Hey, so, if we haven’t met, you should know that I spend a lot of my time filling out paperwork. And it’s not glamorous paperwork. Mostly it’s asking for permission in 5,000 words, and documenting redundancy redundantly, things like that. I spend about a third of my life proving to people that I have insurance, as though a quick “we’re good i swear” text isn’t enough to assuage liability.

Some days, in order to coordinate volunteer trail work efforts on public land, I will fill out the exact same paperwork that Northrop Grummon fills out before they’re awarded trillion dollar contracts to help murder civilians. The exact. Same. Paperwork. To clean water bars on our National Forest.

From day to day, I am continually amazed by the glee with which some federal employees embrace our bureaucratic morass, and revel in inflicting drabness on active community members who have no ambitions beyond contributing to the public good. This goes well beyond my personal experiences, and today being stonewalled by slowly articulated regurgitations of policy handbook language is a right-of-passage for those who would engage with our public land in any organized way.

The daily struggle to simply participate in the public process is infuriating. Asinine. Obtuse.

But the thing is, in spite of every frustration and eye-clawing inconsistency in how it’s managed I will go to war for public land, and so will everyone else who shares the headaches that go with its management. That fight is here.

You can be forgiven for missing the news (it’s been a crowded cycle). But a few days ago Senator Mike Lee became more proactive in his platform to privatize public land. Remember that this is a pillar of the Republican Party platform, but due to its wild unpopularity among voters in the west, most candidates of been wary of embracing it.

Not true of Mike Lee. In spite of outdoor recreation contributing more than $12 billion each year to Utah’s economy, in spite of it supporting 110,000 jobs and contributing nearly a billion dollars in tax revenue, and despite the State’s aggressive stance to public land demonstrably injuring that economy, Lee has embraced the large scale divestment from these natural resources.

From his website: “Congress should honor its promise to sell federal land in western states.” Right there, clear as day. He’s proud of that shit. Across the west the sanctity of public land is pretty much the only thing that right and left can agree on. In spite of disagreements on how that land should be managed, and frustrations over the process itself, the narrative is clear: voters expect our elected officials to Keep Public Lands in Public Hands.

And the threat is more than top down. After sweeping acquittals of insurgents involved in an armed occupation of federal property last year, the ranchers whose case triggered the standoff were granted presidential pardons today, further undermining the sanctity of public land.

The struggle is real. This is not hypothetical. Shoot back.

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When the candidate Donald Trump told the world that he was going to Make America Great Again, it rightly raised a few eyebrows. It seemed incredible that he would be the one to “drain the swamp.” After all, the candidate’s entire professional career reflected the corruption, hypocrisy, and self-indulgence that he purported was at the heart of Washington’s woes. Drain the swamp? This guy? Yeah, right.

Since then we’ve seen that the skeptics more or less hit the nail on the head, and just about everything we heard the apologists describe as campaign rally bluster, not real concerns, have proved to be very, very real. President Trump has been at the helm of a chaotic administration, mired by scandal, corruption, and incompetence since day one. Cabinet picks like Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Susan Combs, who have spent their lives undermining the agencies they now head, underscore what greatness means to the right wing elite in America today.

But to say I Told You So is to forget that Trump won the election. And foreign meddling or not, he did that by keying in to latent dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. His conclusions were wildly off-base and baldly racist, sure, but the observation at the heart of his campaign was spot on: the United States isn’t quite as great as we like to pretend.

And while it turns out that when the President said that he was talking non-white men expecting human and civil rights (where do they get off, anyway?), we can turn to a few statistics to see that he’s not entirely wrong.

For instance, the US has the 55th lowest rate of infant mortality in the world. That ranks us behind Cuba, Bosnia, and, well, pretty much every industrialized country on the planet. We boast the largest prison population on Earth, which may have something to do with the fact that a person earning minimum wage can afford even a one-bedroom rental in exactly 12 counties nationwide.

In spite of being the richest country on earth, we’re far from #1 in terms of literacy, life expectancy, or healthcare. We rank 18th in quality of life. Aside from incarceration rates the only places we’re really on the leader board is gun ownership, military spending, and wealth inequality. Oh and drone strikes. I forgot about drone strikes, which is easy for me to do, given that I don’t personally know any of the thousands of civilians who have been killed in them recently.

