Welcome to The Wild Line, where land stories are the lead stories. This is our report for June 26th, 2026.
Bill, on Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Arkansas Republican John Bozeman, released that committee's draft of the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a massive omnibus bill that is generally passed every five years or so, and it sets congressional direction for policies on agriculture, nutrition, conservation, and forestry. In the past, it has carried with it provisions related to land conservation and management on both public and private lands, and I'm happy to say that this draft carries within its forestry title a number of designated bills that were approved earlier in the year by the Ag Committee. Those include two distinct wilderness bills for Virginia, which together would protect over 100,000 acres of roadless area, an expansion of the Flat Side Wilderness area in Arkansas' Ouachita National Forest, and the Shawnee National Forest Conservation Act, which would protect about 13,000 acres in southern Illinois from commercial logging. It also includes a feasibility study designed to ask whether or not the Benton MacKaye Trail that winds through Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina should be classified as a national scenic trail.
One excited party to this development is the Virginia Wilderness Committee and their executive director, Ellen Stewart Enchins. Here's Ellen on why the areas in Virginia are so important.
These two bills, um, really, they pr- would protect mountain ecosystems that have critical headwaters that feed the Potomac and James Rivers, which are two major rivers in the Commonwealth of Virginia that flow directly into the Chesapeake Bay. So they provide drinking water for Richmond. They provide drinking water for Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia. Um, they're... And also Harrisonburg and gets its drinking water from these headwaters. So multiple large population centers as well as communities throughout benefit from this. And also having a clean Chesapeake Bay benefits strongly from these two bills passing eventually.
These bills are a long way from becoming law, and the Farm Bill always inspires a lot of debate as it makes its way through Congress. But being written to the base text makes these measures that much harder to remove by any members who may be opposed to them, and it signals that they have bipartisan support from the Committee of Jurisdiction. So I think this is a great start.
You're normally pretty good at tooting your own horn, but I'll do it this time. Hats off to you for all your work you've done on a number of those bills. On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a confirmation hearing on Kevin Lilley to be Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife at the Department of Interior. Lilley, who has been serving in an acting capacity at Interior for months, faced Senate questioning on issues ranging from grizzly bear endangered species status to NPS staffing cuts and grant hold-ups. Committee Chair Shelley Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, pressed Lilley on streamlining ESA consultation while also urging him to prioritize installing a permanent superintendent at West Virginia's New River Gorge National Park. Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines used his time to push for de-listing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. Democrats on committee pressed Lilley on staffing cuts and an answer to the screw worm outbreak in the Southern United States.
President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on June 11th opening commercial fishing in portions of three Pacific Marine National Monuments. The move is the latest in a series of actions by this administration to roll back fishing restrictions in both Pacific and Atlantic monuments. And supporters argue that prior prohibitions pushed American fishermen into international waters to compete against less regulated foreign fleets. On the other hand, critics call it a, quote, "reckless attack on the world's greatest ocean sanctuaries that ignores science, undermines native stewardship, and risks irreparable damage," end quote.
This week, the Interior Department proposed two rule changes that would slash upfront costs for oil and gas drillers on federal land and cut a requirement that cleanup plans be included in drilling applications. Under the proposal, bonding amounts, the money companies must commit to covering cleanup costs, would drop from 500,000 to 25,000, while public comment periods on lease sales would shrink from 90 days to 10 days. And the BLM would no longer screen proposed parcels for conflicts with wildlife habitat. The National Wildlife Federation was quick to warn that reduced bonding rates would shift cleanup liability from the oil and gas industry to taxpayers.
USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service has announced it will accept Regional Conservation Project Program, or RCPP, project proposals through August 24th, 2026, with up to $310 million available, including a $30 million set aside for projects with Indian tribes. These monies are designed to help farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners address soil health, water quality, and wildlife habitat. The funding is backed by the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, which increased RCPP's baseline authorization through 2031. Both classic RCPP partnerships and alternative funding arrangements are eligible.
Elsewhere at USDA, a leaked memo outlined plans that would open up more than 190,000 acres of recommended wilderness in the Flathead National Forest to off-road vehicles, potentially unwinding a 2018 land management plan developed through years of interagency collaboration and public input involving motorized users, backcountry skiers, and horseback riders, among others. The memo is part of a broader directive affecting five billion acres across Montana and Idaho. I spoke with Sarah Lundstrom from the National Parks Conservation Association and a member of the collaborative that worked through the planning process about how this all sits with her.
[laughs] I mean, it's, it's certainly disappointing to see, obviously, just all of that work being
put under threat from a top-down decision out of Washington, D.C., like basically completely ignoring all the work that locals did. I think the other part of it is, is it, it takes the
incentive for conservation groups to work in collaboration and to show up. It sort of... It takes that away. Um, you know, we're there to help timber get logs, and we're there to help recreationists get trails, and we're there to make sure that some spaces are put aside for conservation, that they're, they're kept into the future the way they are. They're protected for, you know, wildlife habitat, quiet recreation, all of those things. And if we can no longer get and count on something like recommended wilderness being part of that, like, why show up? And that's a, that's an unfortunate thing because I do think a lot of good can come from collaboration.
I also asked Sarah what she's hearing from across the country since the memo's implications spread across the entire National Forest System and other recommended wilderness areas.
