Welcome to the landscape, your show about America's
parks and public lands and the Trump administration's
ongoing attacks on them. I'm Erin Weiss with
the Center for Western Priorities in Denver.
And I'm Kate Graetzinger in Salt Lake City.
Today on the show, we're getting nerdy with
John Ruppel, public lands professor at the University
of Utah and a former member of the
White House Council on Environmental Quality, otherwise known
as CEQ.
He's gonna walk us through recent changes to
how the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA
is being implemented across federal agencies like the
Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.
But before we do that, the news.
Well, where do we even start?
A complete
barrage of news coming out of the White
House and Congress since our last episode. So
we're gonna highlight a few of the things
we're tracking here.
First off, president Trump is trying to make
coal great again. Good luck with that. He
signed a handful of executive orders aimed at
increasing coal production on public lands. Those orders
direct the interior department to identify public lands
that contain coal and make it easier for
companies to mine it. We're gonna have to
wait and see exactly how they do that
since the free market has already pretty much
made it clear they're not interested because coal
is just more expensive
than renewables and methane for energy.
Next up, the Trump administration has removed protections
over half
of the national forest system.
Agriculture secretary
Brooke Rollins issued an emergency order related to
wildfire
risk that essentially cuts out the environmental review
process for logging projects
and allows companies free reign over more than
110,000,000
acres of National Forest land.
The justification
for more logging, of course, is reducing fire
risk, but the memo comes on the heels
of an executive order calling on the agriculture
department to expand timber production across the country
by 25%.
And as we've talked about many times on
this podcast,
you cannot log your way out of the
wildfire crisis.
The only way through is with more fire,
especially prescribed burns and natural
low level fire.
But the Trump administration
is moving backwards there.
Politico obtained a draft order under consideration
at the White House that would require wildfire
response times of thirty minutes in some areas.
That hearkens back to the Forest Service's disastrous
10AM rule dating back to 1935
that created so much of the mess that
we're in right now.
That aim to put out all wildfires
even naturally caused ones by 10AM
every morning.
And finally, to wrap us up, oil industry
advocate Kathleen Seguema withdrew herself from consideration to
run the Bureau of Land Management
after a letter she wrote regarding the January
sixth insurrection
resurfaced on Twitter or x.
Sagama, who heads the Western Energy Alliance, wrote
the letter to the group's members in 2021
blaming the insurrection on Trump's lies about the
election.
Now, of course, she wasn't wrong about that,
but she also faced severe ethics concerns due
to the fact that she has four years
refused to release the list of Western Energy
Alliance members and did not disclose the group's
members in her conflict of interest disclosures.
So Sagam is out, and there's no word
yet on who might replace her, but you
know that we will update you as soon
as we hear something.
And I'm gonna keep dead naming Twitter. Elon's
gonna have to live with the name it
was assigned at birth. Fair enough.
Our guest today is John Ruppel. He's a
law professor at the University of Utah and
a former member of the White House Council
on Environmental Quality under president Biden.
Professor Ruppel, thank you very much for joining
us today.
Thanks, Aaron. Thanks, Kate. It's my pleasure. It's
really I'm excited to join you and talk
about NEPA and public lands.
Alright. So let's start off with the basics
because this is gonna turn into an alphabet
soup. First, we have NEPA, the National Environmental
Policy Act that was signed into law in
1970.
It's one of the bedrock environmental laws. It
requires federal agencies to just think about and
consider the environmental impacts of their proposed actions
through a whole review process that involves a
public comment period in science and other stuff.
Alright.
Now let's move on to CEQ,
the
council on environmental quality where you worked. What
is CEQ, and what does that have to
do with NEPA?
Great question. So the National Environmental Policy Act,
in addition to kind of setting forth this
national charter about environmental policy,
and setting up these procedural requirements for agencies
to look before they leave. It also set
up the council environment of pardon me, the
council on environmental quality. So that's housed within
the executive office of the president.
And, basically, it has three jobs. One, it's
to help the president,
develop an understanding of environmental matters.
Second, it's to help the president develop environmental
policies. And then third, to help them implement
those policies and programs, including NEPA.
So if we go back to
1970,
we've got the National Environmental Policy Act. The
next year, president Nixon signed an executive order,
and it directed CEQ to issue
guidelines to all of the federal agencies out
there
about how to comply with with NEPA statutory
mandate. The idea is we wanted to create
a common floor, a common set of practice
across all of these federal agencies.
