It was the most consequential camping trip in American history: In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, asked the naturalist John Muir to guide him into the wilderness of California’s Yosemite Valley.
After three days and an unexpected snowstorm, the two men emerged, bedraggled but gratified.
Camping beneath the valley’s giant sequoias, Roosevelt later wrote, “was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.”
The 26th president went on to lay the groundwork for an audacious policy: America’s wild lands should be publicly owned and protected in perpetuity.
For over a century, Republicans have mostly defended and expanded this legacy, in large part because of their personal connections to the outdoors.
But something has changed since President Trump returned to office last year: His inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.
In the past year or so, this new conservative vanguard has rolled out the most boldly anti-environment agenda in modern American history. Recently this has included taking steps to allow a foreign company to mine for copper just upstream of Minnesota’s beloved Boundary Waters wilderness.
Before the rise of the indoor Republicans, conservatives’ affinity for wilderness was a powerful force in American politics. As the historian Douglas Brinkley put it to me, “There was something about huddling around the campfire exchanging stories, hunting and fishing — it was part of the DNA of the Republican Party.”
This helped ensure a nearly bulletproof consensus among Democrats and Republicans to steward public lands. While lawmakers and cabinet members argued about the details of environmental regulations, the core ethic of conservation — protecting clean air, clean water and wilderness for future generations — remained reliably bipartisan.
Since the rise of the MAGA movement, many Republican elites no longer seem interested in riding horses in the Rockies or fly fishing in the Adirondacks. Jackson Hole is out. Palm Beach is in.
Leaders of several nonpartisan and right-of-center nature conservation groups — the de facto representatives of the nation’s hunters and recreationists — told me they have spent decades building rapport with federal officials who admired the conservation groups in the same way Roosevelt admired Muir. In the past year, those partnerships have mostly eroded.
Many of the career civil servants they once worked with at agencies such as the Interior Department have quit, been fired or been sidelined by Trump loyalists focused on retribution and dismantling government bureaucracy.
Many conservationists had hoped that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former governor of North Dakota, would stand up for public lands and environmental protections.
More so than any other cabinet member, he styles himself as a Westerner, hosting a cowboy-themed Christmas party and displaying a mounted elk head in his D.C. office. Even REI, the liberal-leaning outdoor retailer, endorsed his nomination for the top job overseeing the nation’s public lands and national parks. (The company later apologized for its endorsement.)
Instead, Mr. Burgum appears to be a yes man, cowed into submission by Mr. Trump and his sharper-elbowed advisers like the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the Office of Management and Budget director, Russell Vought.
On Mr. Burgum’s watch, the Department of the Interior has systematically pursued resource extraction over conservation and let go of about a quarter of the National Park Service staff.
