The Roads and the Water

 On the Proposed Rescission of the Roadless Rule — and the Test It Sets for Itself

Deer Creek - Greenbank, West Virginia

In the winter of 1897, Congress wrote down why the national forests exist. The occasion was anger. Grover Cleveland had just proclaimed thirteen new forest reserves on Washington's Birthday — twenty-one million acres withdrawn from the public domain in a single stroke — and four of them sat in country I would later spend a career mapping: the Bitter Root, the Flathead, the Lewis & Clarke, the Priest River. Some nine million acres in Montana and Idaho. The western reaction was loud enough that Congress moved to suspend most of the proclamations. But in the same appropriations bill, almost as an afterthought, it did something durable. It stated, for the first time, the purposes a forest reserve would serve: to improve and protect the forest, and to secure favorable conditions of water flows.

Water was named at the creation. Not as an amenity, not as a concession to some later constituency, but as one of the two reasons these lands were held back from disposal at all. I have made that point before in this space, and I will keep making it, because it keeps being forgotten. It is being forgotten again now.

The current administration has proposed to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule — the “Roadless Rule” — and open the Inventoried Roadless Areas to road construction and commercial timber harvest. The rescission would reach nearly forty-five million of the fifty-eight million acres the rule now covers. The stated rationale is twofold: wildfire prevention and timber production, with the argument that these lands need active management and that the rule stands in the way.

I want to take that rationale seriously, because parts of it are serious. Wildfire risk in the West is real and rising. The agency is genuinely, chronically underfunded. “Active management” is not a slur — I spent my early forestry years thinning stands and setting prescribed fire on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and I do not romanticize a forest left entirely alone. If the case for rescission held up on its own terms, it would deserve a fair hearing.

It does not hold up. And the most honest way to show that is not to argue about values. It is to take the rescission's own two justifications — fire and fiscal responsibility — and check them against the record. On both, the evidence runs the other way.

First, what these areas are. A study published this year in Biological Conservation by David Mildrexler and colleagues does something I find persuasive precisely because it is spatial and measurable rather than sentimental. The authors run the Inventoried Roadless Areas through the Forest Landscape Integrity Index — a 300-meter dataset that scores how intact a forest's ecological functions remain, from observed human pressures to the loss of forest connectivity. I spent the last chapter of my federal career as geospatial program manager for the Northern Region, responsible for the spatial data across twenty-five million acres in Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas, and I know what an integrity index can and cannot tell you. What this one tells you is unambiguous. The roadless areas score a median of 9.5 on a ten-point scale — as high as, and often higher than, congressionally protected wilderness. The unprotected national-forest lands score a full point and a half lower. The difference is the roads and the logging. The Great Burn, on the Lolo, is one of the areas the authors photograph to make the point; it sits in the region whose data crossed my desk. These are not marginal lands. They are the most intact forest the country still holds outside its wildernesses, and there is more of them than there is wilderness.

Second, the water. Because the roadless areas are overwhelmingly high, steep, headwater country, they protect the topmost links of the watershed — the cold, clean, slowly released water that everything downstream depends on. The study finds that in the western United States, roughly ninety percent of people are served by public drinking-water systems that draw from national-forest lands, and those lands contain seventy-one percent of all the roadless acreage in the country. Nationally, the Forest Service's own watershed accounting puts something on the order of a fifth of the nation's water supply on these lands, serving well over a hundred million people. This is the Organic Act reading forward into the present tense. The headwaters the roadless rule protects are the “favorable conditions of water flows” the 1897 Congress had in mind, whether or not anyone remembers the phrase. Build roads into that country and you introduce exactly what a watershed cannot filter out on its own — sediment, altered subsurface flow, culverts that fail in the heavy rain events that are becoming more common, not less.

Now the test. The rescission says: roads for fire prevention. But a 2026 assessment in the same literature, looking at three decades of wildfire across all eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions, found that ignition density is highest within fifty meters of roads and lowest in wilderness and inventoried roadless areas. Human beings start most of the fires — better than eight in ten ignitions nationally — and roads are how human beings and their ignitions reach the backcountry. More road does not mean less fire. It means more of the ignitions that drive the fire problem in the first place. The rescission has the causation backward.

