Along the Connecticut River, where languid Vermont leans against New Hampshire, grows a small, native river grape. It hangs late this time of year from the silver maples and boxelders along the riverbank, seeking whatever waning autumn light it can as the sun arcs ever lower across the ridges of the old hills. The fruit is small enough that the modern observer may not even recognize it for the grape that it is or would be forgiven for mistaking it for a blueberry. Elegant and petite with a dusty bruised hue, it bears little resemblance to the brutish factory-farmed fruits you and I now find in the produce aisle. It shares the color of the nearby river, wine-dark and indifferent to your presence. Few people know it is there and fewer still bother to pick it. Wander those riverbanks, though, crush one between your teeth, and it will bite back with a flavor sour, unplaceable, and old. It will echo to something strange but familiar, somewhere before the farms and the orchards took root, someplace unmistakably good.

Naturalist Hal Borland wrote of this same dark riverbank grape decades ago from his farm in Connecticut. “They are full of juice, deep purple juice,” he wrote, “and that juice is the very essence of untamed flavor, tart enough to pucker the mouth. In the old days, farm folk sometimes fermented a wine from them that made a strong man sit up and take notice, but now such wine is only a memory.”

You can hear his grief in that last line, penned half a century ago. We must note well, however, what specifically the old naturalist was mourning. It was not the loss of the grapes. They still hang heavy, cold, and stubborn along the equally heavy, cold, and stubborn rivers of New England. He is not even mourning the loss of the wine or its recipe.

What he is mourning is the loss of culture.

All too often we associate culture with high art, lofty ideas, and marble columns. It is better understood closer to the dirt where it originated. To a sense of place. So reveals the word itself. Culture derives from the Latin cultura, a Roman working word for the tilling of a field. Look deeper and find the root verb colere used for things we do not necessarily associate together today: to till the ground, to dwell in a place, to honor and revere. In short, all the things that allow our songs, our food, our ways and mores, everything that we understand as culture today to thrive. This is important, for as we become a more globally connected people, ever homogenized by technology, our understanding of culture becomes unrooted from the particular locations where it was formed. This is a tragedy, for there is a truth that modern life attempts to ignore:

Amid Borland’s lamentations, there is cause for hope, however. In the hills surrounding that river and its forgotten frost grapes, little rivulets cascade, meet, and coalesce. That old stubborn river of culture yet flows.

This time of year in the northern places, you will find it around the cider press. The father of the family placed it in the back yard by the old barn, and now his extended family, friends, and neighbors gather around taking turns cranking the old wheel to press the gathered apples or marvel at his ingenuity in motorizing an antique model. The children will be laughing and climbing over the tractor and its front loader cradling a massive pile of apple skin and mash. The mash will be discarded that evening at the edge of the corn field, an inadvertent offering and feast for every breed of critter bold enough to wander past the stone walls at the forest’s edge. This is culture.

The golden days of October give way to the winds of November and, as the forest sheds its leaves, the deer hunters settle into their stands and their blinds. Like Borland’s lamented lost wine, this too is a tradition and culture at risk of being forgotten. Vermont’s hunting population peaked in 1987 at roughly 143,000. By 2020, that figure had fallen by half despite Vermont’s overall population rising. There is cause for concern, yes, but the hunting culture of stewardship, responsibility, and ethics has deep roots in the hilly slopes and rocky loam of Vermont’s fields and forests. Even now, young hunters can be found being mentored by the old-timers in hunter education classes while their family members too pass down skills and knowledge. Raucous laughter still echoes off the hills celebrating a successful hunt amid the threat of a November snow, and in the gloaming light of dusk that comes too early that time of year, wood smoke rises from camps and cabins deep in the woods. This, too, is culture.

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By March, the woodsmoke of the deer camp chimneys is replaced by steam from the sugaring shacks found in the same forests. Families may gather sap the traditional way with metal pails or through more modern tubes and machines, but the sap is gathered all the same. It takes time to boil into maple syrup, however, especially if one is using an old wood-fired arch, and it is a cold, damp, and lonely prospect in those weeks leading up to the spring equinox. Friends and neighbors arrive to ease the pang of solitude with food and drink. A crockpot or picnic basket materializes and a guitar or fiddle inevitably appears. A child excitedly offers to put another log on the fire before his mother urges prudence lest the syrup burn. Forty gallons of sap boil down into one gallon of syrup just as the traditions held by the same people in the same place for generations distill into a shared, robust, and undeniable culture.

Return now to where we began, on the bank of the Connecticut in the low, arcing light of October, with the vines hanging over the dark water and the small, inconsequential grapes waiting where they have always been. Borland called the wine into which they ferment “only a memory” but this does not have to be the last word, the final say. Memory is not a grave so much as it is a dry riverbed. The old channels that once fed it endure. They were cut deep into the valley, sloping down from those hills every golden October by farmers who wandered the riverbank to find the tart grape after the first frost. Those grapes still ripen and the frost still comes.

We are the only element missing.

You have your own version of the riverbank frost grape. It may be elderberry along your back fence or a forgotten orchard just off trail. It could be a cranberry bog or a chestnut tree, a fishing hole or a mushroom patch. A cider press, a deer camp, a sugaring shack. A people, a tradition, a place. Every slope and valley has some good treasure that no one comes for anymore, some culture out there waning in its own autumn light waiting to be conserved.

Find it before the light is gone. Let the old river run again.

Ryan Anderson is the Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC) and the author of Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Follow him on X @OldHollowTree.

This piece was originally published in The Daily Wire with the title, “Why I Don’t Worry About My Kid’s Carbon Footprint.”

There is dirt on my kitchen floor again. My 17-month-old son, Calvin, tracked it in and I am delighted: My plan is working.

These days there is no shortage of ways to indoctrinate a child into climate dread. I could stack my son’s nursery shelves with titles such as “Climate Change for Babies” or “Baby Loves Green Energy!” I won’t waste my money. The two very small cowboy boots sitting by the door are the best environmental education I can give him. His childhood is the largest conservation project I will ever run, and it costs me nothing but time.

Nearly every policy I’ve ever worked on expires in an election cycle or two. My son will defend Daniel Boone National Forest for the next 80 years. This is where he first watched his daddy build a campfire, and he learned to love it before he could say its name. I hire young conservationists constantly and can tell within 10 minutes who spent time outside as a kid. Those are the ones who feel responsible for a place and take action. The others just feel guilty about existing.

