The Loss of Stewardship

There are places in this country that were supposed to be off-limits to our worst impulses. Big Bend was one of them. For generations, the idea of a national park was a quiet agreement between ourselves and the land: a promise that some places were too rare, too slow to form, and too fragile to be carved up by the politics of the day. Watching heavy machinery roll past Santa Elena Canyon to scrape wide access corridors through intact desert feels like a total breakdown of that agreement.

I thought we were better than this. I thought that no matter how divided or shortsighted we became, we still held a baseline respect for the raw, wild spaces that define us. The Chihuahuan Desert doesn’t heal like a grassy field; when you run a bulldozer over biological crust and creosote roots, those scars remain long after the contracts expire and the politicians move on. To treat a landscape that took millions of years to shape as just another construction site isn’t just bad policy—it is a profound failure of stewardship. It reveals a cynical mindset that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, leaving us all poorer for what is being lost.