Those guidelines didn't work out quite as well
as intended because it wasn't clear to agencies
or to courts whether they were intended to
be,
advisory or binding in nature. So a couple
years later, in 1977,
President Carter's in office. He issued another executive
order that directed CEQ to promulgate its own
regulations.
Those regulations,
were intended to apply across all of the
federal government, and President Carter directed
all federal agencies to comply with those. So
it created a mandatory floor. In effect, it
created, you
know, a uniform floor across all federal agencies,
but then those
other agencies could adopt their own processes
as necessary. Right? You know, you think about
the forest service.
They're dealing with projects that are very different
than, say, the nuclear regulatory commission. So they
needed some ability to adapt to their their
missions,
but they wanted to start from a common
floor. So
yeah, I mean, it's basic it's it's a
basic structure. It's the foundation.
And agencies, courts, developers, everybody, the public, they've
been relying on that common floor for the
last forty seven years.
So
on February 25, the CEQ under president Trump
issued an interim final rule rescinding its own
regulations regarding the implementation of NEPA.
First of all, did I explain that correctly?
And second of all, what does that mean?
Yeah. That's that's pretty much it, Kate. On
his first day in office, president Trump issued
an executive order entitled unleashing
American energy.
Now this was one of a 24
executive orders that he's issued as of today.
But this EO, it did something really important.
It repealed
President
Carter's nineteen seventy seven order authorizing
CEQ to issue regulations.
And it also directed CEQ
to repeal
the regulations that are currently in effect. So
basically,
he forced CEQ to repeal the regulations
that have been guiding all four forty one
federal agencies
as they implement NEPA. Now I wouldn't go
so far as to say it torp the
rules of the game because NEPA as a
statute still applies,
but he injected this massive amount of uncertainty
in federal decision making. And kind of the
way I think about it is
you can think of CEQ's NEPA regulations as
something like a traffic signal at a very
busy intersection.
You can turn off the traffic lights to
save electricity,
but the traffic laws are still there. They
still apply, and now everybody needs to treat
that intersection as a four way stop.
Yeah. We we save some money along the
way,
but at a significant cost in terms of
efficiency and safety.
So from where I sit, it's a it's
not a good trade off.
And and as a quick aside, you know,
I said there have been a 24
EOs so far from the Trump administration.
To put that in context,
in the whole four years of the Biden
administration,
we saw a 62.
So
in eighty days,
we're seeing, you know,
a push to catch up with what the
Biden administration did in four years.
Alright. So
how did we get here? I mean, where
where does this idea come from that
CEQ wouldn't have the authority to issue
NEPA regulations? I mean, this is something that,
as you pointed out, was
in effect through
Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama,
Trump,
and Biden, and now all of a sudden,
no, you know, forty seven years later, whoopsies?
It it's a great question because for a
very long time, people have been treating CEQ's
regulations
as binding.
You know, there's a complicated legal path that
involves litigation in both Washington DC and North
Dakota, but I'll I'll save you all that.
Basically, we had a court decision out of
the federal district court in North Dakota in
February of this year.
And they reasoned that NEPA,
as enacted by Congress and signed into law
by the president,
did not specifically
authorize
CEQ to issue regulations.
And they went on to say, well,
it's not clear to us. We don't or
the court didn't believe that the president could
then delegate
authority to CEQ to issue these regulations.
So
the court then concluded that absent
authority to issue the regulations in the first
place,
those regulations
were without
legal force and effect.
Now I'm not sure that's the correct legal
answer, but it's a binding
court decision
and the federal government did not appeal it.
So that's the rule of the case as
we sit here today.
The North Dakota court then declared
the twenty twenty four versions of the CEQ
regulations
invalid.
So those are the most recent version.
Interestingly
enough, the court said, well, those are the
only ones that are challenged,
so we are going to leave in place
the
prior CEQ regulations. Even though they were issued
under the same authority, on the same statutory
base or legal basis,
we're gonna leave those in place. And that
created some confusion, obviously, understandably.
Anyway,
all of that was overshadowed,
in
later when president Trump issued his executive order,
repealing CEQ's authority and directing them to repeal
their regulations.
