Preserving both past and future.
There’s something about autumn that feels inherently nostalgic. Maybe it’s the first frost, stirring memories of new beginnings and years past. A sudden chill in the air can transport you to the end of a summer romance, or the warmth of a thermos clutched on a tailgate. Colorful leaves might bring back you back to a road-trip through a national park, or the anticipation of gearing up for hunting season. The warmth of a favorite sweater can feel like reuniting with an old friend.
Wherever fall takes you, it often feels bittersweet—a rare window of time that combines past and present, lightness and darkness, warmth and cold, hopes and regrets. Fall is a feeling as much as it is a season. But this year, it feels heavier than usual—with relentless threats to the landscapes, public lands, and wild places that make this time of year so beautiful and meaningful. The places where we recreate, explore, hunt, fish, and connect with our past selves, younger selves, or inner selves.
As you bask in the beauty of fall this season, we encourage you to lean into the nostalgia it brings.
Cuts to protections and funding for public lands, increased drilling and mining, development in pristine areas, and unprecedented wildfires have put millions of acres of natural landscapes at risk of being forever changed. And access to the land itself is increasingly threatened. Places once used for recreation, connection, and passing down generational knowledge are being blocked off, privatized, polluted, sold, and stripped of limited resources.
Whatever your opinions surrounding these increasing assaults, the underlying truth remains the same: without clean air, clean water, ecological balance and wild places, humans will suffer. And when we stop protecting the places that make our country beautiful, sacred, and enviable to the world, what will remain to have any pride in? When we’ve depleted every resource, what will be left to enjoy?
Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt summarized it best:
“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
As you bask in the beauty of fall this season, we encourage you to lean into the nostalgia it brings. Think about the places you’ve visited. Maybe it was a family road-trip, a weekend spent camping with friends, or a stretch of public land close to home that became your favorite place to unwind and escape.
Think about the kind of place you want to grow old in, and the kind of place you want to leave for future generations.
Think about the memories you’ve made there—the ground you covered, rivers you floated, or stars you’ve gazed upon under unobstructed skies. The places where family traditions lived on, and new ones began. Think about the kind of place you want to grow old in, and the kind of place you want to leave for future generations.
There are plenty of disagreements to be had these days, but public lands are one thing we all have in common. And it’s more important than ever to show up and make your voice heard when your heritage is under threat. Donate to organizations working to protect these places or volunteer your time. Pay attention, call your representatives, and hold accountable those who profit, pollute, or simply pay the fine without caring about the damage left behind.
Because nostalgia is more than remembering what we once had. It can also be a reminder of what is worth protecting, and the experiences worth repeating.
Go fight for what belongs to all of us—then get out there and enjoy the hell out of it.
