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The Wild Line: New Wilderness Directives, Congress Approves $2 Billion for Parks, Former Big Bend Supervisors Fight Border Wall · The Wild Idea

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Welcome to the Wildline, where land stories are the lead stories from New Orleans. This is our report for June 19th, 2026.
• 0:09
  Bill, let's start by welcoming our summer intern, Magnolia, who will be contributing a lot to the Wildline over the next few months. Any errors are entirely hers.
• 0:19
  This last week brought two big announcements by the administration that would shake up current wilderness management strategies. Leading the charge was the Department of Interior that issued a broad and somewhat unclear directive that highlights that the Explore Act, passed by the last Congress, views fixed anchors as appropriate in designated wilderness areas, but offers that decision makers in the BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service still adhere to the Wilderness Act when approving the installation of those anchors. So this is a hard to decipher document. Anchors are generally viewed as a installation and subject to a process called the Minimum Requirements Analysis Framework to determine if those installations would degrade wilderness character and if the trade-offs are worth it. It appears that the intent behind the new directive is to say that climbing anchors are not an installation and not subject to the Minimum Requirements Analysis. But I also think it's clear that the lawyers are going to have to sort this one out. Just two days ago, the Forest Service issued similarly broad statements about climbing being appropriate in wilderness that still leaves a lot to interpretation. Climbing has always been viewed as appropriate in designated wilderness, but the climbing anchors are an issue that still seem to be driving a wedge. It is also of note that the Department of Interior announcement has called for two additional steps that impact wilderness and lands with wilderness character. There is a call to revise key manuals within the DOI agencies that direct how to manage wilderness and wilderness study areas, which on the surface seems like some benign language. But the public should not be shy in commenting on these policy reviews as the intent could be to open wilderness study areas and actually designated wilderness to activities that would degrade the wilderness experience. The Forest Service climbing directive will have a 30-day comment window. We will put a link in our show notes.
• 2:09
  Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins also announced this week a comprehensive directive to all Forest Service employees aimed at expanding livestock grazing on national forest lands. The directive builds on a March 2026 MOU between USDA and the Interior Department and advances key elements of that memo that would expand permitting on vacant and closed allotments. The action is framed as protecting roughly 23,000 permittees who rely on public rangelands while delivering, quote, affordable American-raised protein to consumers, end quote. But critics say the announcement is just another step in a pattern by this administration to sidestep environmental review and subsidize private industry at the expense of public lands. They note that expanded grazing access threatens critical habitat for protected species and contributes to overgrazing, damages riparian zones and soil, and causes stream befoulment and sedimentation.
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  On Wednesday, the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee approved by voice vote the bipartisan America the Beautiful Act, which would reauthorize the Legacy Restoration Fund and provide nearly $2 million annually for deferred maintenance and repairs in national parks and on other federal public lands. The fund, originally created by the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, expired last year. The bill, which enjoys 64 co-sponsors, now heads to a full Senate vote. A companion House bill was introduced on June 10th by Arkansan Republican Bruce Westerman and California Democrat Jared Huffman. Experts note that the current backlog could cost $24 billion to repair in our national parks alone.
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  And last week, the Senate's inaction to take up S.J. Res. 109, a CRA resolution meant to overturn the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument before its June 11th deadline, means that any future attempt to do so would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster rather than a simple majority, making passage far less likely. The 2025 management plan, finalized after a two-year public process, established a tribal co-stewardship framework, formalized government-to-government consultation, and added protections for cultural sites, fossils, wildlife, and water resources. Tribal leaders celebrated this outcome as a victory for Indigenous sovereignty and ancestral stewardship.
• 4:27
  Speaking of Utah, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue the BLM over its quiet approval of a project to blast and pave a 5.3-mile road through Gate Canyon, a route that feeds into Nine Mile Canyon, often called the world's longest art gallery for its more than 10,000 archaeological and cultural sites. The project, approved in April 2026 without public notice or a comment period, would accommodate up to 1,000 oil tanker trucks per day moving petroleum out of the Uintah Basin. CBD and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance contend the BLM violated the Endangered Species Act by ignoring threats to Mexican spotted owls. This is the third attempt to push the project through. Previous versions were abandoned in 2015 and 2022 amid public opposition. And last Friday, the Bureau of Land Management released a decision authorizing private airplanes to take off and land in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness in southern Utah by designating a previously unauthorized Keg Knoll backcountry airstrip as open to aircraft use. The airstrip is located on the west side of Labyrinth Canyon and north of Canyonlands National Park. Neil Clark, Wildlands Director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, issued the following, quote, Wilderness is a finite resource and should be managed in a way that protects the reasons it's designated in the first place. The preservation of natural soundscapes, solitude, wildlife habitat, and non-motorized recreational opportunities. Continuing, unfortunately, the Trump administration and BLM seem unable to say no to activities that are fundamentally incompatible with wilderness, including motorized aircraft use.
