WELC Inauguration Message: TO THE WESTERN HORIZONS

The Western Environmental Law Center’s strategic approach to the confluence of political, ecological, and economic crises faced by the United States in the second Trump era

Portrait of Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, Executive Director of WELC

Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, WELC Executive Director

In this moment of deep challenge and uncertainty, I find solace in Terry Tempest Williams’ poignant words: “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” In the coming months and years, we will need — more than ever — to create that beauty together given the confluence of political, ecological, and economic crises that our country and world now faces.

To create beauty, we must not give in to despair. Instead, I ask that you embrace an ecology of kinship that cultivates trust, dignity, and belonging with each other and the world around us. Start by grounding yourself in the places you love. For me, that means New Mexico’s Valle Vidal, a secret family swimming spot in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, and the backyard gardens I tend to at home. For you, it might be an emerald-green old growth forest or the neighborhood community where you live.

Wherever and whatever they may be, find joy in these places, channeling Mary Oliver’s admonition that “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” Indeed, joy is a spark that liberates us from the destructive political, social, and economic forces that view people and the environment as mere commodities to be exploited.

I know this will be difficult. I know that the coming years are fraught with peril. Our climate is destabilized, with ecological systems and the life they harbor unraveling at a frightening pace.

As I write this, fires rage across Los Angeles and I look at my window at the lack of snow in the Sangre de Mountains above my home and feel troubled, recalling the devastating 2022 Calf Canyon-Hermits Peak fires that burned 341,471 acres of northern New Mexico, the largest and most destructive wildfire in my state’s history. Further, our federal government, historically confined by limited imagination, is now led by an authoritarian president who compensates for his fragile ego by aligning with extremists and elite, hyper-wealthy oligarchs, all of whom are driven by a rapacious, extraction-based ideology that seeks to hoard power, resources, and wealth.

These extremists and oligarchs seek not kinship with but dominance over people and the Earth. They won’t stop the Los Angeles fires and they’ve even repugnantly signaled their intent to exploit the crisis to demand policy concessions as a condition of helping the people of Los Angeles recover. Such demands are terrible, unravelling the trust we should have as Americans that our political leaders will work together to help people pick themselves and their communities up after disaster.

By embracing a joy-filled ecology of kinship, we will defeat these extremists and oligarchs to bring to life our vision: A thriving West, abundant with protected and interconnected ecosystems, powered by renewable energy, and cared for by communities brought together in an ecology of kinship.

You might be asking yourself, “This sounds great, but what does this mean pragmatically?”

FIRST: HOLD THE LINE

We will hold the line on the national stage against the Trump administration’s attacks on the West’s lands, waters, wildlife, and communities — and the bedrock environmental laws that protect them.

These attacks are already well underway, and WELC attorneys and advocates are actively engaged, knowing the work will only intensify on January 20th. And, insofar as Trump has learned lessons from his first reckless term in office that make him more dangerous this time around, so too have we learned lessons.

By holding the line, we can shape the narrative terrain and create opportunities to make forward progress once the political winds shift back in our favor — and, with courage, hard work, and perseverance, those winds will shift. Key priorities on this front include:

  • Furthering an Ecologically and Socially Just Transition. People and communities are the heart of a just transition from fossil fuels to a renewables-powered future. Not developers. Not corporations. And certainly not Wall Street investors. But the Trump administration cares little about people and communities, let alone a renewables-powered future that respects and protects ecological values. It will instead glibly intensify the social, ecological, and health harms caused by our country’s obsession with fossil fuels for political gain. But know this: We will confront such transgressions head on, leveraging our skill as seasoned attorneys and advocates to make use of every tool at our disposal, from litigation to sharp policy engagement and fierce communications. We will stand against the Trump administration, fossil fuel interests, and all who seek to exploit the chaos of the political moment for profit and power at the expense of people and communities. In so doing, we will create space for people and communities to come together to respect and protect the Earth’s ecological boundaries and provide a rock-solid foundation for people and communities to thrive.
  • Conserving public lands and bedrock environmental laws. Public lands are beloved and deserve to be protected for the plants and wildlife that call these lands home, the complicated cultural heritage they embody, and for current and future generations. Indeed, Colorado College’s 2024 State of the Rockies poll found that 70% of Western voters, including 72% of Independents and 52% of Republicans, want political leaders to protect public lands for conservation, not exploit them for energy production. We therefore think the public will recoil, as they have before, from the Trump administration’s transgressions, creating an appetite for change. In 2022, after fighting the Trump administration’s first wave of public lands transgressions, we petitioned the Biden administration to do just that. In 2024, the Biden administration heeded our call, completing new rules that better protect the ecological health and resilience of public lands. Relying on recent Supreme Court decisions that prioritize profit-oriented economic interests over the public interest, states and extractive industries brought multiple federal court challenges to these rules. We’ve intervened in each of these cases to defend the rules. Most importantly, we’ve geared up to fight the Trump administration’s expected effort to roll back them back. But we will do more, leveraging the federal court precedent and authority we’ve secured over the past decade to prevent the erosion of bedrock public lands laws and set the stage for action that strengthens those laws in the public interest once the political winds shift. Intention, here, is an imperative. Our work must not be reactive. Instead, it must be disciplined and intentionally designed to meet long-term conservation objectives.
  • Challenging fossil fuels. As we defend nationwide public lands protections, we’ll fight the Trump administration’s efforts to sell off public lands in the West for coal, oil, and methane gas development, primarily in the Intermountain West. We will challenge oil and gas lease sales and drilling permits to safeguard the climate and public lands from air and water pollution that harms people and communities. We’ll also defend against efforts to roll back place-based protections, such as Interior Sec. Deb Haaland’s 2023 decision to create a 10-mile protective buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, and the Interior Department’s historic decision to end new coal leasing in Wyoming. Our track record on this front speaks for itself. In the past decade, the Western Environmental Law Center, with its partners, has protected roughly 10 million acres of public lands from fracking leases, imposed new guardrails to compel reductions of harmful methane pollution and waste, and provided critical strategic legal representation to groups across the Intermountain West. Just this month, the federal government announced, as a result of successful years-long litigation we brought spanning multiple federal courts, that it would reevaluate 3,224 federal oil and gas leases covering 3.5 million acres sold in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, providing a redoubt to defend against and challenge the Trump administration’s reckless fossil fuel ambitions.
  • Safeguarding imperiled wildlife. In recent years, we’ve worked hard to lock down key safeguards for imperiled wildlife, from Canada lynx and wolverine to grizzly bears and wolves. At the start of 2025, for example, the Fish and Wildlife Service preserved Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears and, in 2023, the agency finally acknowledged that wolverines deserved these critical protections as well. But the Trump administration will seek to remove these protections, demanding intensive legal action grounded in science to conserve and recover these and other species so that they may not only survive, but thrive, as part of the West’s iconic natural heritage.

