The Fight for Wild Lands: Part 1

In the annals of wildlife migration, the biannual human trek to the Montana Rally for Public Lands is gaining stature. 

On February 19, herds of hikers, hunters, anglers, bikers, poets and activists from across the state will head to the Capitol rotunda in Helena. They follow the Path of the Legislators, bringing concerns about endangered species and hunting quotas, roadless lands and trail maintenance, the health of fish and the health of rivers. 

They’ll come by the busload to the call of a flock of environmental and conservation organizations. They’ll listen to provocative speakers and then fan out through the state government neighborhood, stalking legislators and agency officials and anyone else slow-moving enough to have their ears bent around a public lands priority issue. They’ve come like this every biennium since 2015.

But this time is different. 

In 2025, the future of public lands has become the focus of a national energy emergency, according to President Donald Trump. Interior Secretary Doug Bergum used his first day in office on February 3 issuing orders to “encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters” and immediately terminate “all actions … that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources.”

In a bewildering coincidence, the 2025 Rally for Public Lands is taking place just after global climate researchers declared this January the hottest on record. That almost comes as a bad joke to the organizers arranging trans-Montana travel during an arctic outbreak where temperatures at the rally site might not exceed zero. But that cognitive dissonance also illuminates another factor propelling activists to Helena: the potential for climate change to erase the things they love even as they struggle against political winds blowing from Washington, D.C.

Strategies and tactics. Battles and wars. The Rally for Public Lands has routinely been the largest single gathering at the Legislature for the past decade. It emulsifies many interest groups that otherwise separate like oil and vinegar, bonded here by their passion for wild country. But facing a blizzard of White House executive orders, agency directives and federal funding freezes, the point of the 2025 rendezvous feels like grabbing at snowflakes. How to prioritize the needs of a landscape that predates human existence against the news that 3,400 Forest Service workers got laid off overnight? What does one do next? What’s worth the effort?

“The reality is we’re all human, and it’s really hard to continue running through a gauntlet with spears thrown at you every single day in the news,” said Whitney Tawney, executive director of Montana Conservation Voters and one of the organizers of the Rally for Public Lands. “People feel apathetic and tired, like their voices don’t matter. The reality is we have made a difference before and we can make a difference again.”

Six days before the rally, Tawney already had every seat on the Missoula charter bus booked, and was close to hitting her hometown Bozeman bus capacity. A Sanders County contingent was organized and bringing banners. The Montana chapter of the Audubon Society, the Mountain Mamas, Wild Montana, Montana Sportsmen Alliance, Winter Wildlands, Montana Trails Coalition, and The Wilderness Society were either helping organize or sending members. 

“We’re a big tent as far as it goes for Montana,” Tawney said. “The whole group is pretty diverse.”

And not exactly singing from the same songbook. Advocates and opponents of mechanized access to wild lands will be sharing space. Proponents of differing visions for Wilderness in the Gallatin-Madison ranges, which has fractured several old alliances, will try to temper their differences for the day.

“Some of these [feuds] have gone on a long time,” said long-time wilderness activist George Wuerthner, who plans to be at the rally. “The goal is the same but the question is how to achieve it. I’m an idealistic person, so I always ask for the best thing that’s necessary. But I’m a pragmatist. I won’t get 100 percent, but if someone has offered 80 or 90 percent, do I accept it? I want to be the one who’s left standing, but I don’t want to make the compromise right up front.”

That crack in strategy has riven the conservation/environmentalist community. Some hold hard lines and principles they will not surrender, such as the potential for full federal Wilderness status on the remaining undesignated federal roadless land. Others negotiate as if everything has a tradable value, where carving out mountain bike access to one place builds a bigger coalition for keeping another non-mechanized. 

Phil Knight has been guiding visitors into the Yellowstone National Park interior for the past 25 years. Before that, he was a member of Earth First! during some of its most confrontational campaigns to save old-growth forest, when members made human walls to block bulldozers during the Reagan-Bush years. 

“We realize we’re not going to get anything out of this administration either,” Knight said. “We’re stuck with four years of defensive actions. So I want to continue to work with the coalitions I’ve got. We’ve got to get past some of the infighting that’s occurred with the conservation groups.”

The unifying issue of this year’s Rally for Public Lands is the potential elimination of many kinds of public lands: “Everything seems under assault,” as Knight put it. A movement in Utah pushed a plan to transfer all “unappropriated” federal land to state ownership all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear its case on Jan. 13. Nevertheless, the topic remains widely popular, with a state Republican legislator preparing a bill for the Montana Legislature to revive the Utah campaign. 

Federal agencies have other plans. Interior Secretary Burgum’s initial orders include an opaque sentence calling for the review of 54 U.S. Code 32-0301 and 43 U.S. Code section 1714.

“It’s hard to imagine the secretary wasn’t trying to do anything but pull a fast one on the American public,” said Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney for Wild Montana. “Those are the laws covering the Antiquities Act. This one little line is calling for a review of national monuments.”

Burgum’s national monuments review is scheduled to start February 18, the day before the Helena rally. In an interesting bit of historical repetition, it mimics a move made by Ryan Zinke in his first days as Interior secretary during Trump’s first term. Zinke’s national monument review resulted in the reduction of Bear’s Ears National Monument in Utah by 85 percent. President Joe Biden restored that acreage after he defeated Trump in 2020. 

But this time, now-Montana Republican Rep. Zinke is getting accolades from many heading to the rally for his bill intended to keep public land in the federal estate. 

“The Public Lands in Public Hands Act [would ban] the sale or transfer of most public lands managed by the Department of the Interior and U.S. Forest Service except under specific conditions and where required under previous laws,” a notice on Zinke’s congressional website states. “The bill also requires congressional approval for disposals of publicly accessible federal land tracts over 300 acres and for public land tracts over 5 acres if accessible via a public waterway. This provision alone would protect public access to nearly 30 million acres of public lands depended upon by outdoorsmen of all types across Montana.”

Zinke did not return requests for comment on the bill. But his willingness to move contrary to Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who is pushing for more federal land transfers, earned lots of praise.

“We should be buoyed by the stance Rep. Zinke took right away,” said Michael Carroll of The Wilderness Society. “Zinke shows an appetite that’s bipartisan and West-wide for people rallying against the sell-off of public lands.”

Joel Webster at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership said his organization hoped to convince the Trump administration about the value of fish and wildlife habitat.  

“The thought [that] these lands will be sold or transferred, results in a bunch of conflict when what we should be doing is rolling up sleeves and solving real challenges — things like invasive species, drought, conifer encroachment, restoration work,” Webster said. “It would be really good to move past this issue and work on solving problems, versus being caught up in this perpetual conflict.”