Creating advocacy content for public lands right now feels like playing the world’s most depressing game of whack-a-mole.
Every week there’s another urgent issue competing for attention: the Roadless Rule, Big Bend, public land sell-offs, Boundary Waters, monument protections, and on and on. By the time you’ve researched one issue enough to explain it to your audience, three more have popped up.
And us creators are being asked to help fight all of them, oftentimes totally siloed from the other issues at hand.
The problem is, our collective attention is one of the most powerful tools we have.
We just saw that with Big Bend: Creators and advocates made enough noise that the story broke out of the usual public lands bubble, media picked it up, people who had never heard of the issue started talking about it, and decision-makers responded. That’s a win (albeit a short term win, but a win nonetheless).
Unfortunately, we are winning smaller battles while losing the larger conflict for the future of public lands BECAUSE we are fractured and spread thin.
So what if we stopped treating all of these as separate fights?
That’s exactly what Save Public Lands Day is all about.
For a pretty unusual moment, organizations from across the public lands world (including: The Conservation Alliance, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Outdoor Alliance, The Wilderness Society, MeatEater, Duct Tape Then Beer, The Dirtbag Diaries) are putting their individual priorities (and, frankly, some of their egos) aside to organize around three demands that encompass many of the fights we’re already talking about:
1. No Sell-Offs.
2. No Giveaways.
3. No Backroom Deals.
That’s it. Every single public lands attack that has happened in the last two years has fit into one of these three buckets.
The goal is to collect one million signatures for these three demands by National Public Lands Day on September 26. But we don't want creators to simply promote a petition someone else built.
We want you to help shape what this movement looks like.
Creators understand better than almost anyone how public attention gets built online: what makes people care, what makes them share, and what makes an issue break out beyond the people who already know about it. If we're serious about building a movement around public lands, that expertise needs to be part of the strategy, not tacked onto the end as an amplification request.
So we're inviting creators into this as partners. Bring your issue. Bring your audience. Bring your weird little corner of the internet. Make something yourself, collaborate with someone else, lend your platform, help us figure out what might actually work…or just raise your hand and tell us you want in.
This form is that raised hand.
If you wanna learn more about this, like which orgs and brands have signed on already or what the petition form looks like, please check out the website here: www.savepubliclands.us (password: signtheletter)
If you have more questions please feel free to reach out to Teal Lehto, Campaign Social Media Manager, at SavePublicLandsCreators@gmail.com.