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Comment by hellogoodbyeeee | Hacker News Reader

I feel pretty passionately about protecting national land. Are there any recommendations on how to best support it? I don't live near any federal lands and I'm generally don't trust lobbyist groups. Should I be donating to the Sierra Club? Or are there other alternatives?

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Other than using the federal lands more _and_ contacting your representatives (via phone!!) to express your support for keeping public federal lands, yes, donate.

While your money probably won't be ill-spent with your run-of-the-mill environmental groups, I'd really recommend searching out right-leaning groups that support public federal lands, like the American Conservation Coalition (https://acc.eco).

Sadly, the right has—for a variety of reasons—all but abandoned environmentalism and that's been a major hurdle for those of us who want to protect the environment. Eco-right groups have a _much_ better shot at changing the opinions of right-leaning folk than progressive groups like the Sierra Club do.

Full disclosure: I'm one of ACC's 42 unpaid volunteers.

Why do you recommend seeking out right-leaning groups?

Lots of environmental issues get tied up in a debate that usually goes like:

    Left: "Issue X is a problem"
    Right: "No it's not"
    Left: " ... "

...and repeats ad nauseam. If the right was more open to solving environmental issues, we wouldn't have these issues and the debate could be about policy, not the existence of the issue itself.

Right-leaning groups already have an "in" with the right and will naturally be better at educating and convincing the right than left-leaning groups.

I would recommend right-leaning groups as well, but that's mostly because of the hunting communities are usually associated with the actual 'use' of public lands, and have been supporting most of the ecological/wildlife research. There's recently been a big push towards historically sustainable wildlife systems, and that's a topic that resonates with most of the more conservative hunting communities.

Yup. A lot of people don't want to admit that hunters were the original conservationists. And also, a lot of non-hunters don't support hunting-oriented conservation methods. For instance, just because you buy a duck stamp it doesn't mean you have to go duck hunting. Duck stamps support the preservation of duck habitat and other wetlands. Buying a duck stamp is an easy way to directly contribute targetted money to wetlands preservation. Just for an example.

Yea this is exactly what I was talking about. Buying a fishing tag or a hunting tag is also an excellent way to get money directly into the hands of those who work in environmental conservation

hunters originally only wanted to 'preserve' what they wanted to kill... otherwise we'd still have wolves, grizzlies, and other predators of all sizes, at their historic populations. likewise, certain hunters favorites wouldn't be dealing with population issues now. the ranchers have done the most harm though, they seem to want to kill everything, imo.

Ironically one of the consequences of strict laws protecting endangered species is it actually leads to more destruction not less. A rancher notices a protected animal on his land and gets rid of it to avoid getting harangued by the government. "Shoot, Shovel and Shutup"

Not entirely. In practice, the net result is that hunters want to preserve habitat. The large predator species that you mention require a huge range. It is the fragmentation of habitat that has done them in as much as anything else.

Because they are a bit of an untapped resource. The right are more likely to be open to conservation efforts rather than traditional crunchy environmental efforts, but they too often feel driven out.

The right controls the government today. The right listens to right-leaning hunting groups a lot more than left-leaning conservation groups. See Chaffetz's rescinded bill from earlier this year.

warning - generalizations ahead

Progressives tend to already support/buy in to conservation issues, so reaching and tapping In to the political right is where you can get the most bang for your buck.

The obvious question is why can’t other groups reach the conservative environmentalists? Some progressive leaning environmentalist groups embrace ideals which can be at odds with conservative views, while only being tangential to important things like wilderness conservation. Some progressive leaning environmental groups use ‘evil conservatives’ as a fund raising meme. Some simply identify as progressive and don’t leave any room for conservatives.

Truth is, in a huge chunk of this great nation, the people that enjoy, visit, and use national wilderness the most are conservative. They’re hunters and multi-generation farmers and ranchers. Sure, one of them might leave a beer bottle on the ground behind their skyjacked F250, but if they caught you poaching a doe out of season there’d be hell to pay.

