I read with great disappointment this morning that Patagonia, the outdoor apparel manufacturer, has filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump.
The point of contention is the President’s executive order reducing Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by a staggering 85 percent. With the stroke of a pen, the administration has opened hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine desert and sacred ancestral sites to uranium mining, fossil fuel extraction, and the glorious, churning gears of heavy industry.
To the untrained eye, this looks like the cynical liquidation of our natural heritage. But as a man of science, I must ask: when did we become so terrified of data?
What Patagonia, environmentalists, and a coalition of Native American tribes fail to grasp is that the Trump administration has just gifted the scientific community an unprecedented, continent-scale laboratory.
For decades, ecologists have been forced to rely on computer models and small-scale simulations to understand how a fully intact, bio-diverse ecosystem collapses under the sudden, catastrophic introduction of corporate extraction. Now, we finally have the funding, the heavy machinery, and the executive mandate to run the trial in real time.
The hypothesis is thrillingly simple. What exactly happens when you take 1.1 million acres of protected wilderness, strip away its legal shielding, and subject it to immediate, unbridled commercial plundering?
Until now, our observations of habitat destruction have been largely retrospective, pieced together after the fact like forensic accountants digging through the ashes of the Holocene. We observe the damage only after the loggers have left or the oil has spilled.
But at Bears Ears, we have a pristine baseline. We have the "before" picture mapped down to the last canyon. By violently shrinking the monument’s boundaries, the President has neatly divided the Utah desert into a control group of protected mesas and a breathtakingly massive experimental group of newly unprotected sacrifice zones.
The sheer volume of raw data we are about to harvest from the localized extinction of the Mexican spotted owl will keep graduate students employed for a century.
I was discussing this very breakthrough over drinks last week with a colleague who runs a lab at MIT. We marvelled at the sheer elegance of the administration's methodology. The scale of the intervention is simply magnificent.
By opening the region to uranium extraction, we aren't just erasing ancient petroglyphs; we are introducing novel radioactive isotopes into the local water table. This will allow researchers to trace the bioaccumulation of heavy metals through the desert food web with a clarity previously reserved for a Nature paper.
We will be able to watch, in high definition, as the ecosystem's carrying capacity plummets. We will document the exact moment the local mule deer population succumbs to habitat fragmentation. It is a rare privilege to witness the mechanics of ecological unravelling so up close, unhindered by the tedious red tape of the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is here that Patagonia’s lawsuit reveals its fundamental anti-science bias. By demanding that the land remain untouched, the fleece manufacturer is effectively demanding an end to discovery.
They are clinging to a romantic, static view of the Earth, one where sandstone arches remain un-dynamited and ancestral burial grounds are not repurposed as access roads for natural gas pipelines. But the universe is not static. Nature is a crucible of change.
In a very real sense, entropy is the only true law of nature. Mountains crumble. Stars burn out. Civilizations rise, fall, and are eventually ground into dust by the treads of a Caterpillar D9.
Who are we, as mere temporary arrangements of carbon, to stand in the way of that magnificent decay?
The tribal leaders who have joined Patagonia in this litigation argue that their history is being stolen. I submit that they are thinking too small, blinded by the emotional weight of their own heritage to see the larger dataset taking shape.
Their history is merely being accelerated. When the mining conglomerates carve away the walls of Cedar Mesa to extract a few tons of low-grade uranium, they are creating entirely new stratigraphy for the archaeologists of the next millennium to study.
We must learn to embrace the awe of this transformation. When an industrial drill pierces the crust of an ancient, sacred plateau, it is merely the cosmos attempting to understand itself through the medium of resource extraction.
If Patagonia truly cared about the natural world, they would drop their injunction, pull their lawyers out of federal court, and let the President complete his peer review.