And the rescission says: fiscal responsibility. But here the argument turns most sharply against itself. The national forests already carry more than 386,000 miles of road — enough to circle the earth fifteen times — plus tens of thousands of miles of unauthorized road on top of that. The agency's deferred-maintenance backlog has grown from $8.4 billion in 2001 to more than $10.8 billion today. By the agency's own 2001 estimate, it was receiving less than a fifth of what it needed simply to maintain the road system it already had. You do not, as a matter of basic stewardship of public money, respond to a maintenance backlog you cannot fund by building more of the thing you cannot maintain — in the most remote, most expensive-to-reach country you administer. The fiscal case is not an argument for rescission. It is the single strongest argument for keeping the rule. An acre without a road needs no road maintenance. That is not an ecological point. It is an accounting one.

So the rescission fails the two tests it sets for itself. It would not reduce fire; it would move ignitions closer to the fuel. It would not save money; it would add liability to a ledger already in the red. That is what I mean when I say the case does not hold on its own terms. One does not have to reach for anyone's motives to see it. The argument simply does not survive contact with the record it claims to rest on.

I will add the part I know from the field rather than the literature. The roadless areas are the source country for the wide-ranging carnivores — lynx, wolverine, grizzly, fisher. In my Voyageurs years I turned radiotelemetry into wolf-pack territory polygons and supported the interagency lynx survey, and I learned that a “source population” is not an abstraction. It is a place large enough and quiet enough that animals produce a surplus that spills outward and repopulates the rest. Fragment it with road and you do not shrink the population by the acreage you took. You break the function of the whole.

And I will add the part I know from before there was a career at all. In the last years of my father's life, Interstate 80 was under construction through our hunting country in Clarion County. The cut opened a coal seam above the camp he had built on Beaver Creek, and orange sulfur water began running into the stream where we fished. I was a teenager. I did not have the words for acid drainage yet. But I watched a road change a creek, and the water still runs changed today, and the camp is still there. I have never been able to fully separate the federal career that followed from that particular piece of orange water. The roadless rule is, at bottom, a rule about what roads do to water. I learned the lesson early and by accident. The country has the chance to keep from learning it again at scale.

Of the roughly 223,700 public comments submitted on the proposed rescission, ninety-nine percent opposed it. That is not a close call, and it is not a partisan one. The authors of the Biological Conservation paper recommend the better course plainly: not to weaken the rule but to codify it — to pass the roadless country into law the way wilderness was, so it no longer depends on which way the administrative wind is blowing.

I would put it in the register of 1897. The roadless areas are the interior — the un-edged, low-noise core of the system, where the water still gathers the way it did before we arrived. Securing favorable conditions of water flows was never a slogan. It was the founding instruction. We are being asked to forget it. I would rather we didn't.

 

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author's.

We Can Always Grow More

After The Dragonfly’s Tale — a cautionary retelling

Sam Lammie, Claude, ChatGPT

The corn-husk dragonfly, made from the last of the harvest, over a valley split between its two fates.

“We must learn what cannot be grown again.”

An old Zuni story keeps a warning for people who mistake a gift for an achievement. Here it is again, in our clothes — and with one change, because our version may not get the mercy theirs did.

❧

The Zuni tell it as a gift and a warning both, and I hand it back the same way, changed only in its clothes.

There was a people who lived in a valley that had always fed them. They did not always understand why. Rain came when it was needed; the ground kept faith; the storerooms filled year after year until the people forgot that filling was a thing that could stop. They came to believe the harvest was their own doing — the reward of their cleverness, the proof of their greatness — and not a thing given, on terms, by keepers they no longer bothered to name.

Because they had more than they could use, they looked for ways to use it that others would see. The chief — and there is always a chief, and always a council nodding — had an idea. Let us show the neighboring peoples how strong we are. Let us hold a great battle, not of arrows, but of food. Let us throw our abundance at one another until the ground is covered in it, so everyone will know we are so rich we can afford to waste. And the council said: a fine idea. So they built engines to consume, and lit the valley all night, and drank the water down to prove they had water to drink, and called it progress, and called it winning.