Interesting. What kinds of things has your group accomplished?

I'm not a conservative, but the Sierra Club will never see a dime from me until they lay off mountain bikers. It seems so stupid to antagonize a group that could share about 99% of what they want to accomplish.

We have a few different ways we're approaching this. In no particular order we:

1) Work with college republicans to introduce them to environmentalism. We saw lots of success here during National Clean Energy Week where we held events and had 20 CR chairs sign on to our clean energy pledge (https://www.acc.eco/cr-clean-energy-coalition) and we have 25 pilot campuses we're partnering with. We hope to more than double that number next year.

2) Are growing the climate solutions caucus. We've met with members of congress and support those who are pro-environment.

3) Have a policy newsletter with policy research

4) Work with city and county county officials to assist with their environmental policy. (This one has been my favorite to watch take off.)

and plenty more.

> 4) Work with city and county county officials to assist with their environmental policy. (This one has been my favorite to watch take off.)

This one is so ripe for bipartisanship:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula...

It's been so awesome to local politicians from across the political spectrum message us and say, "Hey, what we're doing isn't working, do you have advice?"

People are so much more invested in their own community and open to tangible solutions.

Are you familiar with Strong Towns?

https://www.strongtowns.org/

They're good people, non-partisan, and also very much in line with "something isn't working":

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...

I personally am not, but will definitely run it by some people. At first blush this looks really neat. Thanks for sharing!

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the Sierra Club only opposed mtn biking in designated Wilderness Areas, which only make up 36M out of 192M NFS acerage.[0] (That's 145,000 km^2 out of 780,000 km^2)

Those areas really should just be left alone as much as possible. The White Mountain National Forest doesn't even like expanding or maintaining the leantos in much of their Wilderness Areas, so it's not like Mtn biking is singled out in my area. FWIW I love mountain biking and helping to build singletrack as much as possible, but I also like visiting the sublimely quiet wilderness areas with only my own two feet as my way into those natural cathedrals.

[0]https://www.fs.fed.us/land/staff/lar/LAR2011/LAR2011_Book_A5...

They've been pretty consistently anti MTB over the years.

There are absolutely wilderness areas where there should not be bikes, but it should be decided locally, just as certain trails outside of wilderness areas are, justly, hiker only.

For instance, this is a Wilderness area east of Bend, Oregon. It is not, however a "wilderness" - indeed many of the trails are former jeep roads:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0008533,-121.0058259,13154m/...

And don't forget: you can legally ride a string of horses into a Wilderness area, shoot an elk with a rifle and pack it out. To my way of thinking, riding a bike around is not nearly so impactful.

Give me bikes over horses every day. Not sure exactly why hiking in a bit of horseshit, here and there, bothers me so much. I think it mostly is that I imagine that when you are on a horse you are much higher off the trail and don't have to deal with the stink your horse created.

I'm happy to share, and happy for local decision makers to decide which users should get access to which trails. There are some that even hikers damage, let alone adding bikes and horses. Others are fine for everyone. Some places (not in Wilderness areas) should have some room for ATV people and so on.

I guess besides being a housing YIMBY, I'm a trail YIMBY too.

The shit is the least of it, as horses will pound a trail to dust. How anyone argues with a straight face that MTBs are more impactful than horses is beyond my comprehension.

Yes. If you are hiking behind someone, lots of dust. Horse shit in the dust. Not very pleasant. In conditions like that I hope for a little rain.

The Oregon Badlands Wilderness you have pointed out seems very much wild to me. As a counterpoint, much of the WMNF in NH/ME was formerly logged, and there are remnant logging tracks (as opposed to jeep roads) scattered throughout, including in the wilderness areas. Eventually those jeep tracks will be just as unrecognizable as our logging tracks.

There are so many other places to ride and build trail, maybe we should just leave the wilderness areas alone.

The whole point of the wilderness areas is to halt further development in them. Those jeep roads were probably there before the area was "designated wilderness", as was the custom of horseback riding and hunting. Mountain biking wasn't a thing yet.