No sirree, it’s pretty hard to conceive of how the US can look in the mirror and see “best goddamn country on earth.” We could do worse, sure, and we’ve got potential, but there’s work to do and we’re not there yet.

But then one thing does stand out. We’re doing ok on public land. Not great, I guess, we can do better, but hot damn we’ve got a lot of it. Public land in the US takes up about as much space as France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, all together. It’s about a million acres, and it belongs to you, really, to go screw around with.

Go for a hike. Ride your bike. Where it makes sense, let’s cut down some trees (and build affordable housing!). Hell, get out and shoot all those guns you have. Diverse and protected public land is America’s greatest asset, and investing in it is not an opportunity, it’s a responsibility.

Right now we face a real, organized, and well-funded effort to undermine public land and disenfranchise the American people from our property. They wrote it down. It’s in the platform. This is happening by de-funding the agencies that manage these landscapes, by undermining the policies that protect them, and by fracturing the communities that cherish and steward these places with cynical legislative straw men.

This is no longer just about Robert Frost and Walden Pond. It’s not just about heritage and family values and a western way of life. It’s all those things too, of course, but public land has emerged as the foundation of the western economy. Public land drives America’s outdoor recreation economy, which, by the way, generates $887 billion in consumer spending and $65 billion in federal tax revenue each year. This is larger than the pharmaceutical industry. It’s larger than the mining industry.

So when we see a president proposing to cut federal trail maintenance budgets by 83% (down to about half the cost of a single Predator drone), or shrinking National Monuments, or gutting clean water protections, it’s hard to see how that’s making anything great again.

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We have, here, spent some time discussing public land in the United States. This is for good reason. Public land is explicitly under attack by the Republican Party Platform, and wild places are at the center of numerous land use bills currently circulating through Congress. One need not look past the recent decimation of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to see how effective extractive industry has been in dismantling America’s Best Idea.

Right now two bills in particular are fracturing the western conservation community – one allowing bicycles in designated Wilderness, the other closing the books on decades old wilderness study areas. This has, perhaps by design (<—conspiracy theory), caused some dissonance between conservationists who ride bikes and conservationists who don’t ride bikes, and is generally occupying a lot of peoples’ time and energy. Generally speaking this is good stuff for us to be thinking about, and we are fortunate to have the wild places to fight over in the first place. (Although I do think it would be much more productive if we all just stopped yelling for a minute).

But then there’s one threat to public land that folks don’t really seem to be talking about that much, and which may deserve some yelling. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING ABOUT FERAL PIGS?

Seriously guys this shit is real. You know them as bacon, probably, or maybe “the thing that got Robert Baratheon”. Fans of their earlier work may remember that scene from Snatch. But the thing is, feral boars are a real thing, they’re coming, and before we dig too deep, there’s a few things you should know about them.

• These fuckers are the size of Marshawn Lynch
• They begin breeding at 6 months old, can have 12 piglets per litter, and two litters per year
• Boars can each impregnate about 10 sows per year
• Feral hogs can occupy essentially any habitat on earth, tolerate harsh winters, and happily thrive at 15,000′ above sea level
• They are voracious omnivores and will delightedly out-compete every species of charismatic megafauna you hold dear
• While you hunt the boars, the boars hunt you

Wild pigs present a clear and growing danger to all of the fancy endangered species, across all types of habitat. Sage Grouse, Grizzly Bears, and Lynx are all at risk for further competition and depredation, as well as the animals that people actually care about: elk. In fact the only wildlife that really stand to gain by an influx of feral swine are mountain lions and wolves.

Of course feral hogs also thrive on wild flora and agricultural crops, by tilling the earth with their tusks for plant roots or tearing bark from trees. They are indiscriminate eaters, and ruin landscapes. The US currently spends $1.5 billion annually on pig control and crop replacement, and in Japan agricultural depredation once got so bad that more than 3,000 people starved to death during what’s now known as the “Wild Boar Famine.” And this is all, of course, to say nothing of their prominence as vectors for human-communicable disease, deadly aggression, adaptability to suburban and urban environments, and ready habituation to human presence.

Basically feral hogs are kind of a bummer.