As an employer, I am not paying people to feel bad. Climate guilt is cheap, it is useless, and it burns young people out so fast that they go looking for a new cause within three years. I would rather hire people who view the land as their national inheritance, as a part of themselves they need to protect. This is why my organization has never bet everything on what happens in Washington, D.C., but instead has built a nationwide grassroots network of people who love their hometowns. Durable policy is the result of people like them, not the other way around. Policy may come from Capitol Hill, but the conservationists who write it are made outdoors. The problem is, we are making fewer of them every year.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of 2021 survey data showed that nearly four in 10 kids aged 3 to 5 get an hour or less outside on a weekday. Fewer than half get three or more hours on any given Saturday or Sunday. Screens are the easy answer. The bigger problem is that childhood is more structured than ever. As I wrote for the Institute for Family Studies, our children are being supervised, programmed, and scheduled nearly all of their waking hours.

Their childhoods also lack the risk and independence that shaped previous generations. American parents know that if the helicopter parents don’t get you, the legal liability will. As The Atlantic has documented, a preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence and risk-taking without making it safer. This culture of fear and risk aversion also extends to how we’re teaching kids about the natural world. Today’s climate curriculum leads with catastrophe and alarmism, so children learn to feel guilty about nature before they ever learn to like it.

I am raising my son to love nature the way I did as a child. No indoctrination necessary. He’ll be in good company: conservationists born and raised hunting, fishing, hiking, riding, and caring for the land. Affection cannot be assigned. When we indoctrinate a child into caring for the land instead of letting him find it himself, he becomes compliant. But conviction works better than compliance.

Those with conviction care for the land in tangible ways. Last year alone, hunters and anglers put roughly $1.3 billion into state wildlife conservation through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson excise taxes. No one shamed them into it, but their idea of a good weekend is one spent in a stream or a tree stand, and they pay for the privilege through hunting tags and fishing licenses. An afternoon outside shows up as a funding stream.

None of this is complicated. It is a habit, and habits are set at home.

The numbers are moving our way. Participation in outdoor recreation hit a record last year, and youth participation rose 5.6 percent. That trend will become a fad if we fail to cement it. This is the responsibility of parents. Calvin doesn’t have the words to express his love of the outdoors yet. But each morning he grabs my hand and leads me to our back door, then looks up at me expectantly. Soon he will work the latch himself, and then it is out of my hands. I am not raising an activist. I am raising a boy who will notice when the creek runs low.

So here is my environmental agenda, and it will cost you an afternoon: Take a child outside this week. Do not actively teach him anything. Let him get muddy, and let him track it back into your kitchen.

The opening and closing of your screen door will do more for our future than any government program could.

Danielle Franz is the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition.

For generations, hunting and fishing have been woven into the fabric of America, and Colorado has been no exception.

Long before hunting became the subject of political debates or ballot initiatives, Colorado families were taking their sons and daughters into the mountains, woods, and fields. They were teaching them how to hunt and fish, how to respect wildlife, how to care for the land, and how to provide food for their families.

Those traditions have been handed down from one generation to the next.

This November, Colorado voters will decide whether those traditions should receive protection in their state constitution.

That question is particularly significant in Colorado. Hunters and anglers have played an essential role in Colorado’s conservation history and continue to provide a substantial share of the funding that supports wildlife conservation and management in the state.

From Hunter Nation’s perspective, that history matters. Hunting and fishing are not simply activities that Coloradans happen to enjoy. They have been part of Colorado’s heritage, its conservation system, and its relationship with wildlife for generations.

WHAT AMENDMENT 83 DOES — AND DOES NOT DO

Amendment 83 would establish a constitutional right for the people of Colorado to hunt, fish, and harvest fish and wildlife using traditional methods. It would also establish hunting and fishing as the preferred means of responsibly managing fish and wildlife populations.

There is an important distinction that sometimes gets lost when hunting issues become political.

A constitutional right to hunt and fish does not mean an unlimited right to hunt anything, anywhere, at any time.

Amendment 83 specifically preserves Colorado’s authority to regulate hunting, fishing, and wildlife management when necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management, public safety, and the preservation of future hunting and fishing opportunities.

It does not create a right to trespass on private property or eliminate existing private-property protections. It also contains exceptions for nongame species, endangered species, and species that are illegal to hunt under federal law.

In other words, the amendment protects the tradition while preserving the responsibility that comes with it.

HUNTERS ARE CONSERVATIONISTS

At Hunter Nation, we believe hunters and anglers should never apologize for the role they have played in American conservation—and particularly for the role generations of sportsmen and sportswomen have played in conserving Colorado’s wildlife and wild places.

Colorado’s own wildlife agency recognizes that hunters and anglers provide the bulk of the funding for wildlife conservation and management through hunting and fishing licenses and federal excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, archery equipment, fishing equipment, and related purchases.

But conservation is about more than writing a check.

Hunters and anglers participate directly in hands-on wildlife management. They support habitat restoration, responsible population management, wildlife research, conservation programs, and the work required to maintain healthy wildlife populations.

And hunters do something else that cannot be measured simply in dollars. We pass it on.

A Dad teaches his daughter to shoot.

A Grandpa takes his grandson fishing.

A mentor takes a new hunter into the field for the first time.

Someone teaches the next generation that harvesting an animal also brings an obligation to respect that animal, use what we take, obey the law, protect habitat, and leave wildlife and wild places better for those who follow us.

This is the hunting tradition all hunters know and respect.

And it is a tradition worth protecting.

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THIS IS ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION

The question before Colorado is bigger than whether people can hunt and fish today. Existing state and federal law already allows hunting and fishing.

The deeper question is what protection those traditions will have tomorrow.

Amendment 83 would place the right to hunt and fish in the Colorado Constitution while expressly preserving sound scientific wildlife management, public safety, future hunting and fishing opportunities, and private-property rights.

That balance matters.

Colorado’s hunters and anglers have helped conserve the wildlife that makes this state extraordinary. They have paid into the system, participated in wildlife management, protected habitat, obeyed seasons and limits, and passed their outdoor traditions from one generation to the next.

Now Colorado is deciding what legal protection that heritage should receive for the generations still to come.

Hunting and fishing are worth protecting in Colorado’s Constitution. They are more than recreation. They are part of Colorado’s heritage, an essential tool of responsible wildlife management, and a tradition that connects families and generations to wildlife and the land. Hunting and fishing also give Colorado families the opportunity to put healthy, nutritious food on their tables.

