Supporter,
We've all heard the expressions: Letting a fox guard the henhouse. Sending an arsonist to fight the fire.
Now you can add: Putting an oil lobbyist in charge of our most prized public lands
Trump's first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wasted no time dismantling our great natural treasures—slashing the size of national monuments to allow more energy development, devaluing senior park superintendents to hasten their exits, rescinding climate policies that protected our parks' iconic landscapes, and proposing to double entrance fees—significantly restricting the number of people who would be able to visit the parks.
Zinke's successor, Big Oil and Agrilobbyist David Bernhardt has installed his own anti-public-lands loyalists, banished career field staff to out-of-the-way positions, and moved to privatize National Park services. And most disastrously, they are continuing to aggressively reject climate science and implement policies that hasten the climate crisis.
It's not too late to save our precious national parks and monuments—and the communities and people who will suffer from these all-out attacks on our public lands. We need to mobilize the grassroots to stand up to these attacks and do everything we can to get Congress to re-fund the National Parks, stop the efforts to encourage energy development in national monuments and implement rock-solid protections for public lands like these. Your monthly gift to the Sierra Club is vital to helping these efforts.
Your monthly gift will help us mobilize the grassroots, work with our partners, and push Congress—hard—to pass legislation protecting all of our public lands and wild places.
The Interior Department can seem like just one piece of a mysterious, multilayered bureaucracy. But make no mistake—decisions by Zinke's and Bernhardt's Central Command have had real-time and extremely deleterious effects on the ground for our parks and other public lands.
Just a few examples:
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Leaving the parks open to vandals and generally irresponsible visitors during the government shutdown.
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Allowing "sport hunting" of wolf pups and bear cubs in National Preserves in Alaska.
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Leasing park-adjacent lands to oil and gas companies for drilling and fracking.
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Bulldozing the iconic Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to build Trump's border wall.
The Sierra Club is fighting on the front lines to protect our national parks, national monuments, and other public lands. We're partnering wherever we can to help keep these places protected.
But Supporter, we need your help. Please, support the Sierra Club and our magnificent parks and public lands with your monthly gift now and receive our FREE Parks Project socks!
As conservationists have been warning us for months, the Trump administration's actions are anything but random. They're systematic, short-sighted, and cynically designed to turn our iconic public lands into a pipeline for profiteering mega donors.
Our Sierra Club community is the only thing standing between Trump's Raiders of the Last Parks and America's remaining wild places. Thank you for supporting the fight to save our national parks with your monthly gift today.
With gratitude and determination,
Michael Brune
Executive Director
Sierra Club
Image: Joshua Tree National Park CC2.0/Chuck Holland | 