So that's all,
pretty abstract. Let's bring this down to public
lands where the rubber meets the road, at
least for where our listeners are concerned.
Basically, everything that occurs on federal land, goes
through the NEPA process.
What will this change mean for how NEPA
is applied by the BLM, for example, or
the forest service, to, like, proposed logging,
proposed drilling, things like that?
That's a it's a really good question, and
I think we're still working through that. I
think first of all,
the way CEQ's regulations were written, they provided
the floor
and they specifically said other agencies, you can
supplement these,
but don't
don't be redundant. Don't just copy and paste.
Add to it.
So all of those other agencies, some of
them, I think there's something like 86
that have issued their own regulations thus far.
They're gonna have something to fall back on.
Whether it's gonna have as much detail in
it as the prior CEQ regulations,
we'll have to see. Whether those regulations,
you know, that are in place from the
BLM and the Forest Service and the Corps
of Engineers and everybody else are consistent, that's
gonna be another question.
The extent to which they incorporate
CEQ's prior rules by reference
and in doing so, make them part of
their their own regulations and and allow them
to live on past this repeal, we're gonna
have to figure that out as well.
So all of those things create confusion. They
create uncertainty
for
the agency. So to take your example,
if you have an oil and gas company
that's trying to get permits to drill
on, you know, Forest Service or BLM land,
they're still gonna have to go through the
NEPA process, but the rules are less certain.
The potential to have a conflict between,
between agencies
increases.
The time I think agencies are gonna spend
on this process will increase because they're gonna
have to try and figure out how to
move forward in this atmosphere of increased uncertainty.
There's a risk that
a risk from the perspective of that permit
applicant
that
the public may be more likely to sue
and challenge it because, again, we have questions
of what the rules truly are, what they
require, what rules apply.
So all of those things, I think, are
bad. And I
bad for
the agency that's trying to navigate this process,
and they're trying to do it now at
a time with fewer staff,
fewer resources. So we made their job much,
much more difficult.
It's gonna be bad for industry or the
I should say, applicants. So this could be,
you know, our oil and gas company.
Maybe it is a a transmission company that's
trying to get,
an electric line,
crossing over forest service and BLM lands to
bring
energy to a a local community. Maybe it's,
a community that's trying to update or trying
to replace a water line that crosses federal
land. This is going to impact a lot
of people in ways that I think,
really aren't good if we're thinking in terms
of efficiency,
if we're thinking in terms of environmental stewardship,
or we're thinking about just getting a a
faster, better decision.
Alright. So the short version of this is
this is DOGE
creating chaos,
or the Trump administration creating chaos.
Take us then up to the 30,000 foot
level. At at the end of the last
congress, we heard some serious talk of
NEPA and permitting reform, and maybe there is
gonna be something that got passed on a
bipartisan basis during lame duck.
Do you think this changes
the the dynamic in Washington and the possibility
that congress
might decide to step in if the White
House is just creating
uncertainty and chaos for the industries
that president Trump keeps keeps claiming he's trying
to help promote?
I think that's one possibility.
I think the short, easy answer here is
that
I think the president had authority to president
Carter had the authority back in 1977
to direct CEQ to issue regulations.
I think,
President Trump has that authority again today. He
can withdraw his order. He can allow CEQ
to promulgate rules. We can
recreate
that common floor. That's the fastest and easiest
way forward.
I think Congress could step in here and
provide some very useful guidance. They could say,
look, CEQ,
you have the authority to issue regulations. In
fact, we're going to recognize the ones,
that you already had in place as of
you know, 2024.
We're going to take that as a starting
point. And if if the administration or others
wanna go back and revise those to make
them better reflect their policy priorities, fine. But
at least we can create,
a shared floor. And I think in some
ways, the irony here is if we go
back and we look at what Congress has
been trying to do,
in terms of NEPA and permitting writ large
over the last couple of decades,
it's been largely focused
on efficiency.
I think there's been a recognition
that we can make permitting, particularly around public
lands,
work better. And by better, I mean, we
can make it faster, more efficient, less expensive,
more predictable
without undermining protections for the quality of the
air we breathe, the water we drink. We
can also make the process work better without
disenfranchising
communities
that are impacted by these decisions and ensuring
that the decisions are made in a clear,
transparent way. So I think there's room to
do better, and that's what congress has been
trying to do over the last at least
decade.