Oregon Badlands brochure for those interested:

https://www.blm.gov/or/districts/prineville/recreation/files...

Honestly most of that place seems really sandy, which isn't conducive to mountain biking in my mind.

One more thing. Many of these policies of no MTB were put in place before the advent of more sustainable trailbuilding practices were developed. Get out there and advocate for hardened, twisty, flowy, long-lasting singletrack!

That Badlands place would certainly not the best riding around (it'd maybe be good in the winter), but it's really not 'wild' feeling at all and is a good example of Wilderness != wilderness.

> maybe we should just leave the wilderness areas alone.

Except that brings into conflict mountain bikers with the idea of expanding wilderness areas. Wouldn't we rather have more areas protected like that? As it stands, mountain bikers who are environmentalists face an agonizing choice between protecting the land in that way, and their access to trails.

That's not hypothetical, either:

https://www.singletracks.com/blog/mtb-news/oregon-crater-lak...

See also the Boulder-White Clouds wilderness in Idaho that closed a bunch of trails that mountain bikers were already riding.

What doesn't feel wild about it? 29,000 acres seem like a big enough place to get lost in and feel wild. For example, I've camped in the Presidential-Dry River Wilderness (also 29,000 acres) in the WMNF, and I have to say, even camping a half mile inside the area I felt like I could have been hundreds of miles from the nearest person. Being up over 4000 feet probably helps too...

I've never considered that wilderness areas were even being expanded on such a scale, let alone that it would be an issue. I will have to think about it now...I feel like if I could triple the amount of area that would be let to go wild, but lose mountain biking access in the process, that I'd be willing to accept the gain in wilderness with a loss in biking. I've done very little biking on any federal land to begin with. Most has either been on private land or town-organized easements.

To be fair, anywhere I've mountain-biked is nowhere close to being as remote as places out West. Maybe there is enough wilderness area in the West, but not enough here in the Northeast. That may be my perspective.

Yeah, this is an actual wild Wilderness with lots of high, remote places, and 10X the area of the other one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_Wilderness

Plenty of trails are also not suitable, nor maybe even really feasible for bikes.

They have a different definition of environmentalism

“True environmentalism, from my perspective, is using natural resources that God has blessed us with,” Pruitt told the Heritage Foundation last week.

Thankfully Mr. Pruitt does not speak for the ACC. Our view on public lands:

    In order to protect America’s natural resources and wildlife, the federal
    government ought to retain ownership of the majority of its federal lands.
    Preventing the sale of federal lands to interests contrary to their
    preservation requires citizens to hold officials accountable at every level
    of government.

I don't think 'the right' (whatever that means) has abandoned the environment.

At least libertarians have not.

Check out www.perc.org, these are free market people who are extremely passionate about the environment and they are quite popular and have made great inroads to provide an alternative way of thinking about the environment compared to the leftist big government bureaucracy style of protecting it.

They support great projects like Oregon Water Trust, The Nature Conservancy and do research on how to think in an economically sensible way about these questions.

Here some cool videos, Terry Anderson about Wildlife in Yellow-Stone and about the history of property rights in Montana.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBcpal2le2Y

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPrzUwl0suM

We at ACC like PERC :-) And we do partner with other eco-right groups: https://www.acc.eco/founding-coalition/

Obviously I'm generalizing a bit, but I don't think it's unfair to say the right has lagged far behind on environmental issues since at least the '80s.

I'm kind of late to the game, but what do you think about RepublicEn[0]?

[0] www.republicen.org

They're great! And Bob was one of our first supporters.

[0] https://twitter.com/republicEn/status/918153164146266112

[1] https://www.acc.eco/endorsements/

PERC is partly the subject of the article:

PERC’s affiliation with politically connected outfitters that stand to profit if trails are closed bolsters the sense, to Wilson and others confronting locked gates, that a void in coherent policy about public land management is being filled by cronyism that rewards wealth and connections above all else. Another co-owner of the Wonder Ranch, Frank-Paul King, a friend and former student of Anderson’s, served on PERC’s board. Hudson, the man who got Representative Sessions involved, is King’s brother-in-law, and he’s also a board member and the former president of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that made national headlines in 2014 when it auctioned off a trip to Africa to hunt an endangered rhinoceros.