Amendment 83 recognizes something hunters and anglers have understood for generations: hunting and fishing are not the enemies of conservation. They are an essential part of conservation. Protecting the right to hunt and fish while preserving sound scientific wildlife management, public safety, and private-property rights recognizes both sides of that responsibility.

We inherited this hunting and fishing heritage because generations before us protected it. The question before Colorado now is whether that same heritage will be protected for our children, our grandchildren, and the generations of hunters and anglers who will follow us.

Hunter Nation believes the answer to that question is clear.

Our heritage is worth protecting.

Our wildlife is worth conserving.

And our hunting and fishing traditions are worth passing on.

Hunter Nation strongly supports the constitutional protection of Colorado’s hunting and fishing heritage, and we are asking for your support by making sure you get out and vote YES on Amendment 83.

Keith Mark is the founder and CEO of Hunter Nation, a nonprofit that supports wildlife and conservation.

On the Alaska Peninsula, near the Aleutian Islands, the 800-or-so Aleut residents of King Cove have “pleaded for safe and reliable road access” to the neighboring community of Cold Bay for decades. There is no hospital in King Cove, and it’s only accessible by air or water, weather permitting. Bad weather delaying flights out of the town’s gravel airstrip has led to over 217 medical evacuations since 2013. An 18-mile, single-lane, unpaved road to Cold Bay, winding through a corner of the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, would allow residents to get to Cold Bay’s all-weather airstrip and get lifesaving medical care.

After decades of ping-pong between administrations, construction was finally set to begin this summer. Yet in August, a federal judge vacated a necessary land exchange between the federal government and an Alaska Native corporation, ruling the Interior Department had violated federal law, including the Endangered Species Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).

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Since they’re so remote, I’ve never been to King Cove or Cold Bay. But I left my birthplace of Wasilla, Alaska, for college in 2018, and I haven’t yet come home. I’m far from alone: of the high school class of 2005 who got their college degrees outside of Alaska, only 25 percent were living in-state in 2021. The state has lost more residents to migration than it has gained for thirteen straight years.

Alaska’s fourth governor, Jay Hammond, served between 1974 and 1982, and championed the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which he intended to give all Alaskans an ownership stake in the state’s resources. He evaluated proposed projects during his governorship under four criteria that he “felt crucial to assure healthy resource development.”

That last principle is in Alaska’s state constitution, Article VIII, which requires the legislature to manage the “utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources” for “the maximum benefit of its people.” Yet the state struggles to develop the projects that would fix problems and bring economic opportunity to its residents, despite utilization and development ranking just as highly as conservation in the state’s founding documents.

Hammond’s rubric also doesn’t prioritize the opinions of national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Defenders of Wildlife (Washington, D.C.) and Wilderness Watch (Missoula, MT) — two of the organizations that successfully got the King Cove land exchange squashed. Alaska is worth a great deal to people who will never live here, as a fundraising icon that has to stay untouched and argued about in conference rooms on K Street and the corridors of federal agencies.

These organizations do not have to live with the consequences of these decisions, and they tend to flatten the serious debates over natural resource projects, treating the people who live in Alaska as a monolith when it is convenient to their priorities. Consider the Ambler Road, a proposed 211-mile industrial road to a copper and zinc mining area in the Northwest Arctic Borough. In 1980, Alaska agreed to set aside 10 federal parks, preserves, and monuments spanning more than 100 million acres of Alaska wilderness. In a great compromise, ANILCA guarantees that “The [Interior] Secretary shall permit such access” to the mining district for resource development.

After initial approval by the first Trump administration in 2020, and the Biden administration suspending the permits and denying the right-of-way, the Trump administration last year cleared the project to proceed. The Wilderness Society called the federal government’s decision a “betrayal of Alaska’s overwhelming local opposition to the project.”

But it’s not unanimous in the slightest. When the Biden Administration blocked the Ambler Road, PJ Simon, first chief of the Allakaket Tribal Council, said, “We need this road access to feed our families and allow for more affordable goods… as well as the jobs and investment it would provide for our village.” Miles Cleveland, president of the Native Village of Ambler, said that the road is “the only way our villages will survive,” and offers “a path forward for my grandchildren and my people.”

The Ambler road is only more urgent as the Northwest Arctic Borough’s largest employer, the Red Dog zinc mine, stares down a dwindling supply expected to deplete around 2031. The Borough has seen a 1.43 percent average annual decline in population over the last five years as young people move away.

I could go on about the proposed projects delayed for years, or even decades, in Alaska — from the Alaska liquefied natural gas pipeline (AK LNG) and oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to the Susitna-Watana hydroelectric dam — and why I, and others, think these projects can be pursued in an environmentally sound way and bring “maximum benefit” to the people of Alaska.

Yet the broader point is this: Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of different projects. In cases like King Cove, where Alaskans are dying for lack of medical care, the answers to Hammond’s questions seem to tilt in favor. For the Ambler Road, the calculus is more nuanced. But every Alaskan has a stake in these projects that employees at far-away NGOs will never be able to match, through ownership in the Permanent Fund Dividend and through careful stewardship of the land they fish, hunt, mine, drill, and recreate in.

Gov. Hammond, when asked if he was an environmentalist, responded, “Of course. Isn’t everyone?” But, he continues, “there are also social, economic, and spiritual dimensions to the environment.” Those are too often ignored. Without responsible economic development, young Alaskans move away, and the state suffers when its next generation of caretakers is driven away by lack of economic opportunities and necessary infrastructure.

The people of King Cove are no closer to the road they need than when I was a little kid. Someday, I’d like to come home to an Alaska that makes opportunities for the people who live there.

Sarah Montalbano is energy policy analyst at Always On Energy Research and the Independence Institute, and a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Center for Energy and Conservation. She writes on Substack at Montalbano Mondays.

In 1995, Republican Cindy Watson arrived in the North Carolina House of Representatives representing a rural district in hog country. She came as a believer in free enterprise and limited government, ready to champion the farm economy.

Early in her tenure, her constituents started calling: families whose well water had tested positive for E. coli, parents whose children developed asthma downwind of open-air cesspits holding the waste of millions of hogs, and small farmers whose contaminated land could no longer safely grow food. Watson listened, and she realized this wasn’t the free market she’d come to defend.

Then, a single hog operation spilled 25 million gallons of waste from its cesspits into a major river, more than twice the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Watson could have looked the other way, leaving intact exemptions that industry-friendly legislators had carved into state law, shielding large hog operations from the rules everyone else lived by. Instead, she did what a representative is supposed to do. She stood with her own people and championed legislation to phase out the waste pits and pause new construction.