Into this came two women, ragged, asking for a little to eat. Nobody knew them. A boy and his small sister, who had not yet learned the valley’s manners, brought the women food from their own hands. But an elder struck it away. Do not waste good food on beggars. They are lazy. They want an easy meal they did not earn. And the strangers — who were the keepers of the valley wearing another face, as keepers do when they come to see what a people has become — went away grieved, and made their decision.

The taking, when it came, was quiet. Not a raid — a withdrawal. The water went first, but underground, where no one watches. The ground gave up its faith a season at a time. The old knowledge that had kept the storerooms — the patient, unglamorous keeping — thinned out and was not replaced, because keeping is boring and no one throws a battle in its honor. And the people, when they noticed the numbers falling, did not fear. We can always grow more, they said. There is plenty. There has always been plenty.

This is the sentence the tale is built to warn you about. Say it slowly. It is the last thing a people says before the winter it does not walk out of.

The winter was long. The warm winds came late and then did not come. What had been given was simply no longer given, and it turned out that had been the whole arrangement all along. The storerooms emptied. And the chief and the council, who had staged the battle, did the thing chiefs do: they gathered their warmest robes and went to the neighbors to beg — and in their leaving they forgot the two children. The very ones who had offered food to strangers were left behind, asleep, to inherit the empty valley.

The boy woke to silence. He was afraid, and he was a child, so he did the only thing a good child knows to do: he tried to comfort someone smaller than himself. From the remnants — a dry stalk, a brittle leaf, the last unusable scraps of the old abundance — he made a small and imperfect and beautiful thing, and gave it to his sister, and she laughed for the first time in a long while. That night she told it, Fly, and find us something to eat. And because it had been made out of love in the ruins, it could. It rose on its strange thin wings and went looking for the keepers, tassel to tassel across a dead country, to carry them a single message: the kind ones are still here, and they are hungry.

The keepers remembered. They had never wanted worship. They had wanted, the whole time, only to see the food reach the beggar’s hand. So they filled the children’s house, and the children planted, and the rain returned, and the chief came home to a green valley he had done nothing to deserve and understood, at last, what the arrangement had been. I was proud, he said. I did not want to share. From now on we will not waste, and we will not despise the poor, and we will remember that this was given. And the people learned it, and were spared.

❧

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because the Zuni tale ends in mercy and I am not sure ours does.

Their valley was given back its rain. The corn is a renewable gift; the rain that failed one bad year can fall again the next. But some of what we are throwing in our mock battle does not come back on any timescale a child will live to see. There are basins that have no outlet — that keep only what they are given and drain to nowhere — and once you have drawn them down past a certain line, no season of good rain refills them, no confession does, and no dragonfly, however lovingly made, carries a message that can undo it. The old knowledge, once the last keeper of it retires unreplaced, is not regrown in a season either. Our storerooms have a floor the Ashiwi’s did not, and we are spending as though we cannot reach it.

So take the tale in the spirit it was kept for centuries to be taken. The dragonfly is still out there — the small good thing somebody made out of the wreckage, still flying, still carrying the only message that ever mattered. But it is faster to break a basin than to beg one back. Be the child who offers, not the chief who throws. And do it before the second winter, not during it — because the whole warning of the story is that the people who say we can always grow more are never saying it in summer. They are saying it with the snow already on the field.

❧

After “The Dragonfly’s Tale,” an ancient Zuni story of the A’shiwi people of Hawikuh, kept alive for centuries by tribal storytellers and set down for children by Kristina Rodanas. Retold here in homage, and in warning.

▶ Watch: https://youtu.be/oiWgff4eCSc

A note on the making. We Can Always Grow More was made by three hands. The retelling is Sam Lammie’s, written with Claude (Anthropic) in the back-and-forth that The Musical Stone runs on — Claude drafting and pushing, Sam directing and deciding. The poster was generated by Sam with ChatGPT (OpenAI), which rendered the split valley and the corn-husk dragonfly out of the tale’s own images. And beneath the three of us is the older source we only carry forward: the Zuni storytellers who kept “The Dragonfly’s Tale” alive for centuries.

