The Crisis of Ecological Civics
Campers trashing public lands is a symptom, not the problem. Closure is not the solution.
I got kicked out of another campsite last weekend. It’s been happening more and more. The Forest Service was closing another several thousand acres of public land in my area to overnight camping, riding a national wave of decreased access to free camping. Across the country, access to public lands is steadily dwindling, whether from government closures limiting access and use or private landowners blocking access. If Trump is elected this year and conservatives can implement Project 2025, our public lands will be sold off en masse.
The question of why this particular forest, and public lands in general, keep being closed to campers brought up something profoundly interesting.
On the surface, there was nothing unsurprising about the reasons the Forest Service was giving. “We can’t have nice things,” the ranger told me, shrugging as we both looked at a pile of construction waste that had been dumped in a campfire ring that wasn’t allowed to be built on the site in the first place. I spent half an hour the other morning picking up discarded cutlery and black plastic bags of human feces from around another campsite. Most forays down unmarked dirt roads in a Siskiyou County forest will eventually…
