The Trump administration is moving to end America's wilderness program as we know it. The Wilderness we have today would be all we ever get.

Every Wilderness area since 1964 came through the same pipeline. Wild country gets inventoried, held intact, and managed as wilderness while it waits decades for Congress to act. That waiting room is protected by agency policy manuals rather than by statute, and Interior just opened every one of those manuals for "review" across BLM, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Park Service at once. Rewrite the manual and the protection evaporates without a single member of Congress casting a vote. They buried the whole thing inside a press release about rock climbing.

A draft memo for Brooke Rollins finishes the job at the Forest Service, opening all 5.18 million acres of recommended wilderness to motor vehicles and timber harvest. That's 3,325 miles of trails, habitat for thirty threatened or endangered species, and 1.5 million acres of source water for Western communities.

It takes generations to establish a wilderness and an afternoon with a bulldozer to take one off the table. Spoil the land that qualifies and it stops qualifying, forever. A future Congress can't designate what no longer exists.

The 60-day public comment period opens Monday, June 15.

Read it. Share it with someone who thinks the Wilderness Act settled this. Get ready to comment Monday. Then look up where your reps stand on the Public Lands Scorecard.