Tapadh leat.

the disappearing interval

 A closing movement for “The Last Human Decision”

On August 12, 2026, in Huntsville, Alabama, the outgoing head of U.S. Space Command gave his last symposium speech and read out a list. Five capabilities the command says it will need between 2029 and 2033 to keep its edge over China in orbit: kinetic and non-kinetic space fires; means to counter an adversary’s low-orbit satellite constellations; refuelable satellites that can maneuver instead of husbanding the fuel they launched with; space domain awareness good enough for what the missile-defense world calls a “target-quality track”; and, third on the list, joint, integrated space command and control. Gen. Stephen Whiting was careful to name the genre. “This isn’t just a wishlist,” he said. “It’s a clear demand signal to several audiences.”

It is an interesting choice of words. Industry hears a requirement. Congress hears a justification. An adversary hears capability and intent. One transmission carries several messages simultaneously.

But one item deserves particular attention.

Whiting said the force must “enhance machine-to-machine connectivity to support decision-making and battle management of this global space fight on tactically relevant timelines.”

The important words may not be machine-to-machine. They may be tactically relevant timelines.

Because this essay has encountered that problem before.

In 1983, the Soviet Oko early-warning system told Stanislav Petrov that American missiles had been launched. The system was wrong. Petrov had something that increasingly sophisticated technology cannot guarantee:  time.

Time to look at the signal.

Time to compare it with what he knew.

Time to doubt the machine.

Time to decide.

More than two decades earlier, at NORAD, Air Marshal Roy Slemon confronted another extraordinary warning when the newly operational BMEWS system interpreted the rising moon as a massive incoming Soviet missile raid. He, too, occupied an interval between detection and action in which a human being could ask a profoundly important question:

Could the system be wrong?

The men mattered. Their judgment mattered. But something else mattered first.

The architecture gave them time to exercise judgment.

That distinction becomes important in orbit.

A contested space environment operates at velocities and distances that compress the interval between detection, interpretation and response. Sensors become faster. Networks become faster. Tracking becomes more precise. Machines exchange information directly because human communication increasingly becomes the slowest element in the chain.

There is nothing inherently sinister about this. Much of it is necessary. Machines can integrate sensor streams, maintain tracks and distribute information at speeds no human organization could match.

That is Licklider's promise still alive: machine and human doing different things well.

But there is another possibility.

As the system becomes faster, the machine may cease merely to provide information within the human decision window and begin determining the size of that window itself.

That is a different threshold.

The question is therefore not simply whether a human remains “in the loop.” That phrase may eventually tell us very little. A person can formally remain inside a decision architecture while possessing so little time, context or practical ability to intervene that the human role becomes largely procedural.

The better question is:  How much meaningful time remains between machine certainty and irreversible action?

Whiting does not tell us that humans are being removed from space battle management. His words actually preserve the opposite interpretation: machine-to-machine connectivity will support decision-making. That may prove to be exactly what is intended—machines managing the velocity of information while humans retain authority over consequential actions.

But the tension should not be dismissed.

Petrov's world contained minutes.

Slemon's world contained minutes.

The architecture Whiting describes is being designed for a domain in which minutes may be an eternity.

And that brings us back to the question underneath this entire essay.

For most of the history of automated warning, we have treated the human as the final safeguard against the machine's mistake. Sensors could fail. Algorithms could misclassify. Communications could distort. The human receiver remained the place where context, uncertainty and judgment could interrupt the chain.

But what happens when the speed required for the system to succeed becomes incompatible with the time required for that safeguard to function?

We should be careful here. The answer is not to romanticize slow human decision-making. Humans misinterpret signals too. They panic. They carry biases. They misunderstand adversaries. And in some circumstances hesitation can be as dangerous as haste.

The objective is not simply to preserve human delay.

It is to preserve meaningful human judgment.

That may prove to be one of the central design problems of machine-speed command and control: not merely making the system faster, but deliberately engineering places where speed stops.

A pause.

A threshold.

A requirement for corroboration.

A point at which uncertainty is allowed to remain uncertainty.

A place where the architecture itself says: not yet.

Petrov's pause was partly an artifact of the technological world in which he lived. We should not assume the next generation of systems will give it to us accidentally.

If we believe the pause matters, we may have to design it deliberately.

