Calling on brands to defend themselves against harmful legislation.

Once again, bad legislation attacking public lands, ecosystems and livelihoods of people who depend on the outdoors is being pushed around Washington DC.

Once again, we saw many of our members take to social media to call out the bad-faith politicians and to rally people to fight against the legislation.

And once again, we watched as the majority of brands that claim to support conservation waited until public opinion was clearly in their favor before saying anything about it.

So, I went down to the river and yelled at my phone.

In what was a weird turn of events for an organization that has long-committed to only sharing “light-hearted” and “uplifting” content on our social media accounts… we went viral on TikTok last week for yelling at brands to defend themselves against the “Big Beautiful Bill”.

While my riverside rant was aggressively throttled by most of the algorithms (likely for speaking out against the portions of the bill that would allow for 10 years of unregulated takeover of AI in our members’ industries — something those platforms’ parent companies are pushing for), over on TikTok, over a half-million people have seen the video.

Longtime followers and members of ours know, we have rarely gotten involved in advocating for or against any legislation at any level.

It has not typically been a part of our mission directive.

Instead, we connect members to causes that are already in what Theodore Roosevelt called “the arena” and help them become effective partners of those groups in alignment with their values, team capacity, and customer expectations.

But more and more often, the attacks on the very livelihoods of our members is at stake.

Heck, we had to relaunch our entire programming model to help people keep volunteering for wildlife as they watch their financial margins disappear down an AI-private equity-corporate-oligarchical black hole.

And while we have always privately helped our members fight back, when requested, we have realized that not all brands feel like they can ask for that assistance.

So, moving forward, we are moving that fight from behind-the-scenes to the front.

Our members are busy trying to run their businesses, so we will not be bombarding them with convoluted and spammy calls to action for every bit of legislation or executive order that negatively effects them.

We will do like we did with this bill and stick to clear and concise attack points that are direct impacts on them. Nothing existential… though there are plenty of existential “A+B= Your business is in trouble” threats, those can be challenging to communicate to employees and customers.

In this case, we called on our members and followers to appose a few specific things that would directly effect them in the bill:

• The public land sale proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and backed by the White House. (which was removed, not thanks to any Senators lobbying against it, but because of public outcry)

• The 10 year ban of regulations on AI development in all 50 states. They have already used AI to steal from our members and give their entire operational data to corporate competitors that do not support conservation. This would end all abilities to stop that. (“Why innovate when you can legislate?”)

• Private equity and corporate tax shelter loopholes built into the bill that directly and exclusively benefit the large corporations that want to and are in the process of taking over our members’ markets.

• Removing environmental protections for the wild places our members, their employees, and customers depend on and support the conservation of with their volunteer time and money.

Obviously, there are more things in this disastrous bill (which, as I type this, is currently in the House, having lost the public land sale portion before its close-margin Senate passing) that are going to negatively effect our members, but these are the items that are easiest for them to explain to their teams, communicate to their customers/followers, and that align with our mission directive.

The unfortunate reality is that this bill also has also taught many outdoors folks a hard lesson that may be too late to correct: It does matter how/if you vote.

The real-world actions of our members as conservation volunteers makes them worthy of being supported over brands that green-wash and orange-wash.

Political candidates need to be held to the same test, or we are all going to have to work and fight that much harder to try and undo the damage they and their donors do to the wildlife and wild places we love.

He got shot so that you too could fight back.

In “Taking a Bullet for Conservation: The Bull Moose Party”, the indomitable Jim Posewitz lays out the facts as to why Theodore Roosevelt was shot. He was shot for fighting against legislated attacks on public lands, conservation, and against corporate corruption destroying American businesses.

He took that bullet so that you would have the chance to fight back, today.