Jaime Loucky: 60 Years of Stewarding Trails in the Evergreen State

Jaime Loucky: 60 Years of Stewarding Trails in the Evergreen State

Jaime Loucky is the CEO of the Washington Trails Association, one of the largest trail stewardship nonprofits in the United States. The organization now facilitates more than 160,000 hours of volunteer trail work each year, runs gear lending libraries that generated 5,000 outdoor experiences for youth last year alone, and serves one to two million website visitors monthly looking for reliable information about where and how to get outside. The sixtieth anniversary arrives at a moment when the public lands those trails cross are under serious pressure. A central concept in the conversation is what Jaime calls the flywheel: the cycle by which high-quality trail information draws people outside, outdoor experiences build personal connection, and connection generates the volunteers, donors, and advocates who keep public lands accessible. That flywheel is under stress. In 2025, federal staffing cuts eliminated hundreds of Forest Service and National Park Service positions across Washington State, including all but three of the thirteen-person recreation team managing the Enchantments, one of the state's most-visited backcountry landscapes. Jaime describes what a trail nonprofit does when agency partners disappear, how WTA has expanded paid professional crews into post-wildfire backcountry areas that volunteers cannot safely work in, and why urban day work parties in city parks are not a retreat from the wilderness mission but a genuine entry point for the next generation of trail stewards. The episode is also about coalition. Jaime identifies the fourth pillar of WTA's new strategic plan, building an outdoors movement, as the one that excites him most: uniting recreation groups, conservation organizations, hunters and anglers, and motorized users around shared public lands interests, a coordination that has not historically happened at the scale the current moment requires. The question he is working toward is not whether people care about public lands, because they do across the political spectrum, but whether they can be organized to show it before the losses become permanent. Learn more about the links and resources mentioned today at our website, thewildidea.com [https://thewildidea.com].

The Wild Line: Wildlife Fare Well in Transportation Bill, Park Fees Redirected to DC, a Warning on Wildfire Season

This week on The Wild Line, we're tracking a new bill to nullify the Gulf of Mexico Endangered Species Act exemption, $67 million in national park entrance fees redirected to Washington, D.C. beautification projects, a steep drop in Forest Service wildfire fuels reduction, and conservation wins in the House surface transportation bill. From the Gulf to the Rockies, these stories capture the pressures and the persistent advocacy shaping federal land and wildlife policy heading into a high-risk fire season. Learn more about the links and resources mentioned today at our website, thewildidea.com [https://thewildidea.com].

Tracy Stone-Manning Returns: Don't Mourn, Organize

The federal lands fight has shifted since Tracy Stone-Manning last sat down with Bill and Anders in June 2025. The workforce cuts she warned about have arrived; the Roadless Rule is days from final rescission; and on the day this episode was recorded, the BLM Public Lands Rule was formally rescinded. Stone-Manning, who led the Bureau of Land Management under President Biden, returns as the show's first repeat guest to assess the damage, name what's still worth fighting for, and make the case that the crisis contains an opportunity. The conversation covers the full landscape of the current moment. We walk through the hollowing-out of federal land management agencies, including the deferred resignation programs, proposed 30% budget cuts for FY27, and Forest Service reorganization, all of which she frames as an effort to set agencies up to fail and use that failure to justify divestiture. She sounds a direct alarm on wildfire: with historic low snowpack, a reorganizing Forest Service, and reduced staffing, she calls the coming season a recipe for the government to fail its people. She also addresses the Congressional Review Act's unprecedented use against Grand Staircase-Escalante's citizen-built management plan, and names what a future Congress would need to do to fix it. The episode's most striking thread is Stone-Manning's argument that the destruction itself has opened a door. Ground Shift, a cross-partisan ideas hub seeded by the Wilderness Society but operating independently, is betting that public anger, the obvious inadequacy of laws written for the Dust Bowl and to settle the West, and the scale of what will need to be rebuilt represent a once-in-a-generation chance to reimagine public lands protection from the ground up. Her message to listeners losing hope: don't mourn, organize, and be ready with the answers when the moment comes. Learn more and find the links and resources mentioned today at our website, thewildidea.com. [https://thewildidea.com]

The Wild Line: Pearce Confirmed for BLM, Cyanide Bombs Return to Public Lands, Kash Patel Dives Pearl Harbor

This week on The Wild Line, we’re tracking the Senate confirmation of Steve Pearce as Bureau of Land Management director, the Trump administration’s restoration of cyanide trap devices on public lands, new reporting on how automated bots are locking everyday users out of Recreation.gov permits, the launch of a free community shuttle connecting Colorado residents to outdoor destinations in the Golden and Morrison area, and FBI Director Kash Patel’s coordinated snorkel tour of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. From FY27 appropriations markups to Conservation Alliance lobbying in Washington, these stories trace a week of compounding movement on federal lands and wildlife policy. Learn more and find the links and resources mentioned at our website, thewildidea.com [https://thewildidea.com].

John Leshy: The Hollowing Out of America’s Public Lands

John Leshy has spent sixty years tracking the arc of federal public land policy, which makes his assessment of the current moment unusually grounded and unusually sobering. He is an Emeritus Professor at UC Law San Francisco, former Solicitor of the Interior Department under President Clinton, and the author of Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands (Yale University Press, 2022).   In this conversation, Leshy traces the founding-era origins of America’s public lands, from the thirteen colonies’ negotiation over western land claims to the Great Transition of 1890, when Congress first authorized presidents to reserve lands for protection. He then turns to the present, naming the Trump administration’s approach not as a policy disagreement but as something new: a deliberate strategy to hollow out the agencies that manage these lands, make the management visibly bad, and use public disillusionment to justify divestiture. He also examines why Bears Ears National Monument drew an immediate public backlash while rescinding the Roadless Rule has not, and what that difference means for conservation organizers. The hollowing out of agencies is not something that can be reversed quickly; rebuilding the expertise and capacity that has been stripped away could take a decade. Whether public support, which Colorado College’s annual western polls show remains strong and even growing across the political spectrum, can translate into political action remains, in Leshy’s words, “a big, gigantic question mark.” Learn more about today's conversation and find the links and resources mentioned at our website, thewildidea.com [https://thewildidea.com/episode-61].