Reclaiming the Udall Legacy: The Meaning of Conservation in Trump’s America
The environmental and legislative accomplishments of Stewart, Mo, and Tom Udall offer a roadmap for recovering from the damage of the Trump administration.
The post Reclaiming the Udall Legacy: The Meaning of Conservation in Trump’s America appeared first on The Revelator.
The Udall name once meant something in the American West. For anyone anchored in the arc of modern conservation and environmental protection, to say “I worked for Tom Udall” was to evoke a legacy that coursed through some of the nation’s boldest acts: the Alaska Lands Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the creation and expansion of our parks and wild places. Yet standing recently in a room at Arizona State University’s Pastor Center for Politics and Public Service, introducing myself as a former press secretary to then-Rep. Tom Udall, I was met with puzzlement. The same when I mentioned Reps. Mo and Stewart Udall: blank faces.
The loss is not just one of memory but of a deeper severing from the traditions that once tethered Arizona and the West to the idea that government must be a steward — a protector — of the land and its wild inheritances.
This is not an accident of history. It is the product of years of unraveling, a process on full display under the Trump administration’s second term — a litany of reversals, repeals, and budget cuts whose cumulative effect is not merely policy drift but a deliberate retreat from the standards of stewardship once defined by the Udalls and those they inspired.
In 2025, that wreckage is plain for all to see.
The Dragon Bravo fire — born of lightning on July 4, ignited amidst the ponderosa and pinyon along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon — became, by August, the seventh largest wildfire in Arizona history, consuming over 145,000 acres. The firestorm devoured the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitor center, cabins, employee housing — displacing hundreds of workers, obliterating irreplaceable cultural heritage, and closing the North Rim for an entire season.
The devastation is not an act of nature alone but of policy: the result of shifts in land management, the expansion of industrial logging, and the hollowing out of federal firefighting resources.
California, too, smoldered. The winter of 2025 brought 14 wildfires to the Los Angeles basin and San Diego County, driven by an overheated, drought-parched landscape and hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. Some 18,000 homes gone. Thirty lives lost.
Fires now routinely surpass 100,000 acres. The Gifford fire alone burned over 104,000, emblematic of the new breed of “megafires” searing the American West with a frequency and intensity that is anything but natural.
Yet in the teeth of these disasters, what does Washington offer? Not support, but a mandate to cut. FEMA — built to provide federal relief in times of catastrophe — faces deep reductions, the elimination of grant programs, and talk of outright abolition by December 2025. Money that once flowed to states for disaster planning, preparedness, and training is now “refocused” or slashed, in line with a Project 2025 playbook that makes every calamity a state or private problem.
“States should do more,” the refrain goes, as if wildfires, hurricanes, and floods observed state lines.
Yes, floods, like the ones that rains brought to Texas. Not the soft rains that nourish, but rains that fell like verdicts — hour after hour, day upon day, drumming against rooftops until walls buckled and rivers claimed the streets. In Houston, in Beaumont, in the low-lying neighborhoods of Port Arthur, water rose with a slow, implacable certainty, swallowing whole blocks and leaving only the pitched tips of roofs visible above the brown flood.
This was not some act of God beyond imagining. The Army Corps of Engineers had warned for years of the vulnerabilities — levees unreinforced, reservoirs undersized, drainage systems designed for storms of a century past. But budgets were trimmed and plans shelved.
In the second Trump term, disaster mitigation was not a priority; it was a line item to be cut.
When the Brazos and Trinity rivers spilled over their banks, the toll was measured not just in the 68 confirmed dead, or the hundreds injured, but in the erasure of whole communities — trailer parks where families lived paycheck to paycheck, coastal towns whose tax bases will never recover. The survivors tell of a smell — oil, sewage, and rot — that lingered in the air long after the waters receded, a reminder that the flood was not just a natural disaster but a civic one, born of choices made in distant offices.
And still, from Washington, the refrain: the states should do more. As if Texas, reeling from billions in damages, could single-handedly muster the resources once marshaled by a unified federal government; as if climate change respected state borders or political talking points.
Everywhere, one sees the marks of a presidency not merely indifferent to the land, but hostile to it.
This is not stewardship. It is liquidation.
In the fevered logic of Trump’s second term, a national forest is not a refuge but an untapped ledger entry; a wildlife refuge is wasted potential until it yields oil or timber; a scientific agency is a nuisance until it can be defunded or dismantled. NOAA? Gutted. The Endangered Species Act’s definition of “harm”? Stripped so bare that the bulldozer becomes a legitimate management tool. The California condor, the ocelot, the Houston toad — each now stands closer to the abyss, not because of some unavoidable cataclysm, but because the law designed to save them has been willfully blunted.
And yet, the Udall legacy endures because it was never about nostalgia — it was about action. Stewart Udall knew that progress came from building coalitions, passing laws with teeth, funding them without apology, and holding the line when industry or indifference threatened to breach it. That is still the roadmap.
What must happen now:
Restore and strengthen the Endangered Species Act — reverse habitat rollback rules and return “harm” to its full ecological meaning.
Rebuild NOAA and FEMA’s capacity — not as partisan spoils, but as the scientific and logistical backbones of disaster resilience.
Block industrial logging and extraction in public lands — using litigation, state-level protections, and direct action where needed.
Invest in climate adaptation for vulnerable species — from condor release programs to amphibian habitat restoration.
Mobilize locally and nationally — because the federal government, as we have just seen, can just as easily become the arsonist as the fire brigade.
The Udalls gave us the scaffolding: laws, institutions, and an ethic that tied prosperity to preservation. Trump has shown us how quickly it can be dismantled. The choice before us is whether to stand by while the scaffolding is kicked away, or to rebuild it — stronger, higher, and impossible to topple.
We do not lack for guideposts. We lack only the will to follow them.
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Previously in The Revelator:
The Myth of the Cowboy and Its Enduring Influence on Public Policy
The post Reclaiming the Udall Legacy: The Meaning of Conservation in Trump’s America appeared first on The Revelator.
