He came home from work, hungry and tired, covered in grime and smut. Sometimes his sons and daughters would run outside to give him bear hugs as he climbed out of his truck before he had the opportunity to shake off the feathery flakes covering his work clothes. The asbestos dust would trail him like a galaxy in the evening light as he walked in to sit at the kitchen table with his family. He had worked in the vermiculite mines for decades, and his cough grew worse even after they closed them down.

How have common men fallen prey to corporate interests so consistently when the GOP is in power? Probably it is because Americans inadvertently voted against our own interests, supported the destruction of the environment, strengthened the elevation of corporate interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, and pulled the rug out from underneath the struggling underclass. One corporate CEO puppet after another has been placed into the current cabinet. Many congressmen in both parties have allowed the corporate marketplace to influence their decision-making.

Some current politicians claim that regulations cost jobs and insist that they are helping the working class, but they are putting corporate interests above the working class, as well as threatening public health. Some Republicans believe in a market-based economy for environmental protection.

• Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors and said the E.P.A. should be called the “job-killing organization of America.”
• Former Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. (R-Utah) believes environmental regulation should be shelved until the economy improves.
• Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called the E.P.A. “radical” and believes they have imposed “illegal” limits on greenhouse gases from power plants.
• Marco Rubio said the E.P.A.’s plan to curb emissions would have a “devastating impact” on jobs. He also vowed to scale back the Clean Water Act.
• Ronald Reagan in 1981 said, “Trees [author’s italics] cause more pollution than automobiles do.” He also said, “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?”

Senior Democrat Henry Waxman, on the Energy and Commerce Committee, calls this “the most anti-environmental Congress in history.”

“Not only are these positions irresponsible, they’re politically problematic,” said David Jenkins of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that believes conservation should be a core value of the party.

The looting and plundering of the land underneath us all in the name of progress is not a vision that has “we the people” in mind first and foremost.

America is distinctly a nation of laws, a system of checks and balances. America does not have a king who can rule by fiat. When you join the government, you do not swear loyalty to an individual, but to the Constitution and to the people. Corporations do not pledge allegiance to the Constitution, but rather to their the shareholders. Corporations are driven solely by the profit motive.

We the people—the workers and the children of the workers—seem to have few true representatives for our interests, our public servants having failed to serve public over corporate interests. The “us vs. them” argument sweeping this great land should not be about splitting up the people into patriots and non-patriots, which is what politicians and the media are doing. We the people is “us,” all citizens (conservative and liberal) because we are all in this together, striving to give our families a decent life of health, happiness, and freedom. For the corporate elite (them), everything is for sale, including a man’s lungs and a person’s patriotic feeling, if it can be used for a vote or a buck.

In my opinion, when a select few corporations come in and want to take public land for short-term profit, not the welfare of the country and people, this creates a boom-and-bust economy. Modern carpetbaggers come in and extract as much of the natural resources as they can; during this time the economy and surrounding cities grow. Once the resources are extracted, the economy and surrounding towns collapse. The people at the corporate top—of the vermiculite manufacturing plant, for instance—make a bunch of money and then leave poverty, illness, and a caved-in economy in their wake.  The corporate interests are unconcerned with the welfare of resource-rich towns full of working class patriots, who often voted for a representative whose campaign was funded by lobbyist/corporate interests, with hopes of jobs and “the good ol’ days and ways.” Alternately, the corporations, governmental agents, and lobbyists come for profits.

“They” came for one thing in Libby, Montana, where the local plant spewed asbestos from vermiculite mining over the small town for decades, sickening thousands of people and killing 200.

They came for one thing in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where silicosis from lack of proper health protection (masks) at the Hawks’ Nest Tunnel Disaster caused the death toll to rise to 764.

They came for one thing along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio that caught fire in 1969 due to industrial wastes.

They came for one thing in Pennsylvania where an explosion inside the Darr Mine caused 239 men and boys to lose their lives.

They came for one thing in Picher, Oklahoma, a once-booming lead and zinc mining town that is now a ghost town. This link is to a news story about the “superfund” site, so polluted that it tops  the E.P.A.s National Priorities List.

They came for one thing along the Tug Fork River in Kentucky, where 306 million gallons of mining waste contaminated water for 27,000 people, killing countless creatures.

Many of these places are among the top-ten worst environmental disasters in the history of this great country.

In witnessing the GOP and the new president beginning their assault on America’s public lands since their first days in office, I find their moves counter-patriotic. Since the November 2016 election, I have been grappling with what it means to be a patriot. Why isn’t caring for the environment or the land equated with being a patriot?

Is a patriot only one who supports a given president and congressional decisions? No, of course not. Many disgruntled, patriotic citizens didn’t like the last eight years of Obama. Yet going against the president has a distinct feel of being against the flag and counter to patriotism. Does being a patriot mean loyalty to a political party, to a given figurehead, to policy, or to something that transcends each of those? Perhaps the Constitution?

As Edward R. Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

The root word of patriotism is patris, or native land. Merriam-Webster defines patriotism as “devotion, love and support for one’s country” with a willingness to defend it.

George Orwell creates a distinction between “patriotism” and “nationalism”:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism should include the bedrock of democracy which is “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” By protecting open spaces, clean air, and clean water, we are preserving a future we can hand off to our children with a clear conscience, and we are living in a present where our land, air, and water are ours to protect from profit for a few.

Our nation and the world are at a crossroads. We can either continue down this destructive path of short-term gain called personal profit, or we can choose alternative energies and start thinking of the long-term and a future to believe in that is ours, we the people, and not theirs, they the corporations.