That is what makes the demand signal from Huntsville consequential.

Space Command is asking industry to build systems capable of operating on timelines increasingly inhospitable to unaided human cognition. That requirement may be unavoidable. It may even be essential.

But somewhere between the sensor and the weapon, between detection and decision, between machine speed and human responsibility, another requirement belongs on the list:  preserve the interval in which someone can still say no.

Petrov inherited that interval.

Slemon inherited it.

The next generation may have to build it.

 

— Samuel R. Lammie

 

A note on how this was made: This piece emerged through an iterative conversation among a human and two AI systems. I brought the underlying framework, questions, and professional perspective; Claude helped develop the initial argument and draft; ChatGPT challenged several of its stronger claims and helped reshape the piece around what I think is the more defensible question: not whether machines will replace human decision-makers, but whether the systems we design will preserve enough time for meaningful human judgment. I made the final choices. In a piece about human judgment in increasingly automated systems, that process seemed worth making visible.

 

A Return on the Investment

 On NSF, the National Academy of Sciences, and why I believe in the whole enterprise

In 1988, the National Science Foundation funded the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University at Buffalo — one of only three sites in the country, alongside Santa Barbara and Maine. That same fall, I walked into the Department of Geography to begin a master's degree. I did not know I was walking into something the NSF had just planted. I only knew that David Mark and Hugh Calkins were willing to advise a man who did not arrive empty-handed.

Because I had been doing the work of GIS for years by then — without a computer, and mostly without the name for it. As a Peace Corps conservation agent in the Guatemalan highlands, and later as a forester on the San Carlos and White Mountain Apache reservations, the daily work was spatial to the bone: siting nurseries by elevation, matching species to slope and soil, tracing a watershed by where the water wanted to go, laying land use over terrain over hydrology over the human communities living on it until the pattern surfaced. Call it analog GIS. Ian McHarg had already handed me the method — I read Design with Nature early, before Buffalo or right at its threshold — and his stacked transparencies, one ecological layer laid over another until the fitting ground for a thing declared itself, were exactly what I was doing in the field with paper and judgment and no machine at all: the layers stacked in the mind before any software could stack them for you. By 1986 I had made the jump to the digital tool, pushing the BIA Forestry Branch at White Mountain to trade its aging MOSS system for the new ARC/INFO out of a small company in Redlands. So I came to Buffalo to find the theory beneath a practice I already carried in my hands — not to be handed a practice I lacked.

I want to be plain about what that NSF grant became, because I am one of the things it became.

The three years I spent at Buffalo seeded a career of more than three decades in federal geospatial work. It carried me to Voyageurs, where the data on my desk turned wolf radiotelemetry into the territory polygons of twelve named packs — the early lineage of what people now call the Voyageurs Wolf Project. It carried me, eventually, to the Northern Region of the Forest Service, where I was responsible for the geospatial program across more than twenty-five million acres of Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas: fire, watersheds, timber, the whole living map. None of that was foreseeable in 1988. Nobody writing that NSF award could have drawn a straight line from a center in Buffalo to a wolf pack's boundary in the boreal north, or to a fire perimeter in the Bitterroot, or to the phone in your pocket that quietly knows where you are. That is not a failure of foresight. That is the nature of the thing. Basic science is funded precisely because you cannot yet see what it will grow into. And yet the ledger is not a mystery: the Federal Reserve reckons that federally funded research has returned somewhere between a dollar-fifty and three dollars on every taxpayer dollar spent since 1950. I am, in the most literal accounting, a return on that investment. So is the map that finds you.

Neil Shubin, who this July becomes president of the National Academy of Sciences, put it better than I can. He found a 385-million-year-old fossil — Tiktaalik, the creature caught in the act of crawling out of the water — and he is the first to say he could only find it because he had funding long enough to fail. Five or six years of failure, he tells it, before the discovery. He would not have survived in an industry that measured him quarter by quarter. Neither would the fossil. Neither, for that matter, would I. Long-horizon funding is not a luxury laid over science. It is the soil science grows in.