It passed, but at a cost. Watson received death threats for challenging the pork industry. The following year, the state’s largest corporate hog producers bankrolled a brutal smear campaign to remove her from office, spending what would be nearly $3 million in today’s dollars to unseat a single State House incumbent. She lost her party’s primary by fewer than twenty votes.

“I am no ‘tree hugger’; I am certainly no zealot for a cause,” Watson said. “I am simply ‘my kid’s mom’ who loves Mother Earth and made a decision to do the right thing to protect her.”

Three decades later, the system Watson confronted has only grown more powerful and concentrated, and those in government willing to scrutinize it remain rare.

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Watson’s story is why a Republican conservation agenda must involve rethinking industrial animal agriculture – and backing the public servants willing to do just that. As she discovered, those bearing the highest costs of this system are the very people a conservative agenda should protect: rural communities, family farmers, and taxpayers forced to fund the failures of private business.

Change could not come soon enough for Americans under Big Ag’s thumb. Ask a family who lost their newborn to blue baby syndrome after their well was poisoned by waste. Or the farmer whose creek, the one his great-grandfather fished, now sees fish kills leave thousands dead in the water.

About 99 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs produced in America come from heavily subsidized, industrialized operations. The largest operations generate waste on par with a small city’s sewage output, but with almost none of the treatment infrastructure. Those toxins end up in the water table, the soil, and the air the neighbors breathe.

Meanwhile, the independent farmer down the road raising animals the way his family has for generations must compete against an operation that treats its waste as someone else’s problem – or raise animals under contract for a corporation whose demands bury him in debt.

Contaminated waterways, property values cut in half, and an epidemic of farmer suicide are not hypotheticals in these counties. They are the terms of a deal rural America never agreed to.

The harm doesn’t stay in farm country. Packing animals together at industrial density requires dosing them continuously with pharmaceuticals just to keep them alive. Synthetic hormones and growth drugs, some so dangerous they’re banned or restricted in over 160 countries, push animals to grow faster than nature ever intended. It all ends up on our plates and in our bodies.

An alliance is forming around these problems. Whatever brings people to this issue, whether health, dignity, land, or faith, MAHA moms and regenerative-ag environmentalists alike are arriving at the same conclusion: Washington should not be subsidizing a system that poisons our land and our children. Get the government’s thumb off the scale, and let responsibility fall where it belongs.

One solution is to take a hard look at corporate welfare. Subsidies, liability protections, and checkoff programs that tax every farmer to fund generic marketing overwhelmingly benefit the largest corporations — some of which are not even American. Smithfield Foods, which produces a quarter of America’s pork, answers to a Chinese parent company while marketing itself in the American family farmer’s image. Meanwhile, the real American family farmer pays the checkoff, absorbs the runoff, and watches his margins disappear. No free market would ever have extended these favors.

A second approach is to restore rural Americans’ property rights. A family’s land and water are theirs, but so-called “right-to-farm” laws shield large-scale industrial operators from the nuisance claims of the families next door. These laws pervert a principle conservatives spent generations defending: no theory of liberty includes the freedom to fill your neighbor’s well with your waste.

A third step, and a matter of basic federalism, is to stop Washington from overriding pro-farmer, pro-conservation standards that voters have already chosen. Over 40 percent of Americans now live in states with voter-approved minimum farm animal welfare standards, including bans on gestation crates: narrow metal cages that prevent a mother pig from turning around or avoiding her own excrement.

Beyond basic dignity for animals, these laws offer a market in which independent producers can finally outcompete the industrial machine by growing healthier, cleaner, more conscientious meat.

But due to outside influences on Washington’s top pork lobby intent on disrupting that market, it has spent this Congress pushing the “Save Our Bacon” (SOB) Act, which would nullify those laws and thousands of other state farming laws.

This fight is playing out right now and has split conservatives in two. Last fall, independent hog farmers circled the Capitol in tractors to protest the SOB Act. A vocal minority of Republican legislators backed them up, while others sided with the pro-SOB pork lobby that funds their campaigns. The House passed its Farm Bill with the provision intact, while the Senate has so far left it out of its version.

As the bill moves toward final passage, Washington conservatives face the choice Cindy Watson made 30 years ago: to stand with Big Ag’s checks or their own constituents.

These projects and many others put to work the values conservatives have always championed: stewardship of the land, property and states’ rights, and skepticism of concentrated power financed by public money.

Conservation was never a partisan project of the left. It was a project for all who felt a duty to creation and our children’s futures. It was Cindy Watson’s project, and she sacrificed her career for it.

Watson lost her seat because she stood alone against consolidated money. But the lesson is not that the fight is unwinnable; it’s that a single determined public servant nearly won it, with a campaign budget smaller than what her opponents spent in a month. Imagine what a generation of Cindy Watsons could do.

The most important challenge in food and agriculture policy today is not messaging or money. It’s talent. We need conservation-minded conservatives in the offices where farm bills are drafted, checkoff programs are overseen, and rural water is defended - public servants who answer to the American people rather than the corporations degrading the legacy of American farming. My organization, Food Policy Pathways, exists to help those public servants get a seat at the table.

The next Cindy Watson is already out there, looking for a way in. The question for conservatives who care about the land is whether, this time, she won’t have to fight alone.

Rachel Atcheson is the Founder and Executive Director of Food Policy Pathways. The views in this piece do not necessarily reflect the American Conservation Coalition’s organizational stances.

My townhouse in Miller Beach, on the eastern edge of Gary, Indiana, sits a block off the water. Walk that block north to Wells Street Beach, stand on the sand, and the whole argument is laid out in front of you. Look east, and the shoreline runs toward the Porter County dunes — the black oak savanna, the interdunal wetlands, and Cowles Bog, where American ecology was more or less invented. Turn west, and you see the stacks of Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America, once the largest in the world. My Papaw Hollis spent most of his working life there. So did my dad, until he was laid off during the consolidation of the 1980s.

Visitors and activists assume one of those things intrudes on the other. I think they have it backward. Both belong here, and the question is whether both can last here.

Roosevelt’s late arrival

Theodore Roosevelt did lend his name to these dunes. In May 1917, the National Dunes Park Association staged an enormous pageant on Waverly Beach — a thousand performers, tens of thousands of spectators — as unabashed propaganda for a proposed Sand Dunes National Park. Roosevelt sent a message of support, as J. Ronald Engel documents in Sacred Sands. So did the governors of Indiana and Illinois. It was eleven years too late for the western half of the shoreline.

