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More than a thousand rally and march in Missoula for public lands, fired workers – Missoula Resists

March 11, 2025/

“They say this is about efficiency. This is not about government efficiency at all, so let’s unpack what this is about,” Stone-Manning said, referencing firings made by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person. “As they gut our land-management agencies — the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service — they gut these agencies, they’re going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, we can’t manage these public lands, we have to sell them off.’

They stood well more than 1,000 strong on an unseasonably warm late-winter morning in Missoula, with a message for politicians in Washington: Keep your hands off our public lands.

At the “Hands Off Our Public Lands” rally Sunday morning, the recently out-of-work federal land managers who addressed the crowd included Adin Kloetzel of Philipsburg, who was a mule packer in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness and whose parents met on a trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. There was also Tracy Stone-Manning, the director of the Bureau of Land Management under former President Joe Biden and now the president of The Wilderness Society.