I spent my working life in that soil, and I know its economics from the inside. In the Peace Corps I raised two tree nurseries in the highlands of Baja Verapaz — some two hundred thousand seedlings in all. You plant a nursery for a rotation you will not personally cut. You put a seedling in the ground on behalf of a forester who is not yet born. That is silviculture, and it is also exactly what the National Science Foundation did in Buffalo in 1988 — put something in the ground whose harvest would fall to people it would never meet. I am one of that harvest. So are the students who came through the NCGIA training programs and now lead the discipline. So, indirectly, is anyone who has ever watched a map find them after an earthquake.

That is my case for the NSF, and it is not really an argument. It is a witness statement.

The National Academy of Sciences deserves its own word, because it does something different and just as necessary. Chartered by Congress under Lincoln in 1863, it is the body the nation turns to when it needs to know what the science actually says — advice built through a process designed to strip out conflict and bias and return evidence, not opinion. I know something about disciplined advisory work from my own years of it, at a different table than the Academy's — I served as the Eastern Region representative on the Forest Service's national Geospatial Advisory Committee. There is a particular integrity in an institution whose job is to reduce a policymaker's uncertainty without telling him what he wants to hear. In a country now awash in voices that reinforce what people already believe, an institution built to be a clean signal is not a relic. It is civic infrastructure as real as a bridge.

I have spent a career separating signal from noise — it is the frame I see the world through — so let me be precise about the present moment, because vagueness here would be its own kind of dishonesty. In the spring of 2025 the administration terminated roughly 1,752 National Science Foundation grants, some $1.4 billion of committed work, and proposed to cut the agency that seeded my entire discipline by 55 percent. The director resigned that April, in the fifth year of a six-year term; more than a year later the chair still sits empty. Congress, to its credit, refused the deepest cut and funded the Foundation near its old baseline — the institution has defenders yet, and I do not want to bury that — but the machinery was altered underneath the appropriation. New grants have gone out at a fraction of the historical rate. An entire research directorate was shuttered. Peer review, the thing that makes an award a merit award, was thinned from three readers to two.

The National Academy of Sciences has been hit in a quieter and more telling way. Its working arm, the National Research Council — the body that produces those gold-standard reports — lost more than forty federal contracts and around two hundred staff in a single year and is bracing for what its own leadership has called a radical downsizing. And some in Congress have begun to question whether the Academy's advice is truly nonpartisan at all, urging federal agencies to go find their science reviewed somewhere else. Read that twice. An institution chartered under Lincoln for the express purpose of being a clean signal is being told, by people who would plainly prefer the noise, that its signal cannot be trusted. That is not budget-trimming. That is an attack on the instrument itself.

You cannot claim the dividend while you burn the seed. You cannot ask for the fish while you defund the six years of failure that precede it.

And still — like Shubin, and I do not say this lightly — I am an optimist about the long run, and not out of naivety. Congress rejected the worst of the cuts; the appropriation held. The seed is not yet burned. I have reason to hope. I watched a grant made before anyone knew what it would do turn into a discipline, a career, a way of seeing. I have knelt in enough churches and stood in enough forests to believe that the curiosity behind all of this is not a policy line item but something closer to the human spirit itself — the same impulse that drew a boy to draw craters on the moon, the same one that drew me to read a landscape as a text. No administration plants or uproots that. It only decides, in its season, whether to keep the nurseries open.

I believe in science because I am, myself, a thing it grew. The only question worth arguing is whether we keep planting. I know which side of that I am on. I have a shovel, I have used it, and I am not done.

— Samuel R. Lammie

A note on how this was made. I wrote this essay in collaboration with Claude, the AI system built by Anthropic. The life in it is mine — the wolf packs, the nurseries, McHarg read early, the twenty-five million acres — and so is the judgment, and the decision to stand behind every word. Claude drafted and redrafted at my direction, ran down the current figures on the funding cuts and handed them to me to verify, and pushed back when I needed pushing back. When I told it my early forestry was really analog GIS in McHarg's overlay tradition, it took the correction and made the passage truer; when I asked it to drop a pine I had come to regret planting in Guatemala, it did. That is the arrangement I would want for this tool wherever it touches serious work: the human as witness and final judge, the machine as a tireless second pair of hands, and nothing consequential taken on faith. An essay in defense of human curiosity, made this way, is no contradiction. It is the disciplined version of the thing — the only version worth keeping. 

