No Land Is Safe

Defending the land at home and abroad

Richard Jones/Wikimedia Commons

As we prepare to fight yet another administration over the fate of our American public lands, it’s helpful to look at the bigger picture. Let’s zoom out.

Puncak Jaya, in the Indonesian province of West Papua, is the tallest island mountain on Earth. Its slopes begin in some of the most biodiverse rainforests in the world, while its summit holds remnant glaciers over 16,000 feet above sea level. In pictures, its dramatic cliffs and jagged gendarmes remind me of the high peaks of the Wind River Range, though it is in fact significantly taller. It is one of the only places near the equator that gets regular snowfall; its snowy peak is considered sacred by many of Papua’s over 300 indigenous groups. Tree ferns grow in its sub-alpine meadows.

A few miles from Puncak Jaya, just 2,000 feet below the summit, lies one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world, the Grasberg mine. It is an open pit mine over one and a half miles wide at the surface. Today, the Indonesian government owns a slim majority of the mine, but for 50 years the mine belonged to an American mining company from Texas called Freeport. (Freeport-McMoRan is now headquartered in Arizona.)

The ecological impacts of Freeport’s ongoing operations on Puncak Jaya have been staggering. Tailings—mining waste—discharged in the Aikwa river from the mine have caused fish down the entire river’s length to “largely disappear,” threatening the livelihoods of countless indigenous people along the shores. Acid mine drainage and copper contamination have also polluted the region’s drinking water, putting locals at risk of long-term illness and early death.

This is the kind of thing that makes many Americans grateful for our country’s system of public lands and environmental protections. Activists, pundits, and even corporate leaders regularly cite the alleged strength of America’s environmental laws on all kinds of issues, from conservationists hoping to combat deforestation abroad to foreign policy hawks losing sleep over China. The eyesore alone of a sight like the Grasberg mine might seem inconceivable beneath any comparable American landmark. But lately that sense of environmental security is starting to falter.

The question on many people’s minds today is: Can it happen here?

Renewed doubt about the safety of our public lands struck during Trump’s first term, when the administration’s attacks on Bear’s Ears, the Boundary Waters, the Tongass National Forest, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge revealed a new, ruthless commitment by corporate interests to expand the frontiers of natural resource extraction. The effects reverberated even through the Biden Administration as the conservative Supreme Court put new limits on the authority of regulatory agencies like the EPA. Now, a few months into Trump II, it’s difficult to even categorize the scale of the attack. The firing of thousands of public lands employees, the elimination of crucial regulatory and monitoring functions, and the belligerent trolling of Elon Musk’s DOGE in recent weeks seems less like regulatory rollbacks than an outright coup.

Of course, capitalist hunger for the natural resource wealth of the American commons is nothing new. The National Parks have faced proposals to mine, drill, dam, log, and deface the lands in and around their protected landscapes since Hetch Hetchy; even Trump’s first assault on public lands was straight out of a playbook first used by Reagan. Environmental justice advocates will add that bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act have long been selectively enforced, while indigenous nations harbor few illusions about the alleged benevolence of American public land management. For many people in America, it has already happened here.

But speaking of coups: let’s return to Freeport-McMoRan. In 1960, Freeport’s director, Robert Lovett, met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss recent developments in West Papua. Indonesia had recently won independence from the Dutch, but West Papua, on the island of New Guinea, had few cultural or ethnic ties to the rest of the country. In 1957, the defeated Dutch approved a plan to return West Papua to its mostly indigenous population; an indigenous independence movement took hold throughout the province. The next year, however, the Dutch discovered gold near Puncak Jaya. Soon after, Freeport hired an Indonesian military official named Suharto to lead a search for suitable mining areas. (In Indonesia, single names are common.) In his meeting with President Kennedy, the Freeport director urged him to keep West Papua under Indonesian control.

A few years later, the United States supported a bloody military coup against Indonesia’s then-president and the “father” of its independence from the Dutch, a Marxist and Soviet ally named Sukarno. Freeport’s man Suharto, now a general, replaced him as president. He quickly launched a reign of terror against the independence movement of West Papua that killed tens of thousands. West Papua remained part of Indonesia. Suharto awarded Freeport the new Indonesia’s very first foreign investment contract, to build the Grasberg mine.

This isn’t to pick on poor Freeport-McMoRan. Freeport-McMoRan is hardly the only U.S. corporation to have benefitted from a U.S.-backed overseas coup. But as for the question of whether a similar authoritarian coup could unfold here, or whether ecological ruin and injustice could befall more people here, Freeport-McMoRan’s illustrative example seems to flip the question all the way around. Where, ultimately, do these events happen?

The undermining of sovereignty and justice, the genocide of indigenous nations, the destruction of vital natural landscapes and biodiversity across the world—where does this begin? In what offices, board rooms, and hallways is this agenda planned and executed? Where, as we speak, does Trump find these industry henchmen—like former Freeport-McMoRan lobbyist Dennis Lee Forsgren Jr., his 2017 appointee to the EPA’s Office of Water—that now control our sorry, captured government agencies? In what country, with what purported commitments to democracy, environmental protection, and other lofty ideals, do these enemies of life reside?

Right here.

The United States’ legacy of public lands protection sits uneasily next to the older, darker legacies of its rise as a global economic superpower. Whether or not the former always depended on the latter, whether the latter tarnishes and negates the former—that’s above this essay’s paygrade. But in this moment, the clash of these legacies can’t be denied. Even the most groundbreaking environmental protections on American soil are a devil’s bargain when American companies can plot equally groundbreaking atrocities against people and land beyond our shores. This isn’t a crisis of American laws and ideals, or a house divided against itself. It’s something terrible coming home to roost.

Public lands defenders today must recognize this reality: no land is safe until all lands are safe. It’s a heady proposition, and perhaps a big sell to the typical American constituency for public lands protection. To the extent that’s true, it desperately needs to change. The struggle is much broader than many of us recognized during Trump I, or Reagan, or our previous, resurgent Gilded Age. Our response must be broader too. Put simply: the fight for National Parks, environmental safeguards, and the landscapes we cherish close to home is a fight against the forces that profit from extraction and destruction everywhere. Nothing less will do. And while danger lies in allowing the fight for our public lands to retreat into the safer terrain of these past struggles, the hope of confronting it is even greater. If we can win here—right here—the rest of the world has a chance too. Zoom all the way out.