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Colorado has become a battleground for efforts to disrupt and thwart local support for conservation. The American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based group with a history of anti-government, anti-public lands ideology has convinced at least four Colorado counties—with incomplete or outright false information—to oppose the proposal to protect 30% of America's lands and waters, commonly known as the 30x30 goal.
The Biden administration included the 30x30 goal in its January Executive Order on tackling climate change and instructed the Interior Department and the Department of Agriculture to provide the scaffolding within 90 days for how the initiative could move forward. According to Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz, "The Interior Department is on track to deliver the report to the National Climate Task Force on time and looks forward to sharing the report with the public in the coming weeks."
However, in the absence of further details, the American Stewards of Liberty has been whipping up anti-30x30 sentiment among local governments across the Western U.S. and pushing county commissioners to pass anti-30x30 resolutions. The group has pushed misinformation about a private lands takeover as part of the federal government's 30x30 effort. However, both the government and groups supporting the initiative have been explicit that landowner rights and strictly voluntary private land conservation are key to success. Scott Braden, the director of the Colorado Wildlands Project, agrees that conservation efforts should be guided by local input, not highjacked by “a group from Texas making wild claims.” Speaking further on the American Stewards of Liberty, Braden says, “I think this group is going around projecting fears about what is unknown. They are turning this into a bogeyman and ginning up conflict. Biden’s climate order takes great pains to say that they will work with state and local governments on this.”
The roots of anti-public lands extremism within the American Stewards of Liberty run deep: Margaret Byfield, the founder of the American Stewards, is the daughter of Wayne and Jean Hage, who illegally ran cattle on public land in the 1990's. The group has received funding from conservative “dark-money” billionaires, including the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. Trent Loos, a Nebraska radio show host who sat on a Trump Administration Agricultural Advisory Team and is now part of the American Stewards for Liberty anti-30×30 campaign, has opined that Hitler and Nazism gave birth to the ecology movement.
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