 

The Carrier and the Signal: Antimony, the South Fork Salmon, and a Mine Four Presidents Built

There is a place in the Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho called Stibnite. The name is not decoration. Stibnite is the mineral form of antimony sulfide, and the ground was named for what men pulled out of it — antimony for the Second World War, tungsten for Korea, and gold whenever gold was worth chasing. The district sits forty-five air miles east of McCall, hard against the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River and within the homelands of the Nez Perce. By the Forest Service’s own reckoning, the South Fork holds the most important remaining habitat for summer Chinook salmon in the entire Columbia River basin.

I spent a career reading landscapes like this one — as a geospatial program manager for the Forest Service in the Northern Region, and before that as a line officer with a district ranger’s authority over a couple hundred thousand acres of my own. So I want to be careful here, because the Stibnite Gold Project is the kind of decision that punishes anyone who reaches for it with only one hand. It is not a simple story, and the people telling it simply — in either direction — are the ones I trust least.

The signal being broadcast

The case for the mine arrives wrapped in the language of national security, and that language is not fabricated. Antimony is a genuine strategic vulnerability. It hardens the lead in bullets and armor-piercing rounds; it sits in primers and tracer compounds, in night-vision optics and the infrared seekers that steer missiles, in flame retardants for military electronics. The United States mines effectively none of it and, in 2024, imported around 85 percent of what it consumed. China accounts for roughly 60 percent of world mine production and a far larger share of refining — the step that actually turns ore into usable metal.

Then Beijing closed the valve. In December 2024 China announced a full ban, “in principle,” on antimony exports to the United States, alongside gallium and germanium, in retaliation for American semiconductor controls. Prices did what prices do when a dominant supplier walks off: antimony reached an all-time high near $59,750 a tonne in July 2025, several times its level a year earlier. The National Defense Stockpile, the emergency reserve that exists for exactly this contingency, had been drawn down to what the Defense Logistics Agency called its lowest levels since the Cold War. In September 2025 the DLA signed a $245 million sole-source contract with a domestic producer to begin refilling it.

That is a real signal. If you are responsible for the supply chain behind the world’s largest arms exporter, a single foreign government holding the switch on a metal the defense industry says runs through some two hundred munitions types is a problem you are obligated to take seriously. I do take it seriously. My confidence that antimony dependence is a legitimate strategic exposure is high, and it is anchored on hard trade and production data, not on anyone’s press release.

The mine four presidents built

Here is where the partisan cartoon falls apart, and where I think the honest story actually lives.

Stibnite is not a Trump project or a Biden project. It is a four-administration project, and each one added a coat.

The application landed under Barack Obama: Midas Gold, Perpetua’s predecessor, submitted its plan of operations in 2016. The formal environmental review began under the first Trump administration, which published the notice of intent in 2017 and issued the draft Environmental Impact Statement in 2020. The Biden administration carried it the longest distance — a supplemental draft in 2022, the final EIS and draft decision in September 2024, and then the final Record of Decision, signed January 3, 2025 and released January 6. That is the detail almost everyone gets wrong. A January 2025 mine approval reads, to most people, as a last-minute Trump giveaway. It was not. It was signed by two Forest Service supervisors seventeen days before the inauguration. The green light was Biden’s.

So was most of the money. The Defense Department’s support for Perpetua — now more than $80 million, structured under the Defense Production Act — began in 2023 and 2024, under Biden’s Pentagon. The Export-Import Bank’s first offer of financing, a letter of interest for up to $1.8 billion, came in April 2024, also under Biden.

The second Trump administration then did what it has been open about doing: it accelerated. A March 20, 2025 executive order on mineral production named Stibnite among the first priority projects and placed it on the federal permitting dashboard as a “transparency project.” In May 2026 the Export-Import Bank approved a $2.9 billion loan for the build. The Justice Department is now defending the Biden-era decision in court, and in June 2026 a federal judge in Idaho declined to halt construction while the lawsuit proceeds. Ground was broken in October 2025.

