Public lands at risk in budget amendment

A Senate amendment buried in the latest budget reconciliation bill threatens to sell off vast tracts of our public lands — including in Garfield County — under the banner of affordable housing and energy development. You can see what’s at risk on this map: https://wilderness.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=821970f0212d46d7aa854718aac42310

Let’s get real: This isn’t about helping working families or building energy infrastructure. These lands are some of the most remote, rugged and infrastructure-free terrain in the West. We know them. We camp, hunt, hike, and raise our kids in these wild spaces. They are our backyard.

Now they’re being eyed for private sale — with no real plan, no feasibility studies and no proof of actual energy potential. If there are serious intentions to develop energy on these parcels, where’s the data? Where’s the assessment?

Using history as our greatest guidance, we remember Exxon’s Black Sunday in 1982, when oil-shale dreams evaporated overnight, leaving our region in economic ruin. Companies come and go. The land, and the communities surrounding it, are left holding the bag.

Building anything on these remote parcels — homes or drill pads — means hauling in water, power, roads, cell towers and fire protection. Who’s paying for that? Because it sure won’t be the out-of-state investors who scoop up this land at auction.

This bill is dressed up as progress, but it walks and talks like a public land grab. Once they’re sold, they’re gone — no trespassing signs go up, and our shared landscape becomes private property. And the character of our region — what makes Garfield County what it is — changes forever.

I’m not against housing or energy independence. But this plan is reckless, rushed and wrong for our communities. We deserve better than short-sighted legislation that sells out our future.

Let’s make sure our elected officials hear that loud and clear.

Alicia Gresley, Rifle

America’s immune system is fighting back

America is like a human body. Complex, interconnected and astonishingly resilient — but not invincible.

With the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, it’s as if we’ve deliberately injected ourselves with a fast-moving virus — Ebola. Not a slow-creeping illness we can ignore, but a brutal invader that targets our most vital organs from the outset.

This strain doesn’t just spread through back channels. It assaults the brain — our academia and shared knowledge. It overwhelms the lungs — our justice system, now struggling to breathe. It attacks the heart — our democratic institutions, our voting rights and the public trust that binds them. It sabotages the immune system itself — our checks and balances, the independent press and the rule of law.

And yet, in recent days, there are signs the immune system is responding. The “No Kings” rally, and others like it, feel like antibodies forming — a signal that the country remembers how to fight off authoritarian infection. We see people waking up, naming the illness for what it is, and trying to save what’s left of the body politic.

But Ebola moves fast. We can’t afford to wait and see. Either we mobilize every cell of the immune system — our voices, our votes, our vigilance — or we enable the disease to run its course.

And history tells us: Unchecked, it’s always fatal.

Kevin Ward, Snowmass

Unwinding executive orders might require a wrist brace

It’s no secret that the presidency of Donald Trump has been marked by a flurry of executive actions — more than 200 executive orders in total, ranging across immigration, environmental policy, education, health care and the economy. If the next Democrat to hold the presidency intends to reverse the Trump-era legacy with the stroke of a pen, they may want to invest in a good wrist brace.

Executive orders are one of the quickest ways for a president to implement their agenda — and also one of the easiest to undo. Just as Trump rolled back dozens of Barack Obama’s directives, a Democratic successor will likely do the same with Trump’s. But with the sheer volume of policy changes Trump enacted through executive action, the next Democratic president might find themselves signing rollbacks at such a pace that their hand could go numb.

Imagine a symbolic first 100 days filled not with sweeping new programs, but with endless paperwork undoing climate rollbacks, dismantling deregulatory orders, reinstating protections for immigrants and marginalized communities, and scrubbing federal guidelines of “America First” fingerprints. That kind of policy cleanup takes time, political capital — and a whole lot of signatures.

Of course, not every executive order is easily erased. Some are embedded in regulatory processes that require months, even years, of bureaucratic unwinding. But the visual of a new president signing stacks of revocations one after another could become a defining image — a metaphor for the institutional whiplash America experiences when power changes hands.

So while it’s tongue-in-cheek to suggest carpal tunnel syndrome, it’s not far off to say the next Democratic president may need stamina, strategy and yes, some physical endurance to unwind Trump’s imprint on the federal government.

This is what happens when you have a dysfunctional government that cannot pass bills in the normal manner. Welcome to the roller coaster government of the USA.

Douglas Brown, New Castle