell off the public land. Secure the bag if you're going to do this. It's grossly undervalue. Yeah, I always look at campaign donations and I kind of expect them to be in like the billions or trillions when like you're looking at just this massive and permanent change in government policy.

It's that easy, folks. Yeah, which is why we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to buy back or the public lands we're not. No one should own them. We should not be buying them back. that they should be protected. It's kind of remarkable how many of our public lands this would impact, right? Within 100 miles at a border, that gives us two-thirds of the United States population. The general definition that DHS has operated with also includes all of the Great Lakes

as quote-unquote international waterways. So that takes in, look at a good chunk of the Midwest, right? it would then go 100 miles from the shore of any of the Great Lakes. I've seen this reported on very poorly or not at all. A lot of the people who are better at talking about public lands are like the hunting, fishing, like hook and bullet media, they will talk about it more in my experience and like the straight up outdoor media, right, which is where I've made my career at least somewhat for the last 15 years,

they will also go harder for it. Like, it's generally a more conservative world, but, like, they will, they will go after politicians who sell public lands. But I think if you're incapable of understanding that, like, the border as a zone of exception, the border as a zone without constitutional rights, is a problem.

And this selling of the public lands is part of that problem, then, like, it's very hard to have a complete analysis of this. So, like, I've seen a lot of analysis without any seemingly where the writers don't understand that United States operates this 100 mile border enforcement zone, right? And that you as a U.S. citizen or as a non-s citizen have fewer rights within that enforcement zone, I have seen a lot of analysis which doesn't take into account this weird assessing of migrant damage to public land.

Like, in what world is that a useful allocation of government reserves? Like, there are places, right, where, like, if I think about the places where the Biden administration did outdoor detention, that landscape was damaged because people had fires to stay warm. And that fire, of course, is scarring, right, in our desert landscapes. Yeah, that landscape is damaged. Like, how are you going to, what are you going to do? There were like a thousand people a day coming through at one point. Are you going to find them all and charge them all for, like, misdemeanor, California fire? But also, there's a tiny provision of this bill that I found that suggests that migrants cannot be housed on federal public land unless they are housed in a detention center. Yeah. Yeah, great, thanks. That was kind of the case before. Like, you couldn't really just be like, well, I mean, the Biden administration did just say, right, you all camp here and we'll come get you in a week. There wasn't really a legal precedent for that.

They just went ahead and did it. I guess what I want to end up with is like I'm obviously very passionate about this. I guess I'm kind of a public land super user. You do be camping. Yeah, I do. I am a camping guy. If there's one thing that defines me, it's going camping. I try and sleep outside at least once a month.

But yeah, most of my happiest memories in life are like moving under my own power through the mountains. That is when I'm happiest. That is how I deal with my shit. That is what I do with myself after every. every single one of the traumatic work trips that you seem to love listening to you, that is how I cope with the fact that my job is to turn trauma into stuff to go in between Chumba Casino ads. So yeah, I love public lands, but you should too. Even if you

don't recreate on public lands, right? Sometimes the public lands are called America's best idea. I don't like that because inherent in having public lands is a removal of them from indigenous people right and indigenous people losing their sovereignty over those lands but as things that the state has done with land goes protecting it for future generations is is one of the good ones right like there are some truly special places the vastness of the western united states is why i live here uh i cycled across the united states in 2010 and uh i was just blown away by like the scale of the landscapes without significant human damage. There's still something I'm blown away by, you know, 15 years later. I spent as much time as I can. Not just like

national parks. I think a lot of people, if they've visited public land, will associate it with national parks. I'd really encourage you to like hit up national forests, wilderness lands, like places where there is not a line or a ticket kiosk. Like you can have a really special wilderness experience there. But even if you don't want to, if there doesn't appeal to you, if it's not something that you feel, like, physically or otherwise comfortable doing, the fact that it will be there for future generations, the fact that, like, there is potential to return this land to the indigenous people of North America without giant fucking mind scars and roads cut through it right now

is something that we should fight for. And, like, public lands is one of those things where, like, I have conversations with dudes who do not agree with me politically at all. like people who definitely voted for Donald Trump who are also furious about this shit and if you can help people see that this is part of a bigger problem like if this can be a place where we can build a coalition

that is a good thing and it's one of those things that like to take action you can just lib out and go on the internet and write to your senator call your representative like you can do these things which are so easy low risk and like it's a sort of engagement

that like neoliberal bipartisan and politics wants you to have, right? It's not hard. But in this instance, you can do something really good by doing that. So I would encourage you to do that. Mike Lee's bill is currently in committee, I believe, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. TBD, whether it gets out of there,

but he has tried twice since the summer to significantly destroy this incredible thing that we all have access to in the United States. He will continue to try. This is clearly something that he has an agenda for. So, like, I would really encourage people to keep an eye out. We will keep reporting on it. Anything else do you want to talk about public landscare?

Yeah, I mean, it's a different approach to dealing with, like, protected wilderness land. Prop 1 to amend the state constitution just passed in New York. Yeah. But basically what happened, like 100 years ago, they were building. this Olympic sports complex in violation of the wilderness, like protection, like state, like act or part of the Constitution. Yeah. And to deal with that, I'm not sure why it's taken this long, but to deal with this, they

have just days ago voted to amend the Constitution to set aside 2,500 acres of mountain land nearby, but not on this complex. and to turn that into protected land to then continue the operation and maintenance of the sports complex. The proposition was worded a bit weird, but I think in effect, this just results in there being in the end

of more public land, or more protected land specifically. Yeah. And the complex that already exists can then continue to function because the land's already, it was already used. Yeah, right.

