Professor Char Miller joined me to talk about why public lands matter, why Utah is no accident, and why “efficiency” so often turns out to mean sabotage.
The Trump White House says it is “restructuring” the U.S. Forest Service. Char Miller is not buying the euphemism. Neither am I.
When Miller joined me on WWL, the environmental historian and Pomona College professor said the administration’s move to shove the Forest Service out of Washington and into Salt Lake City is not some innocent bureaucratic reshuffle. In his words, “It’s not reorganizing, it’s dismantling.”
That is the right word for it.
When this administration talks about “efficiency,” what it means is breaking institutions, driving out experienced people, and then pointing at the wreckage as proof that the government never worked in the first place. We have seen the play before. Miller pointed to what happened when Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management out of Washington in his first term. “Ninety percent of the people who worked for the agency in Washington DC did not move,” he said. “The goal was clear - let’s just get rid of people.”
This is the DOGE philosophy applied to public lands: slash first, think later, call the damage progress. Dress sabotage up in management jargon and hope the public is too exhausted or too distracted to notice.
Miller made the stakes plain. Public lands are not some abstract Western hobby for hikers with expensive boots. They are places where people hunt, fish, boat, camp, picnic, work, and build local economies. In the South, he noted, many of these lands like the Kisatchie National Forest were painstakingly restored after private industry tore through them. “The very nature that they’re public means that we collectively own them,” he said. And what this administration is trying to do, he argued, is “trying to privatize what has been and should remain public lands, publicly owned and publicly managed.”
That is the fight.
And Utah is not random. Miller said the political class there has “absolutely no interest” in federal forest management and has long used hostility to federal land stewardship as a way to fire up rural voters. In other words, this move is not about putting the agency “closer to the land.” It is about placing it inside a political ecosystem that is friendlier to the anti-public-lands project.
The consequences are not theoretical. If federal stewardship gets weaker, Miller warned, what gets easier is not just more cutting, mining, grazing, and extraction. What gets worse is the health of the land and the health of the public. “The cleanliness of our air, the things we breathe and the water that we drink gets worse,” he said. “That means our health declines.”
And when I asked him what is deepest at stake here, he gave the answer that should haunt anybody pretending this is just an argument over office locations and org charts. If we fail to protect public lands now, he said, the burden falls on the next generations. “We have just created a much worse world for our children and their children.”
That is what this is about.
Not a management tweak. Not “common sense.” It is about whether anything in this country still belongs to all of us together, or whether every public good eventually gets fed into the same wood chipper of greed, donor pressure, and privatization.
Miller was terrific, and I suspect we’ll be talking again soon because this fight is not going away. And neither, apparently, is the American appetite for taking what belongs to everyone and handing it to the people who already have plenty.
Professor Char Miller joined me to talk about why public lands matter, and why Trump's moves to restructure the USFS look more like an attempt to destroy it
Professor Char Miller joined me to talk about why public lands matter, and why Trump's moves to restructure the USFS look more like an attempt to destroy it