Which is why the next part is so spooky: Hogs are present in 44 states and expanding their range by about 8 miles per year. Without intervention, they will be in every county in the US by 2060. Pigs are coming, and they are going to fuck shit up. Right now the most remote, wildest landscapes in the lower 48 are in Montana and Wyoming, two of the last bastions without pig sightings. Once the boars arrive, they will be changed forever.

Do you think those docile elk in West Yellowstone are weird? Just love the Jeremiah Johnson fantasy of riding your horse through the Bob Marshall? Annoyed when squirrels eat your bird feeder? You haven’t seen anything yet (btw there are pigs in Oregon, Idaho, and North Dakota).

“Sure they’re bad,” you say. “But whatever can we do?” I’m glad you asked. Really the big thing is to STOP DRIVING THEM AROUND TO INTRODUCE TO NEW PLACES SO THAT YOU CAN PLAY GI JOE AND HUNT THEM FROM A HELICOPTER WITH NIGHT VISION. Short of that you can usually hunt them*, and pig roasts are delicious (Columbus introduced them in the West Indies so that future expeditions would have food security).

At the very least we should acknowledge that this is kind of a big deal that we’re not talking about at all. We’ve seen a few studies, a headline every year or two, and that’s really it. So let’s get it together, and maybe take a breather from bickering like Khaleesi and the Lannisters. The boars are coming. It’s real.

 

*And they’re mostly nocturnal, so you may want night vision. And they do move around a bit so if you have a line on a helicopter I guess it wouldn’t hurt.

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I am, right now, seated behind a bloody mary at a scarred wooden table in Le Bon Temps Roule, a laughing dive bar on the corner of Magazine and Bordeaux Streets on the fringe of the Garden District. At this moment it is 1pm on a Friday, and the weekend is underway.

The room is much darker than even the overcast sky outdoors, and towering next to me is the first cigarette vending machine I have seen in more than 20 years. Three gambling machines flash silently in the corner, and a handful of television sets are split between football analysis and music videos that are unrelated in any way to the 90s R&B that pounds through the air, the table, the floor. Eight or ten regulars laugh and dance around two red felted pool tables.

From the ceiling hang Saints memorabilia and the paper mache underside of a crocodile, so that it seems we’re looking up at it from beneath the murkey waters of the Atchafalaya. This is fitting, but I do not understand the skier’s legs that are suspended near the reptile’s tail.

This single block is home to at least three vacant buildings – one appears to have been a pawn shop, the other two were homes. On one of the empty houses someone has used every inch of their height to spray paint “LIES” in crude black print on the molding white siding. The other has more or less completely burned. It is fenced off from the sidewalk and the facade, still partially intact, betrays that it was once a clean, brightly colored shotgun in a row of clean, brightly colored shotguns.

On the corner is a hip-looking Israeli restaurant and shawarma stand which boasts Tal’s Pita in bright pastels. In less-bright pastels Sugar Rae’s is selling sweet pralines, and I admit to myself that I have no idea what a praline is.

Danny’s No. 2 advertises fried chicken, seafood, Po Boys, and Chinese food. It does not appear to be open and later, when we cross the road to peer through its darkened windows we will nearly be hit by a Mazeratti. Next to Danny’s (No. 2) is a retired residence occupied by a real estate broker and an Edward Jones office. The money movers are in place next to a nameless bodega shrouded in a chainmail of steel grate.

Aside our anonymous store, presumably filled with chips and beer and cigarettes is Apolline, discreetly signed and well-received by Yelp as a semi-expensive hot spot for contemporary southern fare. It is filled by immaculate table clothes and thin white ladies with excellent posture, and out front a duck-footed gay couple paces amid a cloud of cigarette smoke and argues about their future.

As they move along the block, shouting questions and ignoring answers across shattered, skewed concrete sidewalks they pass the beads, invisible at first but onmipresent once seen. They hang from trees, from power lines, from fence posts, from buildings, sunbleached ghosts from 300 years of parading through the streets.

In Le Bon Temps Roule the pool table cracks. “Like Dolly Parton,” croaks the bald white man with the cue. “All bust and no balls.” He casts a grin across the bar in search of someone to catch the joke. Now, by 2pm, the music is louder still and we have been joined by maybe a dozen more people and a single lightly colored bulldog, and here we are, at Magazine and Bordeaux, in all of New Orleans on a block.

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