Read the arc plainly and the through-line is unmistakable. The one thing Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again all agreed on was the antimony logic. That is the carrier wave — a national-security consensus stable enough to survive three transfers of power. It is worth pausing on, because genuine bipartisan agreement in this decade is rare enough to be evidence of something.

The payload riding the carrier

And yet. A carrier wave is not the message. The thing modulated onto it is.

By the accounting in the conservation groups’ own filing — a figure I hold as their claim rather than as audited fact — gold is about 96 percent of the project’s profit and antimony about 4 percent. The critics put the on-site antimony at roughly a three-year supply of national demand; Perpetua projects up to 35 percent of U.S. antimony over its first six years, a company projection that a competing domestic producer has publicly called inflated, arguing this is “a gold mine with a little antimony.” I cannot adjudicate the exact percentage from where I sit, and I will not pretend to. But the direction is not seriously in dispute: the revenue is gold, and antimony is the argument that makes the gold politically movable.

That is the part that asks for the older instinct in me — the one that reads signal and noise as a kind of moral topology. The national-security frame is doing real work, and it is also doing convenient work. When a metal becomes a headline, a whole apparatus assembles around the headline. Investment newsletters now circulate breathless pitches for junior exploration companies — I have read one working the Nevada ground hard — promising to be “the only pure-play U.S. antimony producer by 2027,” on deposits that as of mid-2026 have a maiden resource and no feasibility study, no reserves, no permit to build, and grades a fraction of a percent. That is noise riding the carrier, and it degrades the public’s ability to receive the true signal underneath. A citizen trying to weigh Stibnite honestly has to filter the strategic reality out from the promotional wash, and most citizens do not have the time.

Two more facts belong in the honest ledger, because they cut against the tidiest version of the security argument. First, the antimony crisis has already eased faster than the mine can answer it: China suspended its export ban in November 2025 as part of a trade truce, and by mid-2026 the price had fallen roughly 60 percent from its peak. The switch that justified the urgency has, for now, been flipped back partway on — by diplomacy, not by domestic supply. Second, under the 1872 Mining Law, a company can remove gold and antimony worth billions from public land and pay the American people no royalty at all. The public bears the watershed risk. The public does not share the gold.

What stewardship in the real looks like

I do not think this decision is easy, and I distrust the versions that do. The strategic exposure is real; I would put high confidence on that. The place is also real, and irreplaceable in a way antimony is not — you can refine antimony from a dozen deposits, but there is one South Fork Salmon, one run of summer Chinook, one homeland. What the record actually shows is a mine whose antimony is real but modest, whose gold is the engine, and whose national-security justification was strong enough to hold four administrations together even as the acute crisis it invoked began to pass.

I spent enough years inside the agency now sitting in the defendant’s chair to know that the Forest Service is not a villain here so much as an institution absorbing a decision that four presidents narrowed to a single question. The people who will run this project are, in the main, trying to do a hard thing carefully. The plan will disturb some 3,265 acres, move hundreds of millions of tons of rock, and re-plumb a river that already carries a century of mining’s damage — with, its defenders note, a genuine promise to clean up legacy pollution on the way. Whether the repair outruns the new harm is the whole question, and it will be answered in the water, over decades, long after the press releases are filed.

Duty, honor, country — I was raised on that phrase and I still mean it. But the eye has to lift past the nation to the world, and to the ground the nation stands on. A country that cannot make its own bullets is vulnerable. A country that trades its last best salmon river for a three-year hedge on a metal, and calls the gold underneath it a security measure, has confused the carrier for the message. The task, as always, is to hear the difference.

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Sources: Center for Biological Diversity et al. press release (Feb. 18, 2025); Payette National Forest Final Record of Decision (Jan. 2025); Idaho Capital Sun; U.S. Forest Service, Region 4; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025; CSIS analysis of China’s antimony export restrictions; Perpetua Resources and Export-Import Bank announcements; Defense Logistics Agency / U.S. Antimony Corp. contract (Sept. 2025); U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho ruling (June 2026); Equedia/NevGold promotional letter (as cited).

Written with Claude (Anthropic). The frame and judgment are mine; Claude verified the timeline and figures against primary sources and helped keep documented fact distinct from contested claim. Any remaining errors are mine.