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  Degrading Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness so a handful of private pilots can land their planes at one more backcountry airstrip is a disservice to the landscape and public lands users seeking a wilderness experience. We'll be exploring every possible way to right this decision and protect the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness from the impacts of private aircraft use," end quote. The Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness was designated in 2019. More of the week's headlines following this short break. Public land stories continue right now. In Texas, six former superintendents and a former deputy superintendent of Big Bend National Park, who together represent over 250 collective years of NPS experience, sent a second letter to Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen following DHS's June 9th waiver of all federal, state, and local environmental and cultural laws in order to enable border barrier construction inside Big Bend National Park. The letter flags stark contradictions between Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Rodney Scott's public statements pledging minimal technology-based security measures adapted to the terrain and a $1.7 billion construction contract for a border wall and plans involving 205 miles of new roads, new lighting, and new utility infrastructure. The former superintendents offer specific recommendations to reduce harm, including limiting vehicle barriers to locations outside the park, upgrading existing river road rather than blasting new parallel roads, using existing wireless sensor networks, trucking in water, and honoring Scott's promise of no lighting. They also call on DHS to institute a genuine public comment process and suspension of ground activity until the comments are analyzed. We spoke to one of these former superintendents, who's also a member of Keep Big Bend Wild, Bob Krumenacker, about how they are not the only ones opposed to this massive construction project in and around the park.
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  There's not a single publicly elected Republican that I know of in the state of Texas that has come out saying we need to build a border wall or other massive infrastructure. The county sheriffs of the five county regions, all of whom have incredible security credentials, several of whom worked for the Border Patrol in their careers before becoming county sheriffs, um, they were amongst the first to object to this, and they have the cred on security. Um, the 13 county executives in Texas, we call that judges, um, from El Paso all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, they have all written a letter again to Secretary Mullen saying one size does not fit all. And while they were not opposing border infrastructure everywhere, they highlighted the Big Bend area as, uh, a place in particular that does not need massive infrastructure. Just about everybody agrees that technology and boots on the ground is adequate for this area, which has by far the least amount of border crossings of any part of the United States-Mexico border. Uh, more recently, there have been a couple letters from congressmen led by, um, Representative Lloyd Doggett from the Austin area, signed by every Democratic congressperson in Texas, a few from other states, including, um, the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, Jared Huffman, all making variations of the same point, that you do not need to destroy this area, one of the nation's most iconic national parks, in order to achieve a one-size-fits-all border security strategy. So we do think there's a little bit of, uh, impact from that because they have apparently, notwithstanding what the contract says, backed off of a border wall, a 30-foot wall. Um, but still, there's a tremendous amount of harm that will come from new roads, vehicle barriers, buried cables, uh, power lines, um, sensors on poles, all sorts of things. Again, for no... There's no one publicly who's saying this is necessary. So, um, you know, it's our hope just that we can spread the word as wide as possible, and at some point, perhaps public opinion or maybe more likely some quiet conversations behind closed doors from, uh, hopefully senior Republicans that are saying, "Hey, you're gonna lose us the midterms in Texas if you do this." You know, it's, it's our hope to just shine as much light and make as much noise as we can in hopes that they will make some reasonable decisions going forward.
• 10:39
  And finally, a federal judge in Massachusetts has ordered the Trump administration to reinstall displays it earlier removed from national park sites as part of a crackdown on DEI content and climate change information. A group of park advocacy organizations sued the Interior Department in February over what they described as an effort to, quote, "erase history and undermine science," end quote. Judge Angel Kelly sided with the challengers, finding that the government's actions, quote, "set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization while undermining the integrity of the national park system and that stewardship of park sites carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments." That is our report for June 19th, 2026. We will be back next week with another edition of The Wild Line. And next week on the Wild Idea Podcast, we speak with author of Trail Work, Dylan Alslager, as a part of our month of stewardship. Until then, act up and run wild.
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  The Wild Line is a production of Wild Idea Media. Production and editing by Bryn Russell at Podlad. Digital support by Holly Wilcheszewski at Daypack Digital. Our theme music, Spring Hill Jack, is from Railroad Earth and was composed by John Skehan. The executive producer is Lara Hodge. Learn more about us at thewildidea.com.
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  [outro music]