J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel, chartered in 1901, began assembling land here in 1905. By the summer of 1906, teams of horses and mules were grading the dunes flat. The Grand Calumet River was rerouted, the wetlands were drained, and the town was named for the company’s chairman, Elbert Gary. In Duel for the Dunes, Kay Franklin and Norma Schaeffer put it plainly: in erecting Gary Works, U.S. Steel destroyed the Lake County dunes forever. All of that happened while Roosevelt was in the White House protecting land two thousand miles west.

The problem was more than inattention. At the height of the Panic of 1907, Elbert Gary and Henry Clay Frick came to the White House to ask whether the government would object if U.S. Steel absorbed the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, its largest southern competitor. Roosevelt said he could not advise it but would not stop it. Taft’s Justice Department sued over that transaction in 1911, and in 1920 the Supreme Court declined to break the company up, holding that size alone is no offense. Standard Oil and American Tobacco had both been dismembered in 1911. U.S. Steel became the largest American corporation to survive the trust-busting era intact. The man who broke Morgan’s railroad trust let his steel trust stand after it leveled the dunes.

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That record is worth holding alongside Roosevelt’s own definition of the word, from The New Nationalism in 1910:

“Conservation does not mean nonuse or nondevelopment. It does not mean tying up the natural resources of the states. It means the utilization of those resources under such regulation and controls as will prevent waste, extravagance and monopoly, but at the same time, not merely promoting but encouraging such use and development as will serve the interests of the people generally.”

That is not a philosophy of locking places away. It is a philosophy of using them well. Applied to Northwest Indiana, it does not ask whether we should make steel on this shoreline. It asks how.

Civil society intervention

The dunes that survived are worth the answer, and the people who saved them did not work for the federal government. Henry Cowles was a University of Chicago botanist. His 1899 study of plant succession on these dunes essentially founded American plant ecology, and he wrote it about ground that is now bracketed by steel mills. Half a century later, in June 1952, Dorothy Buell gathered roughly two dozen neighbors — nearly all of them women — in her living room in Ogden Dunes and formed the Save the Dunes Council. No budget, no staff, and no standing.

They did not win everything. The port and the park were authorized in separate bills a year apart, and Congress deliberately tied them together: no appropriation for Burns Harbor until the dunes got a lakeshore. Coexistence here is not a recent idea. It is the founding legal architecture of the place. The Council could also outlast anyone. When NIPSCO tried to build a nuclear plant on the parcel between the lakeshore and Bethlehem Steel, the opposition held out until the project was abandoned in 1981, with $191 million spent and one percent built.

Indiana Dunes became a state park in 1926, a national lakeshore in 1966, and a national park in 2019. On roughly 15,000 acres, it supports approximately 1,100 native vascular plant species and thirty percent of Indiana’s listed rare, threatened, and endangered plants. The Park Service calls this ground the birthplace of American ecology. Arctic, Atlantic coastal, and Great Plains species grow within sight of a blast furnace.

A new era

Nippon Steel now owns U.S. Steel. As a condition of clearance, it signed a National Security Agreement and issued the federal government a golden share, which gives the President consent rights over any reduction in committed capital — roughly $11 billion through 2028, including about $3.1 billion for Gary Works. In a region that has watched capital leave for forty years, that is the largest commitment to Gary Works since the mill was built.

To date, the announced projects come to roughly $300 million to reline Blast Furnace No. 14 and about $200 million to upgrade the hot strip mill. Some of the remainder is ordinary sustaining capital that never gets a press release. No announcements have been made about the rest, and perhaps that is the good news.

A reline extends a furnace’s life by about two decades, so Gary will be making iron from metallurgical coke into the 2040s, and coke oven emissions are a known human carcinogen. My Papaw started at Gary Works around 1955 and worked fifteen years before the EPA existed. Because of their exposure to pollution, I knew men who didn’t get many years of retirement after decades in the mill.

Newer technology could change that arithmetic. Hydrogen injection displaces a meaningful share of the coke without abandoning the asset Nippon is about to rebuild, and the BP Whiting refinery, one of the largest industrial hydrogen operations in the Midwest, sits eight miles from the Gary Works gate.

The bigger opportunity for The Region is direct reduced iron (DRI), and U.S. Steel has already committed to it. In April, the board approved $1.9 billion for a DRI plant at Big River Steel in Osceola, Arkansas — the first in the country to be built alongside an operating mill and its electric arc furnaces. The case for bringing it to Gary is competitiveness before carbon. DRI runs on natural gas, which America produces in enormous volume and sells cheaply — the clearest structural advantage we hold over Chinese steel. With automakers already writing lower-emission steel into procurement terms, this seems like a natural play.

In the name of silicon and iron

In 1919, at a gathering of Jens Jensen’s Friends of Our Native Landscape at Lake Front Park in Gary, W. D. Richardson dedicated this landscape element by element: “In the name of silicon, the great earth builder. In the name of iron, maker of civilization.”

Consider when he said it. The Great Steel Strike had begun three weeks before. On October 4, a riot broke out on Broadway. Two days later, Governor Goodrich declared martial law, and Major General Leonard Wood arrived from Fort Sheridan with more than four thousand federal troops and banned public assembly on every street and in every park in the city. Wood had commanded the Rough Riders; Roosevelt had been his second, and had died that January.

Columbus Day fell six days after the troops came. Richardson stood in a Gary park under military occupation and consecrated this shoreline during the worst week this city ever had. He understood they were never two subjects.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 is what allowed Roosevelt to protect the Grand Canyon, but he couldn’t have done anything for The Region because the dunes had already been purchased by the industrialists of the time. Today, the capital is committed, and the government holds a share to keep it committed. What remains is the decision of what to buy. If Roosevelt were here today, I’d like to think he’d finish his map by supporting the coexistence and juxtaposition that is Sand and Steel.

Robert Ordway is a third-generation Northwest Indiana native and holds a MS in International Commerce & Policy from Valparaiso University. He writes on cultural and economic issues related to 20th century southern migration, deindustrialization, the Rust Belt and steel industry.