I mean, again, disa- disappointment across the board, concern. Um, you know, when I say something like we have grizzly bears are still listed, so maybe we won't see recommended wilderness change much here right now, that's not true in other places. There aren't those, those other backstops. And so the question is, like, how fast do, do we see changes on the ground? And the concern around what that really means because once those places are lost as wilderness, once they see incursion from, you know, ATVs or snowmobiles or roads or development, we don't get them back. The only thing that we're not making more of in this cou- in this country and, and in this world right now is wild nature. And so, like, the loss of those places,
you know, it just... We, we never, we never recover from it. And so the, the concern
across the board is just this, this undermining of these last protected spaces that we have, and the potential loss of them as, as, as qualifying for wilderness in, you know, some future Congress where we [laughs], where we have a Congress that actually passes wilderness bills. Like, those places no longer potentially qualify, and so, so we've, we've just lost them.
Areas of concern in Montana include the Badger-Two Medicine, which is sacred to the Blackfeet Nation, and key grizzly and lynx habitat in the Whitefish Range. More of the week's headlines following this short break. And back to the Wild Line.
The Washington Post reported this week on a second leaked memo, this time focused on the National Park Service. The memo, issued in December, prohibits NPS staff from confirming deaths, the severity of injuries, or other incident details related to deaths inside national parks, marking a significant departure from longstanding agency practices of issuing releases within 24 to 48 hours. Staff may only acknowledge that an incident occurred, provide the general location, and note that responders are on the scene. An average of about 350 people die in national parks each year, with the leading cause of death being falls. The Department of Interior said the guidance was meant to create, quote, "A more consistent approach to incident communications," end quote, and was not intended to conceal fatalities, though current and former rangers say it breaks with decades of public disclosure norms.
On Monday, the Bureau of Land Management announced it was moving forward on three travel management plans in Utah. Trail Canyon, east of Zion National Park, Dinosaur North, near the Dinosaur National Monument, and the Dolores River, northeast of Moab. Travel plans guide where motorized recreation is and is not allowed on public land. The agency is accepting public comment on the Trail Canyon and Dinosaur North plans. Here is Laura Peterson, senior attorney at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
After years of dragging its feet, the BLM is suddenly racing ahead to finalize three plans for off-road vehicles, plans we expect will wrongly promote motorized recreation over the interests of all other public land visitors.
These three landscapes highlight the beauty and diversity of public lands in Utah, but one thing unites them. None of them should be transformed from quiet, wild places into motorized playgrounds.
In a shockingly quick turn of events and carrying a shockingly short comment period, the U.S. Forest Service announced on Monday a massive salvage timber sale across multiple national forests in Idaho and Montana.
The forests across the region were hit by strong winter storms that brought high winds in December and March. The combination of high winds and saturated soils led to significant blowdowns. The agency now has issued an emergency declaration to authorize salvage logging across up to 11 million acres of public land. More dramatic than the scope of the project is the ridiculously short comment period for the public to have their voice heard. The declaration was issued this Monday, the 22nd, and the public has been given until next Monday, the 29th. Yes, this coming Monday, one week later, to provide feedback.
The project documents also anticipate a June 2027 decision, but with the emergency declaration, the work on the ground could actually start way before then.
Finally, we want to mark the death of James Bruggers, a giant of environmental journalism, whose decades of reporting held polluters to account and brought countless readers closer to nature. Raised in Michigan and educated at the University of Montana, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington, California, and Kentucky. He spent nearly two decades as the environmental beat reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, then spent seven years of his career at Inside Climate News, where he covered the Southeast with a focus on coal mining, petrochemical development, and plastics pollution. He was a pillar of the Society of Environmental Journalists, serving as a longtime board member and one-time president, and helped establish the organization's annual journalism contest. James, who was 68, died in the early morning of June 16th. He is survived by his wife, Christine, who said he died from complications of a rare and aggressive thyroid cancer and pneumonia. Before we sign off, I wanted to add some clarification on a story we reported last week, which was the story that the land management agencies have started the process to set policies around climbing anchors in designated wilderness as directed in the EXPLORE Act, which was signed into law in early 2025. In that story, I stated that anchors are generally viewed as an installation and subject to a process called the Minimum Requirements Analysis Framework. It should be noted that there has not been a standard legal definition that says fixed anchors are an installation and therefore prohibited in wilderness. Agencies have long wrestled with this issue, and some units have made the installation of anchors subject to the MRA process. Another reminder that the chance to weigh in on this issue is now open for the DOI and USDA agencies that manage wilderness. We will link to those comment portals in our show notes. If you want to hear a deep dive into the history of climbing management in wilderness, we point you to our Wild Idea Fault Line bonus episode we released just yesterday that features Eric Murdock from the Access Fund.
That is our report for June 26th, 2026. We will be back next week with another edition of the Wild Line. And next week on the Wild Idea podcast, we end our month-long look at stewardship by sharing a live recording of our conversation with Meryl Harrell with Friends of the Forest Service and Lisa Ronald from American Rivers that we had during the National Wilderness Skills Institute. Until then, act up and run wild.
The Wild Line is a production of Wild Idea Media. Production and editing by Bryn Russell at PodLab. Digital support by Holly Wilkoszewski at Daypack Digital. Our theme music, Spring Hill Jack, is from Railroad Earth and was composed by John Skehan. The executive producer is Lara Hodge. Learn more about us at thewildidea.com.