You know, we had, you know, not to
get too far into nerdy, dumb hair, but
we have something called Fast 41,
which is named after title one of Fixing
America's Surface Transportation Act. It was basically this
this pilot project that said we're going to
take the biggest, most difficult, most thorny projects
that require federal authorization.
You know, they need to be $200,000,000
or bigger.
And we're going to move those onto a
dashboard
to make sure that all of the agencies
that are involved, whether it's the EPA, the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, whoever
it is, that they're all working together. They're
coordinating
and we're moving
concurrently
rather than sequentially.
It was a huge win. It's carving years
off of the permitting
process.
But that's not what the executive order does.
It now fragments
at a time
when we have been trying to coordinate and
make things more efficient to make sure that
if you think about the wildlife analysis that
has to be done for a large project,
you know, we want to make sure that
the Forest Services needs are met, that the
Fish and Wildlife Services needs are met, that
the state wildlife managers,
that their need, their analytical needs, whatever they
need in order to support their permitting decision,
that's all done at once. We don't need
three separate
analyses,
three separate sets of studies that go to
essentially the same question. That's just a bad
use of time and resources.
So let me make sure I've got this
straight. Does Fast 41 go away now? Was
that a CEQ
creation?
Like, does
is this basically
a step in the opposite direction of efficiency
and collaboration?
No. I didn't mean to imply that. That
that was I was unclear.
FAST 41 is still in place, but I
think it's an example of the kind of
reforms that we were already seeing to make
the permitting
process more effective, more efficient
without
undermining our environmental protection. So I think but
I mean, maybe to your point, though, FAST
41 compliance
now does become more difficult because you're going
through the NEPA process as part of FAST
41.
And
the rules now are less clear. I think
that's gonna cause a problem.
So you, along with a bunch of other
law professors, filed a comment to the federal
government arguing that this
rescission of,
the CEQ authority will create issues for permitting,
which you sort of just talked about. Another
group of law professors filed a comment objecting
to CEQ issue issuing this interim final rule
change instead of going through a notice and
comment process. Can you explain the importance of
that? Why is it why would that
be a better way to do this?
Wow.
You guys really did your homework.
This is this is kind of a deep
dive.
Yes. There are two letters.
The one I signed on to, I think
there were 28 law professors that expressed concerns
about the IFR. There's a separate,
separate letter that was written by another group
of environmental law professors.
And
kind of to understand the difference here, we
have to talk a little bit about federal
rulemaking.
Rulemaking is governed by something called the Administrative
Procedures Act or the APA.
And most of the time you have a
situation
where Congress
says to an agency,
we want you to go out and issue
a rule or a regulation of the same.
And that rule kind of fills in the
blanks, provides details
around a particular
how to implement a particular law. And most
of that rule making goes through what's called
a notice and comment process
where the public is told about the proposed
rule. They're given a chance,
to read it, an opportunity to comment.
The agencies then have to read those comments,
consider them,
respond to them, and change the draft rule
as necessary
all before they can issue a final rule.
So the idea is that, again, we're we're
going through a transparent process
that is predictable.
What happens and now there's an exception to
that normal APA process, the notice and comment
process,
that allows agencies to forego notice and comment
if they can show what's called good
cause. And under the APA, there are three
reasons for the good cause exemption.
One is that the rulemaking would be impracticable.
One is that it would be unnecessary.
And the third is that rulemaking, you know,
that that process would be contrary to the
public interest.
And here, the interim final rule repealing CEQ's
regulations,
it relies on that good cause exemption.
The
other letter goes into great detail about that
exemption and explaining why public comments
were not impracticable.
There was nothing that made it impossible.
They weren't unnecessary
and they certainly weren't contrary to the public
interest.
And if that letter is correct, and I
think they make a very, very strong legal
argument,
then CEQ would need to go back, reissue
their repeal rule in a draft form
and then follow the notice and comment process.
Otherwise,
those valid CEQ regulation, to the extent they're
valid following a North Dakota decision,
would remain in place
until
that rule making
process is concluded. So that's kind of messy.
And the bottom line is we had you
had two groups of law professors debating about
what was the
how to proceed.
And
we chose to focus on the president's authority
to
authorize CEQ to issue rules, to focus on
the consequences of the repeal, and to focus
on why the interim final rule is inconsistent
with these broader efforts to make permitting efficient.