Background

There are 10 Western states with about 61,500 wild horses and approximately 23,900 burros. Most are located in Nevada, Wyoming, and Oregon. Wild and free-roaming horses are federally protected under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. This federal protection says that wild horses cannot simply be captured, killed, harassed, or sold like ordinary stray livestock. The law also gives the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) management authority over 175 Herd Management Areas across ~25 million acres. The U.S. Forest Service has management authority for horses on Forest Service land, a smaller role than the BLM. The agencies must maintain healthy populations while making sure public rangelands stay healthy as well. If populations become too large, the government can remove excess animals and make them available for adoption or other authorized placement. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act does allow culling of wild horses as a management tool, but Congress traditionally has used appropriations restrictions to prevent such a cull, and wild horses are not allowed to be sold for slaughter.

It’s become apparent that the status quo is not working for American wild horses. Their numbers exceed BLM management targets. Livestock can be moved seasonally, but wild horses remain on the range year round, which has negative impacts on vegetation, soil, water resources, and the overarching health of rangelands. These same rangelands support iconic western species like elk, pronghorn, mule deer, and sage grouse. Because an introduced grazer is allowed to be this abundant without any seasonal restrictions/movements, they are destroying habitat for native wildlife. Unlimited population growth is often presented as the humane thing to do. But, eventually the numbers become so big that there isn’t enough food or water. Simply allowing horse populations to grow without effective management is not necessarily the humane alternative. Eventually, populations can exceed available forage and water, resulting in declining body condition, starvation, dehydration, and death.

Managers should have access to a broad range of humane, science-based management tools, including removals and adoption, fertility control, sterilization, and, where other approaches are inadequate, consideration of humane lethal removal as a last-resort management tool. Managers can use fertility control and sterilization. However, these tools have not yet been deployed at a scale sufficient to control population growth across most large western herds. Fertility control is particularly difficult and expensive in large, remote herds and works best once populations have already been brought closer to management targets. In other words, contraception alone can’t solve a herd that’s already twice the desired population. The goal should not be eliminating wild horses from the American West. It should be maintaining healthy, free-ranging herds at levels that the landscape can sustain while protecting the native wildlife, waters, and rangelands with which they coexist.

Reforms

Policy reforms that could enable managers to have access to a broad range of responses could include beginning with and prioritizing severely overpopulated herds. BLM already has authority to gather and remove excess horses, but limited adoption demand, limited holding facility capacity, and the cost of a lifetime of off-range care constrain the scale and speed of removals. Congress should address this bottleneck by expanding successful adoption, training, sale, and transfer programs while developing a financially and ecologically sustainable policy for excess horses that cannot be placed in private care. Rather than continuing to rely on indefinite taxpayer-funded holding, managers should have access to additional humane options for addressing animals that cannot be adopted or otherwise placed. Congress should provide dedicated funding and clear targets for contraception and other fertility-control programs. Fertility control should be used aggressively to maintain herds once they have been brought near sustainable population levels, reducing the need for repeated gathers and removals in the future.

Where herds remain substantially above sustainable levels and adoption, transfer, and other nonlethal options are insufficient, Congress should consider allowing carefully regulated humane lethal removal as a last-resort management tool. Finally, managers should have access to humane lethal removal as a carefully regulated last resort. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act already provides authority for the humane destruction of certain excess animals, but Congressional appropriations restrictions have prevented BLM from using federal funds to euthanize healthy horses that cannot be adopted. Congress could modify these restrictions so that humane lethal removal is available only when clearly defined ecological and animal-welfare thresholds have been met and reasonable nonlethal alternatives (such as adoption, transfer, fertility control, and other placement options) are inadequate. This would not become the default method of managing wild horses, but neither should managers be forced to choose between degraded rangelands, animals facing starvation, and maintaining excess horses in taxpayer-funded captivity indefinitely.

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The long-term objective should be to shift federal resources away from maintaining tens of thousands of horses in captivity and toward maintaining healthy, sustainable, free-ranging herds on healthy western rangelands. Reforms aimed at scientific transparency could also help managers determine sustainable herd sizes in a way that won’t cause public backlash. BLM should regularly review and update its Appropriate Management Levels (AMLs) using current data on vegetation, drought, native wildlife populations, livestock, and horse populations. The agency could also clearly explain to the public how those factors are weighed when establishing herd targets. This would help address criticism that AMLs can appear arbitrary or primarily designed to accommodate competing land uses, while also providing managers and the public with greater confidence that wild horse population reductions are based on demonstrated ecological conditions.

Dr. Kelly Dunning is an Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming. She is also a member of ACC’s Board of Directors.

A century ago, Americans watched the land turn on them.

Homesteaders across the southern plains spent the 1910s and 1920s turning 5.2 million acres of prairie into wheat fields. In the process, they had severed the roots of the native grasses that had previously kept the earth steady through centuries of drought and flood cycles, leaving the land with nothing left to protect it. Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew off in 1935 alone, and a single storm in May of 1934 carried Oklahoma and Texas dirt two thousand miles east, dusting the desks of Washington on its way out.

The apocalyptic scene was one of our own making. We had refused to let the land rest, forgetting that Sabbath was never ours to give.

The late Wendell Berry was scathing when referencing the hypocrisies he saw between Christianity and Christians’ in-practice stewardship of creation. That indictment lands squarely on the chin of American agriculture, which has sped up to keep pace with American life rather than meet the rhythms of biblical stewardship.

Blasphemy is a strong word for a farming practice, though the pace of American life makes it easy to forget that rest is neither a reward nor a regulation imposed on a broken world. Rather, it was written into creation before the Fall of man and long before it was inscribed into stone on Mount Sinai. Rest, like good work, is part of the rhythm of the created world.

To be a created being is to be limited, not just in metaphysical ways but in the tangible, physical realities of the earth we occupy. In this way, sabbath is not something we grant to God, it’s something we observe. Sabbath is, in perhaps its most direct form, the practice of admitting that we are not the Creator. If the creator of the universe rested on the seventh day, refusal to engage in Sabbath is a form of arrogance.

Rest is woven into the fabric of the created world itself, not just a feature of the work week. Leviticus and Exodus give the fields a sabbath of their own, instructing Israel to work the land for six years and then to leave the seventh alone entirely, with whatever came up on its own left for the poor and the wild animals. The command was as literal as it sounds, telling a subsistence farming society to stop farming for a year and to trust that the sixth year’s harvest would carry them through the gap.

That trust had already been tested in the wilderness, where manna gathered beyond the day’s need bred worms and stank by morning, spoiling in the hands of the people who had tried to store it. The reasoning behind both is explained in Leviticus: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.” Israel farmed as a tenant, and the rest it owed was written into the lease.

