The New Political Landscape
By Jenn Fields
Just after Thanksgiving, The Conservation Alliance quietly made an announcement on its website, but not on its social channels: The board had decided to sunset the organization’s Public Lands Defense Fund, which it launched in 2017—the year President Donald Trump’s dismantling of Bears Ears National Monument made it a rallying cry for the outdoor industry to protect public lands and defend conservation laws.
“While threats to our public lands system will never disappear entirely, transitioning to a friendly administration greatly diminishes the need for a second grant fund,” the organization said in its statement.
“We’re certainly not trying to telegraph to the world that the battle is over,” says Brady Robinson, executive director of The Conservation Alliance. The board decided to put the organization’s energy into the overall grant fund instead, and, with the incoming administration, it was shifting to offense. “It’s built into the name—public land defense,” he says. “I think what we’re looking at is, what is a nondefensive structure?What’s the opportunity? What can we drive forward?”
“While defense is always going to be part of the equation, we think it’s time to think more broadly and more creatively,” he says. After four frenetic years of conservation battles and regulation reversals led by a climate-denying administration—suddenly punctuated with cause for celebration with the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA)—the U.S. elected Joe Biden, who, as a candidate, laid out an aggressive climate plan and pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement and reinstate national monuments, perhaps in his first days in office.
Outdoorists might be forgiven for feeling the need to rehab their political whiplash for a day or two, but even with Biden in office, there’s much work to be done. Greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere have committed us to at least a few more decades of warming, and areas of the American West—including outdoor recreation hot spots like Moab, Utah—have already seen 2 degrees Celsius of warming, beating the global average, not to mention the threshold set by the Paris Agreement. As Inauguration Day approaches, the outdoor industry’s policy wonks, access advocates, and climate champions are looking ahead to what they can accomplish in the coming years in a new administration—and with or without the Senate.
Some are looking well beyond Biden. The next four years will go by quickly, according to Mario Molina, executive director of Protect Our Winters (POW). “We’re talking about the full transition of the energy system by 2035,” he says. “That far outlives this and the next administration. So it needs to be a priority for the outdoor state regardless of what administration is in power.”
And there are still concerns with the outgoing administration; plenty of effects from Trump-era policies on public lands and conservation, climate, and international trade will linger into the new administration. “The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is really at the forefront of our minds,” Robinson says. “The potential oil-and-gas leasing sale could comedown to the final hours of the Trump administration, and they’d be tough to reverse.” And there’s the Tongass; in October, the Trump administration announced it was seeking to open more than half of Tongass National Forest to development, including logging. The Tongass is the largest national forest in the U.S., an old-growth carbon sink, and an important food source for native Alaskans who rely on the Tongass’ streams for salmon. The battle is not over.
CLIMATE POLICY WITHOUT CONGRESS
Without the Senate, some Democrats are mourning the loss of an opportunity to pass sweeping climate legislation. But, as we saw in the Trump years, there’s much an administration can do. The Biden administration is expected to move quickly on rescinding Trump-era energy rollbacks, such as tightening emissions standards and clean-air regulations, and axing an executive order from 2017 that lifted restrictions on offshore drilling and exploration.
“There’s a lot the Department of the Interior (DoI) can do,” Molina says. Wind turbine permits that were held up in the previous admin istration, unenforced emissions regulations on Bureau of Land Management land—a slew of things happening at DoI add up. “A lot of this stuff is not sexy,” Molina says. “For me, that’s a key takeaway. Seeing the cabinet appointments, this isn’t going to be big, splashy, Paris 2015 cap- and-trade work,” he says. “But it would be far more effective to do it right, and a lot of this will be agency-level work, and there’s a lot of it.”
Biden announced Rep. Deb Haaland as his groundbreaking pick to lead DoI, which manages about a fifth of the land in the U.S., in December. If confirmed, Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, will be the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary. Though she comes from an oil-producing state, the New Mexico congresswoman has protested the Dakota Access Pipeline and supports Biden’s climate plan (“That economy wasn’t working for a lot of people,” she told The Washington Post of the state’s ol and gas jobs). She’s also a marathon runner. The Department of Agriculture also has a role to play in the climate crisis. The Forest Service falls under the USDA, and agriculture plays a big role in emissions. EPA estimates put about a quarter of global GHG emissions under the category of agriculture, forestry, and land use. Biden’s pick for Ag, Tom Vilsack, held the role throughout the Obama presidency, and he’s a concerning choice for some climate activists, who see him as a business-as-usual leader entering a time of crisis.
In November, Biden announced he would name John Kerry as a special envoy on climate, a new cabinet-level position, and in December, he nominated former EPA chief and National Resources Defense Council President Gina McCarthy as Kerry’s domestic counterpart, the “climate czar.” But, in addition to giving climate a home in his cabinet, Biden’s transition website outlines an all-in approach to climate with a call for investment in infrastructure and efficient buildings, transportation, energy, agriculture, and environmental justice. Climate is one of four priorities listed on the transition site (the others are COVID-19, economic recovery, and racial equity). It’s not just a workaround or an administration dealing with a GOP led Senate; climate change is already affecting the economy (recovery from longer, wetter hurricane seasons and more intense wildfire seasons is expensive), as well as health and housing (extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and floodwaters are all deadly). The military has been transitioning to renewables; during the Trump administration, it declared that securing and processing rare earth minerals, which are used in solar voltaics and batteries, was a defense issue.
