We the People

Today, the United States boasts more than 400 national park sites, 560 national wildlife refuges, and nearly 440 million acres of other public lands managed by the Department of the Interior and US Forest Service. They showcase the diversity of our nation’s beauty, from ancient towering redwoods in Northern California to free-roaming bears in Alaska to the foggy peaks of the Appalachians.

From the beginning, the idea behind our national parks was downright revolutionary. In a world where the most beautiful and pristine places were typically reserved as private sanctuaries for royalty and their aristocratic guests, in America those places would be open and protected for all. The Sierra Club was at the heart of this effort to establish public lands. We mobilized the organizing power to create Yosemite, Glacier, and Mount Rainier National Parks and led the movement in the 1890s to create the National Park Service. We’ve been defending our national treasures ever since, from stopping mining at the Grand Canyon to protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

After celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American democratic experiment and the 110th anniversary of the National Park Service this summer, we were reminded that neither can be left unattended or undefended. The Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since President Donald Trump took office in 2025. His 2027 budget calls for cutting another 31 percent (3,967 full-time employees). Millions of dollars of much-needed funding are being redirected from parks across the country to projects befitting a monarch, including painting and guarding the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and restuccoing the White House West Colonnade.

Beyond its blatant abuse of tax-payer dollars, the Trump administration is constantly seeking to corrupt our relationship to public lands and the democratic ideals they embody. These lands are under attack—from attempts to privatize them and auction them off to corporate polluters, to the construction of a detention center in Big Cypress National Preserve (“Alligator Alcatraz”), to the military operations and proposed border wall expansions in Big Bend National Park. But just as we have for more than 134 years, the Sierra Club is not standing by. We are organizing, we are marshaling our grassroots power, and we are fighting back.

Defending our precious public lands goes hand in hand with fighting for safe and healthy communities, where people have clean air to breathe and safe water to drink. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has helped retire more than 70 percent of the country’s coal plants, preventing 72,000 premature deaths, 112,000 heart attacks, and 1.1 million asthma attacks. Now the Trump administration is illegally propping up failing coal plants and paying companies billions of dollars to halt work on offshore wind projects. It has also directed the Environmental Protection Agency to assign zero value to human lives and only factor in the potential costs to polluters when considering air-pollution-reduction measures.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that presidents can dismiss the heads of “independent” agencies at their discretion. We know what Trump will do with this power. He has met with oil company CEOs at Mar-a-Lago and told them that in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations, he will protect their interests over those of the American people. When a US president can be bought, the consequences affect us all: It puts our health and well-being at risk as our utility bills and insurance costs skyrocket, all while we increasingly face the
devastating effects of heat domes, wildfires, major storms, and flooding.

Every day, the Sierra Club is working to protect what is best about this country—in courtrooms; in legislative chambers at the national, state, and local levels; at share-holder meetings of financial institutions; in town halls, public hearings, and community meetings; and at the ballot box. We are the organizing arm of the environmental movement. With your help, we’ll be working to protect our lands, communities, and democracy for the next 250 years.