I read the article. I just wanted to show that they do more then just what is in the article, because the article points them in a pretty particular way, whatever your opinion of the article is.

There are lots of groups specific to regions and activities, so a bit of searching about specific activities/places you enjoy should yield some good organizations.

For example https://www.accessfund.org/ does a great job of representing rock climbers.

https://gorgefriends.org/ are a group representing the Columbia River Gorge along the Oregon/Washington border.

The "Friends of the Gorge" are no friend you'd want. Every interaction I had with them was NIMBY, how dare you not smother the small towns along the gorge to death BS. Most of 'em would see to it that the Gorge goes back to having no wind mills, roads or dams unless its directly used by them for wind surfing or skiing.

Bunch of rich, elitist assholes who've come in from Portland and Seattle to fuck up the Gorge IMO.

NIMBYism is a little different when your backyard is a protected National Scenic Area. Stopping development is pretty much the whole point.

Phoning your government officials works well.

This website takes an address, and returns names and phone numbers belonging to your government representatives. I don't use my home address. There's a grocery store a couple blocks away whose address I use:

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/take-action/contact-your-...

Tell them your name and what city you live in. This is so they can decide whether or not to write you off; if you're not a resident in the district which they were elected to represent, your opinion really doesn't matter.

Tell them specifically, in plain english what it is that you are FOR or AGAINST. All they want to know is "When I am asked to vote 'yes' or 'no' on this issue, which binary response will get me more approval from my constituents?" So all you have to say is:

  "My name is <NAME>. I live in <TOWN>. I am <FOR>|<AGAINST> <ISSUE>."

If you're unsure what language to use, or what legislation is related to your cause, try visiting university campuses, national parks, or local conservation groups. Attending meetings and talking to professionals in the field is a good way to get informed about what you care about.

I don't live in the USA, so I don't really have skin in the game on this issue. I did however want to point out that the Sierra Club has long held a strong anti-mountain biking advocacy position.

To each their own of course, but I'd rather support more inclusive groups.

https://www.nature.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_Conservancy

> Are there any recommendations on how to best support it?

If you want a fun project, you can grab a kayak and a GoPro in order to prove that a river is navigable, which enables legal access up to the ordinary high water mark.

You can support the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, both of which are heavily involved in issues of access for all types of backcountry users. RMEF especially specializes in purchasing land rights which unlock thousands and thousands of acres of public land that was previously inaccessible. I don't think any organizations are doing more to promote access on public lands. From their website: "Since 1984, RMEF has opened, secured or improved public access to more than 1.1 million acres of elk habitat across the country for hunters, hikers, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts to enjoy."

Check out backcountry Hunters & Anglers: https://www.backcountryhunters.org/

They fight to preserve and add to the existing lands.

Not Federal and I am going to just quietly link to an option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Trust_Alliance

Definitely. We have a lot of different alliances around Montana.

http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/memberdirectory/

One of the great benefits about living where I do (Maine) is that so much land is open for public use. I don't want to derail the thread so I will simply point out that it is really easy to cede your land to a trust, in many areas where that's actually beneficial. Some trusts are set up to accept donations in cash, as well. So, either way helps preserve land for public access in perpetuity.

Here is another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trust_for_Public_Land I am having a hard time determining the difference between these organizations. There seems to be plenty of advocacy. I am particularly interested in organizations that pool money from donations, buy land from these private ranchers, and then turn around and donate it back to the public.

I don't really know either.

For clothing you were going to buy anyway, you can spend money with Patagonia & company, who are wading into the fray.

You can try to connect with sportsmen's groups and donate or get involved; I'm not a sportsman, but they have been the most effective political force defending public land this year.

There is a great episode of How I Built This about the cofounder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, and his values. http://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=504852483:505017995

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