Match My Mountains

Former Chief Ranger of the National Park Service Walt Dabney spent a long career pulling climbers off of Mount Rainier, counting alligators around the Everglades, keeping the gates open in Southern Utah, and otherwise having great adventures in public service around the national park system. He takes us deep, deep down in the weeds on the different tasks rangers do across the parks, how those need...

Here is a long and winding and obscure extended metaphor of the American identity as being, more than anything else, the the collaboration and compromise of multiple many things for the common good in the long term-- just like our wonderful National Forests. (And our chili bowls too, while we're at it.) So what are we all doing in this big beautiful American experiment together, and how shoul...

National Parks and public lands are an issue everybody cares about, after they care about everything else— and most people don’t really understand the dynamics of public land policy. This means it’s quite common for very well-intentioned supporters to completely lose their minds over comparatively unimportant things— most recently, the bad-but-not-existential restructuring of the U.S. Forest Servi...

Everybody knows about the two great American traditions of cOnSeRvATiOn aNd PrEsErVaTiOn (and if you don't, we're exploring it here!) Not many people look backward beyond John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. We all assume American conservation started when the big evil oligarchs cut down too many trees and a few idealists convinced Teddy Roosevelt to stop them. But conservation came from somew...