In this recent email to an RCU Steering Committee member, our friends from the Center for Biological Diversity warn about big money land grabs. Learn more about how to keep public lands wild and free for all.

by Kierán Suckling, Executive Director, Center for Biological Diversity

A Republican-led movement, funded by the Koch brothers’ dark money, is conspiring to seize millions of acres of our public lands and auction them off to the highest bidders for drilling, logging and mining. Working through obscure organizations with ties to militia-style groups like the Bundy clan, their influence reaches to the U.S. Congress and the presidential race.

Just last month, Koch ally Congressman Rob Bishop proposed a deal that would open up wide swaths of Utah’s beautiful public lands, full of sandstone ridges, soaring red arches and sage grouse habitat, to oil companies. If we don’t stop them, many of America’s last wild places could be lost.

The Center for Biological Diversity needs your help to stop this land grab with a contribution to our Public Lands Defense Fund.

The ringleaders of this movement — groups with misleading names like the American Lands Council and Federalism in Action — contribute money and lobbying power to a raft of right-wing politicians.Just last weekend in Idaho, presidential candidate Ted Cruz declared that public lands should be turned over to private interests.

With much of the country distracted by the election, the right wing will try to move this agenda in backdoor ways like last-minute congressional riders and committee votes. But we won’t let up: The Center has some of the best environmental lawyers, scientists and activists around, and we’ll take on the movement to steal public lands everywhere it rears its ugly head, from Congress to the courthouse.

You can help stop this theft of our lands with a donation to the Public Lands Defense Fund. We can’t ever raise as much money as the Kochs have, but we don’t need to — we’ve learned how to win lean against deep-pocketed special interests.

The Kochs and their allies have the same goals as these extreme anti-government ideologues. They aim to do by the pen what the Bundys failed to do by the gun — seize our wildlands, end federal protection of endangered species like wolves, grizzlies and condors, and sell off the landscapes that belong to all of us. With your help, we can stop them.