Corpofascism | Public Lands & Environment

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Every entry below is preliminary. These are dated, sourced notes on unfolding events judged relevant to a future Volume 2 paper — not the papers themselves, and not yet integrated into the numbered chapter dossiers on The Evidence or The Actors. Every Corpofascism paper published from this point forward is labeled Volume 2. When an addendum below is developed into a full paper, it will be removed from this page and linked from its permanent home instead.

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Public Lands & Environment

The rollback of conservation protections, read first in the administration’s own accounting of it and then against the counts and objections it drew.

Relevant to Ch. 33, What We Held in Common

The rollback, in the administration’s own words

The White House fact sheet of May 29, 2026 is worth reading as a primary source, because it does the inventory work itself. Announcing an Executive Order rescinding EO 11644 and EO 11989 — the roughly fifty-year-old orders governing off-road vehicle use on public lands — it lists the administration’s own prior actions in sequence, and names what it is removing.

The criteria being struck are quoted in the fact sheet itself: rules requiring agencies to prevent “adverse effects on natural, aesthetic, or scenic values” and to minimize “conflicts between off-road vehicles and other existing or proposed recreational uses.” The document characterizes these as “vague,” “subjective,” and “ill-defined and arbitrary environmental and social standards,” whose removal will “restore balanced land management.” The same sheet lists, as accomplishments: an Executive Order that “opened hundreds of millions of acres” of federal lands and waters to energy development; the February 2025 rescission of the Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations; USDA’s move to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which the White House itself describes as covering “nearly 45 million acres of the National Forest System”; and Interior’s rescission of the BLM Public Lands Rule.

The Center for American Progress, analyzing the same period from the opposite direction, put the second-term total at more than 86 million acres stripped of protections — equivalent, by its reckoning, to more than seventy Grand Canyons or thirty-eight Yellowstones — and more than 100 million acres counting the first term. The rhetorical collision is exact and worth preserving: the White House sheet claims the Great American Outdoors Act as “the most significant conservation achievement since Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency,” while CAP’s reply notes that Roosevelt conserved nearly 230 million acres.

Sources: The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Removes Unnecessary and Counterproductive Restrictions on Access to Federal Lands” (May 29, 2026), fetched directly; Center for American Progress, “Trump’s Conservation Disaster” press release (Jun. 25, 2026) and the underlying analysis by Sophie Conroy and Sam Zeno. Noted for accuracy: CAP is an avowedly progressive policy institute and its figure is an advocacy estimate, not a government count; it is recorded here as CAP’s number, alongside the administration’s own. A live discrepancy to resolve before drafting: the White House puts the Roadless Rule at “nearly 45 million acres,” while other counts — including the NPR headline flagged for this batch, not yet read in full — give 58 million. The two figures likely reflect different treatments of Alaska’s Tongass and state-specific carve-outs; neither should be used until the basis of each is confirmed.

Relevant to Ch. 33 — and to Ch. 34, The Defunding of Inquiry

Redefining harm

On July 10, 2026, the Departments of the Interior and Commerce finalized a rule rescinding the long-standing definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. The change is small in text and enormous in effect: only actions that directly injure or kill an animal now count as a violation. Destroying the forest, wetland, or stream a species depends on no longer does.

Karrigan Börk, a law professor and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, stated the mechanism plainly: “You can destroy the resources a species requires as long as you don’t do it when the species is at home. If you drain a salmon river during the summer when the salmon aren’t in it, ultimately it has the same impact of killing off that whole species.” The empirical stake is measurable: a 2019 study in Conservation Science and Practice, examining species listed between 1975 and 2017, found that only 17% faced threats from direct killing, while 81% faced habitat loss. The rule removes federal protection from the threat that accounts for the overwhelming majority of listings.

The administration’s stated justification is that states remain free to protect habitat themselves — framed by federal officials as giving “freedom” to state leaders. This is the claim the reporting tests most directly, and the objections did not come from one side. Wildlife agency leaders in both conservative and liberal states filed concerns: North Dakota Game and Fish’s Bruce Kreft warned of “dire consequences” and that eliminating habitat protection “will lead to further population declines and, ultimately, an increase in the number of species needing (Endangered Species Act) protection.” Officials in Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wyoming objected as well, as did the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. Of the public comments Stateline reviewed, only Alaska’s wildlife agency head gave the change wholehearted support.

The structural reason states cannot absorb the role: per a 2024 National Caucus of Environmental Legislators analysis, only eight states plus Puerto Rico require critical-habitat designation under their own laws, and California appears to be the only state with a process requiring developers to offset habitat damage. State endangered-species laws overwhelmingly address poaching and direct killing, not land. And no state law reaches federal land at all — if the Forest Service permits old-growth logging under the new definition, state wildlife officials have no authority to stop it. Chris Servheen, who spent 35 years as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator: “It’s really disingenuous to say if states want to protect habitat, they can do so. That’s not their role, that’s not what they do… The federal agencies manage the land base.”

The administration’s position, recorded in full: the rule is framed as restoring the ESA’s “original intent” and ending regulation of “indirect or speculative impacts”; the rulemaking states the change “does not alter the ability of States to implement their own conservation programs or to regulate habitat impacts under State law.” Interior did not respond to Stateline’s interview request. The industry position, also recorded: the American Petroleum Institute and allied oil and gas groups supported narrowing habitat protection, citing Justice Scalia’s dissent in the 1995 case that upheld it — arguing “harm” “must involve a direct injury to a particular animal” and “cannot result indirectly from habitat modification.” Notably, those same groups objected to the method, warning that rescinding the definition without replacing it leaves a future president or court free to read the statute more broadly than before. Litigation: a coalition of environmental groups filed suit via Earthjustice; two Washington State tribes filed separately, asserting the rule infringes treaty-protected fisheries. Source: Alex Brown, Stateline (Jul. 20, 2026); the rule at 91 Fed. Reg., published Jul. 14, 2026.