You know, it's just a it's a the
difference of approach reflects where we chose to
focus our limited time and resources,
and it doesn't necessarily
reflect a disagreement
about the law. Many law professors signed both
letters.
Alright. I'm glad we started talking about the
Administrative Procedures Act because, boy, we're about to
get wonky with what happened this week.
We're taping this on Thursday. Late Wednesday,
president Trump signed yet another executive order.
It's
confusingly
written. It's kinda all over the place. Everyone
seems to not be entirely sure even what
this will mean because it is so far
out there.
The very short version is that it appears
that he is trying
to make
a whole bunch of agencies, including interior and
EPA,
add a one year sunset clause to essentially
every existing
environmental regulation,
on everything
from the,
the Endangered Species Act, to Migratory Bird Treaty
Act, the 1872
Mining Law. It is a very long list
just as far as interior is concerned, and
it looks like they're trying to make every
environmental regulation
expire in the next year
or so.
How out there is this idea?
Are there any examples of this kind of
sunset thing happening even on a temporary basis,
much less across every rule coming out of
entire government agencies?
Aaron, where to where to begin on this
order? I mean, I guess, first, I wanna
go back and say, again, this is the
hundred and twenty fourth executive order we've seen
in eighty one days or something. We're breathing
from the fire hose
and
still trying to make sense of not just
these individual orders,
but how they fit together,
how they fit under our constitution,
how they fit under the laws we have
in place. So this is a huge project.
And
as you say, we're still trying to make
sense of what
what is a really
radical
order.
Yes. There are examples of laws that include
sunset provisions or regulations that include sunset provisions.
You know, after
a period of time, maybe three, five years,
you know, something goes away.
I am
I can't see
how a president
through an executive
order
could
modify
multiple existing regulations
to insert
a sunset provision into those existing rules. That
just doesn't work. The Administrative Procedures Act requires
a process.
It requires
transparency
and engagement. I can't see how you would
be able to avoid notice and comment rulemaking
on these, and that's going to take time.
And in doing that, the agencies are going
to have to explain
why they're making these changes. In here, that's
gonna be clear because the president told them
to. But Is that enough under the law?
Right. Is that a justification?
We'll see.
And this is a really confusing
order. It talks about,
the the purpose
of the order applying to
regulations
governing energy production,
but it doesn't define that.
What does governing
energy production mean? Are we talking about mining
for uranium that may or may not be
used
for power generation?
Are we talking about,
you know, power plant operation?
What what is this? What does it mean?
I think those are all really, really difficult
questions.
And then if you read further into the
order, it talks section five c exempts what
they call
regulatory
permitting regimes
authorized
by statute.
I don't know what that means. My colleagues
don't know what that means.
And it seems like just about everything they're
talking about here in the context of
rulemaking and sunset provisions
is a regulatory
permitting
regime.
So we're still trying to figure this one
out. It may contradict itself. No one knows
anything because
these are is it fair to say not
the
best and brightest in terms of regulatory lawyers
who are drafting these things to begin with?
I wouldn't go there.
There are some very, very bright attorneys
working in the federal government.
The attorneys in the Department of Justice, the
attorney this the career attorneys
in
the office of White House counsel, those are
the best of the best. Their career attorneys
are really good.
I wonder personally, and this is, you know,
a personal question, is who is in the
room who is working on some of these
orders?
Are those career folks that have
that have experience, that have expertise, that understand
how the regulatory and permitting system works, Are
they in the room? Are they fully engaged?
Is their input being being considered?
But
that's an open question. I wouldn't
I
they're very, very smart people,
available
and I'm sure there's some very, very smart
people working on these orders and they may
be thinking about them in ways that, that
I am not in terms of slightly different
objectives
or
you know, how they will all come together
at some later date.
So since we're talking big picture about
all of these executive orders,
I'm curious. Do you do you see this
all as part of a
concerted effort to roll back regulation across the
federal government?
And if so,
do you think how far do you think
they'll get? I mean, I feel like when
we talk about these EOs where it's always
like, oh, well, we've got the backstop of
the court. Someone will sue. It won't actually
go into place. It's actually a press a
glorified press release more than anything. Like, these
EOs oftentimes don't they're not legally binding. They
don't change the law. But how
you know, just given what we've seen over
the past month and a half or two
months,
how far do you think they'll get in
terms of deregulating,
you know, across the federal government, especially
as it relates to public lands?
