The Sage Grouse Doesn't Care Who Is President

The sage grouse doesn't care who's president. She dances at dawn, as her ancestors did, in dry grass carved by wind and time. She moves through the silence with feathers flared and her heart steady—tethered to something older than borders, older than land leases, and older than the men in suits who sign away what they’ll never bother to understand.

But ritual doesn’t stop bulldozers.

And while she dances, they move...quiet and practiced...through back doors and boardrooms, untying the last knots that still hold the wild in place.

With one closed-door meeting, one signature, and one smug smile, they’ve revived the so-called “God Squad”, a dusty mechanism built to dismantle what the Endangered Species Act once vowed to protect. Not out of need. Out of spite.

They’ve stripped away the requirement to even look before they drill. No more environmental reviews, no more questions asked. As if the land no longer deserves the dignity to be known, to be mourned, to be loved, before it's destroyed.

They’ve turned extinction into an acceptable cost, buried in the language of progress. And if that weren’t grotesque enough, they’re now peddling fantasies of de-extinction—claiming that a lab-made dire wolf might one day replace what they’re killing now. As if ecosystems can be summoned from blueprints and belief.

This isn’t policy.

It’s desecration wearing a suit and tie.

They aren’t failing to see the consequences.

They’re choosing them.

And still, she dances.

Even as her sacred ground disappears under machines.

Even as the sky turns thick with dust.

Even as the future leans toward silence.

This isn’t order.

It’s cruelty wrapped in protocol.

It’s the cold, calculated swing of power from men who know exactly what they’re doing.

They aren’t ignoring the cost.

They’re accepting it—willingly, knowingly.

And we—we’re the ones who have to decide who we are in the face of that choice.

Will we look away?

Will we pretend we didn’t see the birds vanish, the bees fall, the forests catch fire and never come back?

Or will we rise?

Will we step forward, not in fear, but in fury, in love, in defense of what still breathes beneath the weight of their indifference?

Because somewhere inside us, the wild still speaks.

Not in words but in instinct. In marrow. In memory.

It's in the ache in our chest when a landscape goes silent.

The clench in our gut when the sky goes still.

It's not sentiment—it's common sense.

And it is screaming now.

They hold the pen.

But we hold the memory.

We hold the rage. The grief. The quiet, furious hope.

And we have not forgotten how to fight.