SECOND: MOVE IN SPACE

Forward progress will prove immensely difficult on the national stage in 2025, but opportunity abounds at the state level. We will therefore move in space at the state level to best make steady progress towards our vision for the West. Priorities include:

  • In Montana, we will leverage our groundbreaking win on behalf of brave youths asserting Montanan’s constitutional right to clean and healthy environment to challenge fossil fuels, compel the retirement and clean-up of fossil fuel infrastructure, and advance climate action.
  • In New Mexico, we are building a “safety net” watershed protection program to remedy the harms otherwise caused by the Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision gutting the Clean Water Act. That decision exposes more than 95% of the state’s rivers and streams and 88% of its wetlands to the risk of unbridled pollution discharges. We will also advocate for new statewide climate action laws and reform outdated financial assurance rules to require oil and gas companies — not taxpayers — pay to clean up industry messes. We will also take action to diversify and strengthen the state’s revenue and economic base by reducing its dependence on volatile boom-bust oil and gas production.
  • In Oregon, New Mexico, and Washington state, we’ll proudly fly our “beaver believer” flag, working with state political leaders and agencies to further resilience of the land to wildfire, water security, and overall ecological health by restoring beavers to the landscape.

THIRD: BUILD POWER FOR CHANGE

Let’s be real: Political support for environmental protection ebbs and flows such that we have proven unable to meet the urgency demanded by the confluence of crises we face. To revitalize our movement, we must build power for change through diversified coalitions and partnerships.

To do this, we will strengthen the integration of ecological and social values in our work, harnessing the power intrinsic in multi-sector collaboration. The path to a thriving, resilient future is not traversed by restoring a kinship-based relationship between humanity and the world, not by severing or sabotaging that relationship for profit and power.

Across the West, we will work with allied organizations to build networks of mutual support and collaborative, multi-faceted strategies to protect the shared values. Public lands, for example, are core to our sense of identity as Westerners and essential to the clean air and water we are entitled to as a matter of right, to wildlife that deserve to roam free across their historic range, and to communities who serve as the stewards, not profit-seeking exploiters, of the land.

In New Mexico, for example, we’ll work in cross-sector alliances of progressive climate, conservation, Indigenous and immigrant rights groups, education, and worker and racial justice groups to challenge the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on the state’s politics. In Oregon, we’ll work with forest and wildlife advocates to leverage opportunities for old growth forest and wildlife protection, reforming state-level decision-making bodies to better reflect the science and moral imperative of conservation.

These examples reflect the importance that the Western Environmental Law Center places on longstanding, trust-based relationships. Each year, we partner with more than 150 nonprofit and community organizations fighting for the places and issues they care about, and it is through these longstanding relationships that we can build solidarity and systems of cooperation and mutual support that are ever more necessary.

As part of this effort, we will lean into storytelling to lift up people’s love of public lands, counter the noxious narratives advanced by fossil fuel and other interests, and breathe life into our intersectional movement as a complement our hard-edged litigation and policy advocacy.

We know this is an anxiety-inducing moment. But by embracing an ecology of kinship, by staying true to our values, and by standing together in solidarity, we can hold the line for a better future, move in space to make steady progress, and build power for change.

It is in this way that we will confront the challenges of the coming months and years. And it is in this way that we will work through the grief and rage of the loss and heartache that seem all but inevitable.

I’ll leave you with John O’Donohue’s resonant poem, For One Who Holds Power, in the hopes that it inspires, in you, the spirit to embrace your power and your kinship with the world.

May the gift of leadership awaken in you as a vocation,
Keep you mindful of the providence that calls you to serve.
As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings,
May your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills.

When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance,
May your imagination continue to evoke horizons.
When thirst burns in times of drought,
May you be blessed to find the wells.
May you have the wisdom to read time clearly
And know when the seed of change will flourish.

In your heart may there be a sanctuary
For the stillness where clarity is born.
May your work be infused with passion and creativity
And have the wisdom to balance compassion and challenge.

May your soul find the graciousness
To rise above the fester of small mediocrities.
May your power never become a shell
Wherein your heart would silently atrophy.
May you welcome your own vulnerability
As the ground where healing and truth join.

May integrity of soul be your first ideal.
The source that will guide and bless your work.

Onward to the Western horizons.

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