American farming would look unrecognizable to a culture that left its fields fallow on purpose. The advent of cheap fertilizer made fallow years begin to look like waste, and they dropped out of the rotation soon after. By the 1970s Earl Butz, Nixon’s agriculture secretary, was urging farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow and to “get big or get out.” Our posture toward the land changed, though the land itself had not. We have gone on asking more of finite ground by whatever means each decade’s technology allows, and the costs have come due in the soil and in the water underneath it.

In Leviticus and 2 Chronicles, the exile is described as the land finally enjoying the sabbaths the Israelites denied it. This is more than a biblical metaphor, it is part of our reality living in the created world: rest happens either way. The choice we have is whether sabbath is given freely or if the land must come to collect its due.

Researchers mapped the Corn Belt and found that nearly 100 million acres, more than a third of the region, has lost its A horizon entirely. This dark, carbon-rich topsoil provides the main biological foundation for plant growth and nutrient absorption, and it’s being washed away from our fields. Chemical fertilizers are unable to make up the gap, either. The loss already stands at roughly 6% of corn and soybean yields, close to $3 billion a year in economic losses.

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Water is going the same way. Western Kansas draws its share of groundwater nine times faster than precipitation is able to refill it, and more than 80% of the water once stored under some countries is already gone. This is forcing farmers to revert to dryland, meaning farming on rainfall alone – rainfall that in western Kansas runs under 20 inches a year. Corn will not reliably grow on that, so the ground goes to wheat and sorghum at a fraction of the value. These crops often only yield every other year while the land sits bare to bank moisture for the next crop.

Our relationship to the land need not be a series of booms and busts, nor do we need to reject modern agriculture outright. We just need to rediscover a rhythm of rest and recovery. Aligning our farming methods and, importantly, the financial infrastructure and public policies that support them, with this rhythm is the harder half of the work. The practice itself is simple enough: keep something living in the ground year-round, rotate what is planted, disturb the soil as little as possible, and incorporate animals where it makes sense. A cover crop does what fallow was meant to do, holding moisture and rebuilding organic matter, and does it better, since living roots hold soil that bare ground surrenders to the elements. It also does something fallow never could, because a cover crop can be grazed or cut for forage, so the land takes its rest while families eat.

Wendell Berry’s argument at its core was that good work honors the work of God, making how we farm a religious question whether or not we treat it as one. Scripture promises that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, and the rest a field takes is a small sign pointing toward that larger one. We do not solve sabbath, we submit to it. The land will have its rest either way.

Alina Voss is the Communications Director at the American Conservation Coalition.

A year ago, my wife and I decided to stay in Rhode Island and build our roots here, despite the cost. I had come to believe I needed to stop running in search of the perfect place and instead stay and create the change I so desired: a family enterprise we were all invested in, our children growing up watching and participating as we built something meaningful, useful, beautiful, good, and eternal. That’s when I noticed the wool shawl sweater on me; the chickens and children running around outside; the chicken coop and run that I built; the plentiful grassy yard around my house.

I looked at the tag to see what the sweater was made of, and where:

“80% recycled wool, 20% nylon. Made in Vietnam.”

I wondered if I could make this here, in America, maybe even in New England.

In short order I realized it wasn’t remotely simple to do in New England, let alone America. Live sheep existed, but nothing like they used to: the American flock peaked at 56 million head in 1942 and stands near five million today, much of it now hair sheep raised for lamb, not wool breeds at all. The mills followed; roughly 650 textile plants closed between 1997 and 2009 alone. But sheep and mills are only the endpoints of the whole chain that turns fiber into fashion. Lose your sheep, or your mills, or both, and all the parts in the middle, the shearers, scouring plants, spinning mills, and dyehouses, become lost as well. Though in truth, as I learned, we’re most hampered by the loss of the knitting and finishing, for the machinery, the engineers, and the technical skills – the most expensive parts on the way from fiber to sweater – have disappeared, and even if we patch together the missing middle, we still don’t have the machinery to make the final product.

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When I started calling around to see if anyone could actually knit my sweater, I found practically zero- or at least zero who wanted to return my calls. So I decided to get my own sheep and build the whole thing myself, with any partners who want to be a part of it.

Two months after our Corriedale sheep arrived, I watched their fleeces fall to the earth as our shearer worked them free. Seeing that simple, yet profound conversion was mesmerizing. And it will happen every year, for as long as the animal lives, which is also why so much American wool is discarded. Medium wool commonly fetches around 20 cents a pound, less than the shearing costs, and even where a buyer exists, transport eats whatever the clip might bring in return. So fleeces get burned, buried, or dumped in ditches across the country.

That’s when I realized I was dealing less with a wool problem and more with a land problem. All around me I see pastures but no sheep, and in fact, no animals at all. On the smaller pastures around us, sheep would be ideal, but when the wool becomes worthless, the sheep earn less, and the pasture loses its viability as a productive landscape. Soon, though it may take a generation or two, the family views it as nothing more than a parcel to be sold to some developer. The American Farmland Trust has recorded roughly 11 million acres of agricultural land converted to development between 2001 and 2016. I would wager that on a good share of those acres, the working economy died years earlier, when the buyers of what that land produced went away. We all groan when the machinery appears to prepare a field for development, but this is just the final act of a series of events set in motion when the mill in town closed many years prior. We were too ignorant to notice, or worse, took it for a sign of advancement.

Now, what I am about to say comes from a friend of conservation. Every easement in New England is a good thing, and wilderness set aside for its own sake- our parks and refuges and deep woods- needs no economic defense from me, an avid upland and deer hunter of those lands. But for working land, the easement is only half the battle. It may preserve the ground to pasture sheep on, yet it cannot preserve the thing that makes the fleece worth shearing.

That distinction is what I’ve come to call the working landscape, whose conservation comes less through preservation than through productivity. On the land you have the woods, pastures, and meadows, and the farmers, shepherds, ranchers, and hunters who tend them; in town you have the shops, mills, and factories, and the trades who work within them. The two are more connected than one realizes, for the town needs the land just as much as the land needs the town. And this working landscape is as important as the natural landscape spread through it, and must be conserved as carefully, for the two were never really separate to begin with.

The artifacts of such a time stand right in front of our faces through much of New England: stone walls running through secondary-growth forest that was once sheep pasture; the abandoned or repurposed mill in the connecting town. The Blackstone River Valley, not far from my home, is where America went from farm to factory, when Samuel Slater set the nation’s first water-powered cotton spinning to work in Pawtucket in 1790 (the practices in those early mills were far from good, though that is hardly a reason not to run them better now). Farm and mill rose together, and when the mills left, the farms did not flourish without them. Soon enough they thinned out too, along with all the pieces in between, really the supply chain itself. As the mills with their workers go, so go our meadows with their animals and their stewards.