It's a great question.
And,
it was actually before we
we got on this call,
I was doing some research in preparation for
a a presentation I have to give on
Monday.
And I was looking at the amount the
number of proposed rules under the, you know,
the beginning of the Biden administration versus the
beginning of the Trump administration.
And it surprised me a little bit because
the Trump administration
has has issued something like a third, a
little more of a third as many
draft or proposed rules as the Biden administration.
The Biden administration came in and did a
lot of rulemaking at the very beginning.
But what I think is different is we're
seeing just this
tsunami of executive orders,
many of which direct agencies
to go through rulemaking processes
with a very specific deregulatory
focus,
where I think the Biden administration said, alright,
we have this idea of how to make
things work a little different,
how to make
rules work within
our priorities
and within the structure of law. We're seeing
a much more focused direction
from the Trump administration. So I think we're
going to see a lot of rulemaking,
to come.
How that will fare in the courts. It's
hard to say. The first Trump administration
had a terrible record
in terms of getting things
through the courts.
And I think in some ways it's going
to become more difficult. You know, there's all
this talk about
the death of Chevron and Loper, bright
Kind of the the TLDR
there is that
before we used to give
deference
to agencies on a lot of questions that
come up in rule making.
Now under the Loper Bright decision,
agencies have to put forth the best explanation
for the rules.
So I think the bar got high The
bar is higher now for the trump administration
than it was before.
And we're gonna see how this this wave
of rule making fares as we move forward.
A a bit of be careful what you
wish for or the
the dog that finally caught the car
here
because it's now the Trump administration that has
to deal with the fallout
from Loper Bright and these and Chevron decisions.
And it should be noted doing all of
that
with a
drastically reduced staff in the justice department. It's
not interior department lawyers that go to court,
right, for this. It's DOJ.
That that's right. It's DOJ that's gonna be
in court, but it's gonna be the Department
of Interior and the Department of Agriculture
and EPA's lawyers that are helping craft these
new rules,
that are helping to shepherd them through the
process. It's gonna have to go through the
Office of Management and Budget. It's gonna have
to go through the Office of Federal Register.
There's a, there's a process here to make
things,
make sure that things are clear and transparent
and accessible.
And, and we've thrown sand into gears
by
cutting
agency staff and personnel.
These agencies
were already working at max capacity.
People were working their butts off to try
and get stuff done.
And then you you reduce capacity,
you reduce staff, you limit resources,
and you put more work on the plate.
It's it's just
it's not going to
give us
the intended result,
assuming that the result was to get you
know, to move through the rulemaking process in
a a faster, more predictable way.
Alright. Thank you for
this insight and for this road map for
what's to come. I realize this has been
a wonky episode, but I really
appreciate you walking us
through what's gonna happen because we're gonna have
to follow this closely over the next several
years.
John Ruppel, law professor at the University of
Utah and an alumnus of the White House
Council on Environmental Quality. Thank you so much,
for your insight today.
Thanks, Kate. Thanks, Aaron.
Here's a little good news to close out
this episode.
A federal judge recently ruled that federal agencies
unlawfully froze funds awarded under the bipartisan infrastructure
law and the inflation reduction act. The agencies
include the agriculture, energy, interior, and housing departments.
In her ruling, the judge who was appointed
by Trump stated that agencies do not have
unlimited authority to further a president's agenda, nor
do they have unfettered power to hamstring statutes
passed by Congress,
AKA laws. She commanded the agencies to immediately
release the funding, which includes payments to nonprofits
working on everything from urban forestry to lead
pipe remediation.
Of course, we will see whether the administration
follows that court order. That's gonna come in
future episodes. You You know they're trying to
make lead pipes great again.
Right along with coal.
That's gonna do it for us today, folks.
You can always reach us at podcast@westernpriorities.
Or don't be shy. We love to hear
from you. If you are a journalist and
gonna be at the Society of Environmental Journalists
Conference next week in Phoenix,
please drop us a line. Kate and I
are gonna be hanging out there. And even
if you're not gonna be at SEJ, go
sign up for our daily newsletter, Look West,
if you wanna keep up with the barrage
of tax on our public lands.
Thanks again to professor Ruppel for joining us
today, and thank you for listening to the
landscape.