Despair has a budget. The people dismantling America’s public lands have spent a fortune teaching you that your voice is too small to matter.

It’s a lie. Every public comment. Every call to an office where a staffer marks a tally you’ll never see. Every dinner where the subject doesn’t get changed. Every time you take what you were only feeling and turn it into a thing you actually did. It compounds. The slope keeps gathering weight until one afternoon it lets go.

The elk hunter and the backpacker. The rancher and the rock climber. The angler, the birder, the photographer, the family that buys the annual pass, the kid who’s never been but will. We agree on almost nothing else in this loud, divided country. We agree on this.

Ankle-deep water carved Zion. A single ripple is nothing. Ten thousand braid into a current that brings down walls. We are the overwhelming majority. They have money. We have the river.

Read it. Share it with someone wondering if their voice still matters.