What can conservationists do? First, land trusts that work to preserve farmland should also look at nearby markets for what the farm produces, and count that production as part of their mission. Second, historic preservationists, who have saved so many of our mills, though converted to offices, museums, and apartments, might weigh whether an operating mill, producing goods of value to land and town, is a higher form of preservation. Third, our schools should take seriously the teaching and apprenticing of the trades the whole chain depends on: shearers, machinists, technicians, textile workers. And fourth, perhaps most important, buyers, institutions, and customers both must not only come to appreciate but also accept that a wool sweater made locally, with local sheep, local hands, and local machines, will not be cheap, though it will outlast every cheap thing they own. We don’t need to recreate Sturbridge Villages all over New England to make this possible (though it would be cool). We have modern machines, interstate freight, and the internet to sell over. As long as the value comes back to the land, the town, the people who grew it, and the people who made it, we will know this is good.

At the end of the day, my sheep are still here growing their wool, just as they did last year and will next. That wool will have to be sheared, whether I do it or not. And ideally it becomes something, and on its way to becoming something, every hand it touches finds further meaning in the work. A productivity that gives purpose. Because as long as the wool comes every year, those hands will remain productive. Or they should, if we do the hard and proper work to help conserve it.

Greg Cello is a husband, father of four, U.S. Army veteran, and writer living on a small homestead in rural Rhode Island and building his sheep farm, Cello Acres. He writes about family, land, industry, and the recovery of rooted life at Kinward and on X at @gregcello.

August has always been one of my favorite, and busiest, seasons at ACC. It’s been that way since I initially joined as Southern Regional Director in August 2022. The excitement of a new school year energizes us and gives us momentum unlike any other.

While the weather forecast still says summer (who else is over these 100-plus-degree days?), we’re already thinking about fall kickoff events, tailgates, hikes, and more. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes preparation that leads us to this moment, so when August comes around, we’re ready.

For the past two years, our annual Summit has taken place during the first weekend of August. That’s an intentional choice. We want to end the summer on a high note while preparing our members for an exciting rest of the year.

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This year’s Summit brought our Top 50 members to Medora, North Dakota, for a weekend centered around our movement, time outdoors, and conversations with incredible speakers.

There is a lot of planning that goes into making this event special. At ACC, we pride ourselves on the member experience, and no detail goes unnoticed. From custom shirts to swag bags filled with high-quality, made-in-the-USA goods, we want our members to know that the work they put into this movement matters, and that we notice it.

But - Summit isn’t only about celebrating what our members have already accomplished. It’s about preparing them for what’s next.

One of the things we spend a lot of time focused on as a field team is fall branch planning, and we intentionally incorporate that work into our Summit programming. It’s rare that we’re able to gather so many of our top members in one place, and even more rare to have every member of the field team there alongside them to offer support in person. There’s something different about planning your semester in a room full of people who are just as excited about this movement as you are.

Our college breakout at the Summit might have been the best example of that. As a field team, we had an agenda and a presentation. We had spent several hours together preparing exactly how we wanted the conversation to go.

Then, we threw it all aside.

Once our members started talking, we realized they didn’t need us to lead the conversation. Our job was simply to sit back, listen, and step in when they needed us.

For the rest of the breakout, members traded ideas, told stories, asked each other questions, and learned from what was working on campuses completely different from their own.

Texas branch leader Nick Walker shared his plans for a back-to-school Buc-ee’s social. Our Utah members talked about the ways they connect the dots between their ACC work and other conservative organizations on campus. Our Florida members explained how inflatable sharks have somehow become a way to draw attention to their work on campus (this is the kind of thing that could only happen in Florida).

There were stories about pulling off large events, ideas for recruiting new members, plenty of humor, and moments when one person’s story immediately sparked an idea for someone sitting across the room. Staff barely had to say a word.

When the breakout ended, field staff looked at each other and laughed. We’d spent several hours preparing for a conversation that our members had just led better than we ever could have.

Our National Field Director, Hanna van Loon, said it best: “That was way better than we could have done.”

And it was. I think that’s part of what makes Summit so special.

We can create the agenda. We can bring everyone to Medora. We can find great speakers, plan the programming, order the swag, and make sure every detail is taken care of. But even with all that planning, we can’t manufacture what happened in that room.

That comes from bringing together young leaders who genuinely care about this movement and giving them the space to learn from one another. Those organic moments are where the Summit becomes more than an event.

A member from Texas hears something from a member in Colorado and takes the idea home. Someone from North Carolina shares a lesson learned the hard way that saves another branch leader from making the same mistake. Another member walks away inspired by the stories around the room, ready to get more involved with ACC.

That’s community, and ultimately what makes our movement stronger. This is where the excitement of the weekend begins turning into something tangible.

Now, we get to watch those plans leave Medora.

Over the next few weeks, our members will return to campuses. Our young professionals and hubs will host an exciting slate of events across the country. Soon, the ideas scribbled down during Summit will become kickoff meetings, tailgates, panels, hikes, cleanups, tabling events, and conversations with people who may be encountering ACC for the first time.

That’s what makes this time of year so exciting for our field team.

We know how much work has happened behind the scenes to get here. We’ve watched these members grow as leaders. We’ve sat beside them as they’ve mapped out their goals. Now, we get to see them take ownership of what comes next.

Our Top 50 left Medora energized, but the goal was never for that energy to stay with 50 people. They go back to their branches and communities. They bring in new members. Those members bring their friends. New leaders emerge. New branches grow. And little by little, campus by campus and city by city, the movement gets stronger.

This year, I’m experiencing this season from a new perspective. As a new mom, conversations about the “next generation” feel a little different than they used to. Watching young leaders take ownership of their communities, learn from one another, and choose to build something bigger than themselves gives me a lot of hope for the world my daughter will grow up in.

Maybe that’s part of why this Summit felt so special to me. We spend a lot of time talking about building a better future. In Medora, I got to sit quietly in a room and watch some of the people who are going to build it.

That’s the momentum we’re carrying into this fall. And if Medora was any indication of what’s ahead, we’re just getting started.

Lily Long is the Vice President of Grassroots at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). She lives in Northwest Tennessee with her husband, Jordan, and their daughter, Ellie.