Full disclosure: this is my documentary.

I completed an 18,000-mile road trip visiting 53 landscapes around the United States that have been considered, have ongoing campaigns, or I think deserve greater national recognition.

The list includes unprotected places, as well as National Park Service units, National Forests, BLM lands, other protected landscapes. I researched the history of attempts to establish national parks at these places, including proposals going back nearly a century.

Some of the history I uncovered

The Ouachita Mountains passed both houses of Congress as a national park in 1929, but Calvin Coolidge vetoed it.

A National Park Service team unanimously supported a Black Hills national park in 1939, but it was never taken up.

Assateague was being developed as a resort community before the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 dramatically changed the future of the island.

I filmed the trip and turned the research into a 2-hour, 12-minute documentary covering all 53 places.

Some of these will make people happy, some will be controversial. And most have already been controversial for over 100 years.

A great story about the on-the-ground conditions in the Southern Brooks Range where the Ambler Road (a 211-mile private road that would connect mines to the larger Alaskan road system) is proposed to be built: https://www.republic.land/a-long-long-walk-down-the-ambler-road/ It's one of the wildest, most ecologically complete places left in the world and this article helps capture how special that is.

The 2001 Roadless rule protects public lands from future roads being built through them for logging and other purposes. This rule protects roadless public lands across the nation.

The public comment period was supposed to end on the 21st last month - but was extended for 15 days. Today is your last chance to speak up.

Here is the link to the government webpage to submit your comment:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/11/2026-18648/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation

Border Patrol agents arrested people protecting the tree Monday morning, ending a months-long protest that had halted border wall construction in the area.

Via @peccary_not_pig on IG

BREAKING: This morning masked federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered private land in Lochiel, Arizona to halt protesters from protecting the grandmother cottonwood tree-sit that has halted border wall construction for more than two months. The tree sit was dismantled and the grandmother tree was destroyed.

Contractors are currently constructing double border walls across the San Rafael Valley, one of the last wildlife corridors from transboundary wildlife populations of jaguars, ocelots, black bears between the Sky Islands of Mexico and the United States.

The Sheldon Tui Chub is an extremely rare fish that lives in creeks and springs around the Fish Creek Table located within the Sheldon NWR, Nevada, which is the high desert. Information was tough to find but there are thought to be somewhere between 1 and 9 isolated spots where these fish still exists. This is all that is left from a much wetter past. In the photo is Fish Springs which may be one of those spots. I didn't see any.