I once heard someone say a new kind of patriotism needs to emerge that is land-based with a focus on ecological knowledge, moral consideration, ethical principles, spiritual belief, and a profound affinity for the earth underfoot that includes us all. The world’s scientists overwhelmingly agree that our planet faces an environmental crisis of epic proportions.

 A debate continues: we can have either a reverence for life or an allegiance to industry or we can figure out a way to mesh the two together in our public’s best interests. It doesn’t have to be an either/or argument. It is not a jobs vs. environment argument as the GOP and uninformed prez would have many believe. Plenty of jobs, if not more, can be created from cleaner energy than from fossil fuels that leave our workers sick and their communities dirty and undesirable places to raise a family. In fact, clean energy is currently cheaper than fossil fuels.

As Terry Tempest Williams writes, “The natural world is dying, poisoned by the hands tied to corporate greed.” The natural world is not dying by the hands of the patriots.

Conservationists are patriots of the land, the American land. There are congressmen and even presidents who are conservationists. Theodore Roosevelt, during his presidency, protected approximately 230 million acres of public land, six national parks.

“The Clean Air Act passed in 1970 without a single nay vote. When Nixon passed it, he said this puts us way down the road that Theodore Roosevelt spoke so eloquently about and meets the goals of clean air, clean water, and open spaces for the future of American citizens,” says the Washington Post in a 2014 article. “In 1988 George. H.W. Bush ran on the environmental ticket and updated the Clean Air Act. The Senate passed the measure with an 89-11 vote. Mitch McConnell agreed with it by saying, ‘I had to choose between cleaner air and the status quo; I chose cleaner air.’”

The land, water, and air do not tiptoe along partisan lines, so why do we as a people allow ourselves to be badgered and divided this way? In 1997, several Republicans from the Northeast promoted the Environmental Protection Agency, which was birthed during the Nixon years.

• Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-New York) compared smog to terrorism. “We are sponsoring a form of pollution terrorism by allowing this to take place.”
• Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) supports climate change legislation and curbs on carbon emissions.
• John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, defied his own party by standing up for clean energy. He says clean air and clean energy is good for business and homeowners.  
• New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and set strict renewable energy standards.
• The state of Nevada had fewer than 67,000 acres of protected wilderness when Democratic Senator Harry Reid took office. When he left there were 3.4 million acres.  
• Former Governor Mitt Romney (R-Massachusetts) went in opposition to his party when he said, “I believe we should keep our air and our water clean.”

Part of the reason why Americans aren’t as vocal about the environment as they were 48 years ago is because the effects of pollution aren’t as visible and so closely tied to human activity as they were before the Clean Air Act was passed. Back then, Americans could see smog and people were newly aware of scientist/poet Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. “Silent Spring, a landlubber, is no slouch of a book: it launched the environmental movement; provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972); and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970.” The non-partisan Clean Air Act act eliminated the smog from the sky and ameliorated acid rain but didn’t manage to allay the greed that we see taking over the environmental and climate policies these last several months.

What is the cost of progress? Does progress equate with more coal miners dying of black lung disease again? Does progress equate with no E.P.A. to monitor dumping mining debris in streams, no researchers or federal workers monitoring the changing chemistry of those streams as they become inhospitable to aquatic life? The current administration’s view of progress will be rough on our America, to say the least.

Would a patriot outright reject internationally negotiated treaties like the Paris Climate Treaty and the Clean Power Plan that reduce the threat of global warming for our children and their children in favor of aggressive plans to increase domestic drilling for fossil fuels?

Would a patriot transfer our federally protected public lands to the state without time or money for states to create extensive new management plans? Would a patriot sell that land to the highest bidder if the state failed to manage efficiently? Would a patriot implement a broad array of actions to open up previously protected public lands like national forests, national monuments, national parks, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, and wildlife refuges to oil and natural gas drilling, fracking, coal and other mining?

Is patriotism exhibited by gutting the Endangered Species Act, by rolling back the protections against pollutants in our air and water, by cutting funding for clean-ups of polluted sites? I say it isn’t. In my opinion, while some patriotic citizens will back whatever Trump and the GOP push through, their public interests are equally being debased by these carpetbaggers and wealthy elite. The aims of these few figureheads over the many in 2017 was to make a buck off the public lands, wildlife, and wilderness areas that belong to us all. Corporate coffers are already lined with gold, but our pockets, across party lines—working class, middle class, immigrants, and migrant workers—are not.

American’s public land belongs to all of us. We need to care for it responsibly, patriotically. People think public land belongs to the government, but it is essential to realize that the government is us. If we protect our land, our water, and our air, then we are protecting ourselves, our children, our communities and our nation.

I live in the great state of Montana, Big Sky Country, a land rich in beauty that brings people from all walks of life together, regardless of political party; a land filled with amber waves of grain and mountain’s majesty, where crystal clear rivers run through it, and where an abundance of wild things roam.  

Every outdoorsman I know who truly loves this land called America, needs to take responsibility for the land, air and water, and defend it from moneyed interests who don’t care for it beyond their personal profit. They’ve forgotten who the we is in “we the people.”  Let us come together and remind them.

As a country, what do we want? As fellow citizens, what kind of patriots do we want to be? Do we want a faux patriotism—nationalism—that rewards the corporations, elite, and wealthy, or do we want a citizen-oriented patriotism that cares for the land, the air, the water, and the health of our people from sea to shining sea? Defending and taking care of the environment and public lands is not a Democratic or Republican issue. It is a patriotic, human issue. Pledge allegiance to that.

Mark Twain was once questioned about his loyalty. He responded, “My loyalty is to one’s country not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over and care for. The institutions are extraneous. There it is mere clothing. Clothing can wear out, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease or death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to die for rags is the loyalty of unreason.”