Like, they sort of built it and then asked permission, like, I guess, a hundred years later off. Almost a hundred years later. Like, land swaps happen. They, like, and like, like, sometimes you'll see people being like, oh, this is public land being sold off. Like, sometimes land swaps are very menial, right? Like, if there's a little parcel of national forest land or, like, it could be, it's a piece

that, like, it's next to a school and the school needs a playing field. And those things like that, land swaps do happen. And as long as we're not, like, losing acreage to oil and gas or to like McMansion building, you know, I think we can be flexible. No, I mean, if anything, this will set aside thousands of acres of land to

not have that happen to it in the mountains of like... Van Rondacks, right? Yes. And then this complex can now continue to get maintained. I think if this didn't pass, they would, like, restrictions would fall upon the capacity of this complex

to continue operating. That's dumb, because you have place which is like it's not going back right like once you've built stuff uh you should use it the damage has been done and you should use it here and then protect more land exactly yeah and luckily this this thing barely passed um it was it was pretty closing around 52% yes most of the votes for no did come from people i think living in new york city i think mostly because of the way the proposition was worded it was worded in a in an odd way because it made it sound like you're like sacrificing currently protected land at this complex is on. So I think people who are approaching this from like kind of an ecological standpoint, a conservation standpoint, like

misunderstood or had or had some like differing view on like the value of protecting the current land of the complex is on versus establishing thousands of acres of more land to be protected nearby. Right. Yeah. I mean, initiatives and propositions are often written in a particularly bizarre way. And it's a, it's not like the California prop 50 was like two lines. This is several paragraphs of, so I can see how it would have been confusing to people. But yeah, like this also happens at a state level all the time, right? Like states have public lands too. You'll see like a patchwork of state and federal and private land, especially like in some national forests in the west, right? But that's something that especially in Republican-run states now, people should be very

aware of in their own states is like the GOP didn't use to be massively anti-public lands this is a new thing for them right they always felt like they needed their like I guess maybe that they needed their like hunting fishing shooting crowd no but environmentalism is now wokeify right exactly this is like a post-al-gore thing of now the conservatives associate a lot of this language with climate change algorisms and it has this woke element. Yeah, it's very strange. Like, it's funny.

Often when I'm out about, you know, like exploring in the back country, I run into guys who are out there, like, they're either hunting or like looking for places to hunt, I think. We'll be like, oh, yeah, well, there aren't as many of the turkeys or the deer or the whatever as they used to be.

But then it's very hard for people who now can't say climate change, is real, to find a way of having permission to say what they want to say because they've seen it with their own eyes. Yeah. But also, yeah, they don't want to say it. No, I mean, I did an episode about this after the RNC because I talked with this, like, Republican conservation group about how they're trying to bring back, like, put the conservative

back in conservation or whatever. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, I think generally the idea of them conserving anything is pretty much. much off the table at this point. But yeah, people getting out in public land will, you will understand climate change. You spend long enough going to the same spot and you're going to see what that means. So it has a lot of benefits.

Go outside this weekend. Go camping. It's great desert season right now. If you're within range of a desert, go camping in the desert, look at the stars. To find a dark sky area, if that's your thing. Was it REI who had the like, don't go shopping on Black Friday, go outside? I don't know. You don't remember this? It's okay. This is just shit. I, you know, I am, I am pro gazing at the flickering lights of civilization. Garrison. No one wants to see the fucking flickering lights of civilization. I do. I do. I don't. I want to see the stars. I camped in Chaco Canyon earlier this year. Bangor for a national park. That's my final tip for you. The great house at Chaco Canyon was the largest building constructed in the United States until 1880.

Really? Yeah, yeah, it is vast. It is one of the least of incident parks in a system because you have to go like 17 miles down a dirt road. Sure, sure. But incredible.

These are the ancestral Pueblo and it's right, like the people who are the ancestors of the Pueblo tribes today. But it's an amazing place to go check out. You should all go, not at once. There's not enough space for all of you. I mean, I'm just rolling

through Mike Lee's Twitter account now. Oh, yeah. got any bangers? Not really. Not really. I mean, he's whining about Zoron and posting a lot about Charlie Kirk, and that's mostly it. He doesn't even talk about this stuff, because no one likes it. He got hammered by a bunch of very right-wing rancher types on Twitter last time he tried

to do this. Yeah, that makes sense. I think he knows better. Because a lot of people, you can also graze cattle on public land, right? There's been a whole standoff about this long time. Listeners will remember the Bundy situation. But, yeah, I guess he's also pissed those people off now. I just went to search for the news coverage of this.

The only thing we can find is a Washington Examiner. So it's just us and them. God, the video, the auto players on the Washington Examiner page is petrifying. The true bastions of journalists are us and the Washington Examiner. Horse shoes theory come to life. Oh, God. All right. Go outside this week slash weekend.

Fuck it, don't go to work. Go outside. Go outside tomorrow. Bye. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app,

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