On Teddy Roosevelt’s Birthday: Are We Deleting Our Wild Firewalls?

This morning, before sitting down at my desk, I spent forty-five minutes at the piano working through a quiet autumn melody while a loaf of bread baked in the oven. Looking out my window, the late-October hills are a patchwork of deep rust, faded gold, and stubborn pine green. Taking the time to bake bread from scratch and letting music settle my spirit is how I practice daily recovery. As a fellow traveler, I have learned that peace requires a protected space to grow.

Today is October 27th—Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday. While I was playing those chords, my mind drifted to the millions of acres of forests, canyons, and wildlife refuges he fought to set aside. I could not help but wonder: is old Teddy rolling over in his grave today?

After 35 years in full-stack software engineering—from troubleshooting digital electronics in the cubicles of corporate America to sitting in a VP office—I cannot help but view our public lands as a massive, living operating system. And right now, when I look at the data, someone is systematically rewriting the security permissions.

People ask me if the land Roosevelt protected has been sold off into private hands. The answer is a bit geekier than that. Most of the land remains federally owned, just like a server remains bolted into the rack. What is being dismantled are the access controls—the rules that stop destructive processes from strip-mining the hardware.

Right now, administration actions have removed or proposed removing protections from at least 86 million acres of public land. Earlier this year, Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante national monuments were slashed by roughly 90 percent each, stripping nearly 3 million acres of monument-level safeguards. The land is still public, yes, but it can now be opened to new mining claims and mineral leasing. Instead of preserving a complete ecological and cultural system, we are left with tiny, isolated islands of protection surrounded by industrial extraction.

We see the same pattern across the board. The Bureau of Land Management repealed its Public Lands Rule across 245 million acres, knocking conservation and wildlife habitat off equal footing with drilling and grazing. Meanwhile, the administration has moved to rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in our national forests, threatening millions of acres with new logging roads and habitat fragmentation. Even offshore, Pacific marine monuments like Papahānaumokuākea, Mariana Trench, and Rose Atoll were altered in June to allow commercial fishing in previously protected waters.

As a Liberation Technologist, I recognize this playbook immediately. In my work studying decentralized networks, we look to nature’s mycelium model—the underground fungal web that connects an entire forest, sharing nutrients and warning trees of danger. A forest thrives on connection and biodiversity, not isolated islands. When you carve up Bears Ears or drive logging roads through roadless national forests, you sever the mycelium. You trade long-term ecological resilience for short-term extraction.

In recovery circles, we talk constantly about how essential boundaries are. Boundaries do not exist to lock out the world out of spite; they exist to keep the "rage machine" and extractive habits from consuming our health. Congressionally designated wilderness and the Antiquities Act are simply boundaries we set as a nation to protect our shared soul.

The good news is that we are not powerless users locked in a read-only system. Tribal nations and conservationists are already challenging these monument cuts in court, and modern liberation technology gives us incredible tools to help. From open-source AI that analyzes satellite imagery of roadless forests to Indigenous data sovereignty networks and citizen-led monitoring, we can audit what happens on our public lands in real time.

So today, on Teddy’s birthday, I invite you to celebrate the best way we know how. Step away from the screen, breathe the crisp October air, and remember that we are all stewards of this great network. When we keep our bodies healthy, our minds clear, and our voices united, we can defend the sanctuaries—both digital and wild—that keep us free.