Molina has been following the Climate 21 Project, a set of memos from “150 experts with high-level government experience, includ-ing nine former cabinet appointees,” offering advice, but not a policy agenda, on a “whole-of-government climate response coordinated by the White House.” It’s a framework for how the Biden administration can be effective on climate without Congress. “I think what they realized—and we’ve learned from previous administrations—is that going for one big regulatory push is a risky proposition and can be turned back,” Molina says.
There’s bipartisan work to be done on cli-mate regardless, Molina says. “Without Trump in office and the threat of Trump going after senators who don’t stand by everything he wants, there are center-moderate Republicans who want to take action on climate, but it hasn’t been popular in the party,” he says. Like the Outdoor Industry Association, which is non-partisan, POW ambassadors lobby both sides of the aisle and have found friends of the industry in both parties. “My hope is that this is a time when we can do bipartisan work on climate,” says Molina.
Rich Harper, OIA’s director of government affairs, expressed a similar hope for the next few years. “It’s encouraging to think we’re go-ing to have the opportunity to make progress across our policy agenda and continue to work on a bipartisan basis—and that was the roof of the success in the GOA,” says Harper. “We spent 10 years working on that across the aisle, and it took two Republican senators to get that done. The outdoors is a bipartisan issue. Outdoor recreation is a bipartisan issue.”
BEARS EARS AND 30X30
During the campaign, Biden promised to “take immediate steps to reverse the Trump administration’s assaults on America’s natural treasures, including by reversing Trump’s at-tacks on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Bears Ears, and Grand Staircase-Escalante.” Since the election was called in November, ad-vocates have been wondering whether Biden will take action on public lands as early as his first week in the White House.
“Public lands in general, but Bears Ears spe-cifically, is one of the reasons the trade show moved from Salt Lake to Denver,” Robinson says. “I think for the industry, it’s a good time to remind ourselves—hey this is why we made this big move.”
Robinson has been following the conversa-tion around the 30×30 initiative, which calls for protecting 30% of public lands and waterways by 2030 in order to protect spaces that offset our carbon expenditures and combat biodi-versity loss. Some NGOs are using it as a long-term motivator, Robinson says. “Others are thinking about doing GIS surveys to figure out how we do that 30% in the United States now.” Regardless of how you frame it, “30×30 should be an impetus for us to do more, to strive to do more as quickly as possible,” he says.
But that action should still be thoughtful. The summer’s anti-racism protests against police brutality brought a floodlight to a move-ment in the outdoor industry to examine just how non-inclusive it has been. “We’ve focused on the protection of big landscapes, so (now) we’re thinking about how green spaces that are closer to urban areas can be protected as well,” Robinson says.
“A lot of the voices that had been advocat-ing for LWCF [Land and Water Conservation Fund] are like, OK, let’s push for 30×30; let’s get beyond advocating for the single funding mechanism and create a broad framework of meaning that could compel people to do things at the national level. And state and municipal efforts count too; it’s not like the only game in town is big-W Wilderness,” Robinson says.
The surge in outdoor recreation during the pandemic has given the industry grounds to push harder for wilderness as well as urban parks and greenbelts, Harper says. “It’s in those areas of green infrastructure and close-to-home recreation, as well as regulations on pub-lic lands and waters, where we can make a dif-ference,” he says. “I think that’s a critical piece for OIA working with the new administration, ensuring that the outdoors are open to all.”
KEEPING THE STOKE IN 2021
To ensure that the outdoors really are open to all, the entire community will need to keep fighting for its values in 2021 and beyond.
Pro skier and POW athlete Amie Engerbretson spent the 2020 election season using her platform to encourage followers to vote for the outdoors. It wasn’t easy.
“A lot of what I do as a skier is, I do things I’m intimidated by or scared of, and I do it any-way—and that’s what this election felt like,” she says. “I got trolled, and I got beat up by both sides too. You can say they’re just trolls, but I’ve got one guy calling out my sponsors asking them to drop me. That’s hard.”
A resident of Truckee, California, Engerbretson also volunteered for two local candidates’ campaigns. “I learned some funny lessons on Brynne Kennedy’s campaign,” she says. (Kennedy, a Democrat, lost her race against incumbent Rep. Tom McClintock—who called climate science “suspect” amid the West Coast’s 2020 wildfire season—in California’s 4th Congressional District.) “Phone banking, you learn a lot about persuasion.”
Listening and learning what was important to the people she called across the district was eye-opening. She wondered about climate de-nialism’s connection with people’s fear of losing their livelihoods. “This is about humanity’s well-being,” she says. “But it’s about so many things. This is about our economy. This is about jobs.”
“In my opinion, we need to turn to persua-sion,” Engerbretson says. “So we don’t have any climate deniers in our system—period. Both of the local candidates for which Engerbretson volunteered lost, but that hardly dampened her spirits for the pro-cess. “I have this attitude of, well, we lost, so it’s time to do more,” she says. “Tom McClintock, two more years and it’s over for you, buddy.”
