Environmental stewardship, intergenerational responsibility, and a livable future

My environmental vision starts from a premise that is both moral and practical: we are stewards, not owners.

The land, water, air, and ecosystems that sustain life in Utah were not created for short-term extraction or political convenience. They were entrusted to us, and our responsibility is to pass them forward in better condition than we received them. That responsibility does not belong to one political party, one generation, or one ideology. It belongs to everyone who expects Utah to remain livable.

Stewardship means thinking in time horizons longer than an election cycle. It means asking not only what benefits us now, but what protects our children and grandchildren from inheriting irreversible damage. A society that consumes its future to make the present more comfortable is not pragmatic. It is reckless.

Utah’s natural beauty is not incidental to who we are. Our national parks, state parks, wilderness areas, public lands, watersheds, deserts, mountains, wetlands, rivers, and skies shape our economy, our health, and our sense of place. They are part of our shared inheritance.

Protecting them is not about aesthetics alone. It is about public health, economic stability, water security, climate resilience, cultural identity, and whether future generations will still recognize the Utah we leave behind.

I am an unapologetic defender of our national parks and federal public lands. These lands are not vacant inventory waiting to be liquidated. They belong to the public, and they should not be sold off or carved up to finance short-term political priorities.

That threat is not theoretical. In 2025, Senator Mike Lee advanced a proposal that would have required the sale of millions of acres of federal land across the West. Early versions made broad areas of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land eligible, including lands in the Wasatch canyons and near the gateways to Utah’s five national parks. The parks themselves were excluded, but surrounding public lands, trails, watersheds, wildlife habitat, and public access were placed at risk.

The proposal was revised and ultimately withdrawn after opposition from across the political spectrum, including hunters, anglers, conservationists, outdoor businesses, and Western Republicans. That response mattered. But the larger effort to privatize public land has not disappeared, and we should not pretend that one defeated proposal ended the argument.

When public lands are privatized or exploited without full accountability, profits are concentrated while costs are socialized. Utahns are left with polluted water, damaged watersheds, lost recreational access, fragmented wildlife habitat, and cleanup obligations that can last for generations.

That is not conservative stewardship. It is a bad deal, and I will treat it like one every time it comes back.

Protecting public lands and national monuments is also about recognizing their lasting economic value. Outdoor recreation, tourism, research, grazing managed responsibly, watershed protection, and ecosystem services can support local economies year after year without destroying the systems on which those economies depend.

A mine is eventually exhausted. A subdivision can permanently close access. A healthy watershed, protected trail system, or functioning ecosystem can continue providing value across generations.

That is what sustainable prosperity looks like. At the state level, I strongly support expanding and strengthening Utah’s state parks system. State parks are often the most accessible way for families, students, seniors, and disabled Utahns to experience nature. They are where people develop lifelong connections to the land.

Expansion should focus not only on acquiring acreage, but on maintenance, habitat protection, accessible trails and facilities, public transportation where practical, outdoor education, and affordable access. A park that exists on paper but is inaccessible, degraded, or chronically underfunded is not a success.

Here in House District 39, environmental stewardship also means caring for the Jordan River corridor that runs through our communities. The river should be treated as vital neighborhood infrastructure: a watershed, wildlife corridor, floodplain, trail system, cooling corridor, and shared public space.

That means restoring habitat, improving water quality, protecting native vegetation, expanding safe and accessible trail connections, reducing litter and illegal dumping, and making sure neighborhoods on both sides of the river benefit from its restoration. The Jordan River should connect West Jordan, Sandy, and Midvale rather than function as a neglected boundary between them.

Protecting what remains intact is equally important. Some places are simply more valuable left whole than exploited. Wilderness, sensitive ecosystems, wildlife corridors, wetlands, and watersheds provide benefits that compound over time. They filter water, absorb flood impacts, reduce erosion, moderate extreme heat, support pollinators and wildlife, and preserve options for future generations.

Once those systems are destroyed or fragmented, many cannot be restored at any reasonable cost. Stewardship requires knowing when not to build, not to drill, and not to extract.

Environmental protection and economic vitality are not opposites. They are inseparable. A state with dangerous air, collapsing water systems, extreme heat, and degraded landscapes is not competitive. It is fragile. Businesses cannot recruit and retain workers in communities where children become sick from pollution or outdoor life becomes hazardous. Families cannot thrive where the foundations of health are treated as acceptable collateral damage.

Air quality is one of the clearest indicators of whether stewardship is being taken seriously. Pollution is not an imaginary or "woke" environmental issue. It is a public-health crisis that affects children, seniors, disabled people, outdoor workers, people with asthma or heart disease, and everyone who lives along the Wasatch Front. Clean air is not a luxury. It is a baseline responsibility of government.

In April 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed reversing the Northern Wasatch Front’s reclassification from a “serious” ozone nonattainment area back to a “moderate” one. The proposal cited international pollution and wildfire smoke that Utah cannot directly control.

Those factors deserve honest scientific consideration. But pollution arriving from outside Utah does not erase the pollution generated inside Utah, and it does not excuse us from reducing the emissions we can control. Regulatory relief cannot become permission to stop doing the work.

Real stewardship means reducing emissions from transportation, industrial facilities, buildings, and power generation. It means expanding reliable public transit, modernizing the grid, improving energy efficiency, supporting cleaner vehicles and equipment, and requiring major polluters to account for the health costs they impose on surrounding communities.

It also means recognizing that pollution does not fall evenly. Working-class neighborhoods, communities near freeways and industrial corridors, and people who cannot simply stay indoors or leave the valley during an inversion often bear the greatest burden. Environmental policy should be judged partly by whether it protects the people with the fewest options for escaping environmental harm.

Water is the defining environmental issue of the American West, and Utah is no exception. The winter of 2026 made that reality impossible to ignore. Utah recorded its lowest snowpack on record. It peaked weeks earlier than normal at roughly half the level the state typically sees near the beginning of April. By May, Utah had declared a statewide emergency because of extreme drought.

That is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a warning about the future for which we must plan.

Stewardship means aligning growth with water reality rather than assuming supply will somehow appear after approvals have already been granted. It means measuring what we use, repairing aging infrastructure, expanding secondary-water metering, promoting waterwise landscaping, and investing in agricultural water optimization.

But public investment in conservation should produce measurable public benefit. When taxpayers help fund irrigation improvements, the water genuinely conserved should be measured, protected from being consumed somewhere else, and, where appropriate, delivered downstream to the Great Salt Lake.

Conservation cannot become an accounting trick where a project is labeled efficient while total depletion continues to rise.

The Great Salt Lake is the most visible warning signal we have. Its decline threatens air quality, migratory birds, wetlands, mineral industries, regional weather patterns, snowpack, and public health for millions of Utahns.

As the lake retreats, exposed lakebed becomes vulnerable to wind erosion. Utah’s own Great Salt Lake program has warned that dust from the lakebed can carry fine particulate matter and elements such as arsenic into communities across the basin.

There has been real progress worth acknowledging. Salinity conditions have improved from the emergency levels seen in 2022. Utah has expanded water leasing, conservation tools, measurement, research, and mechanisms for dedicating water to the lake. The lake’s condition stabilized during the wetter years that followed its historic low.

But stabilization is not recovery.

The lake remains below its healthy range, and Utah’s own strategic planning shows the scale of the challenge. Under one thirty-year scenario, reaching even the lower end of the healthy range would require conserving and delivering roughly 471,000 additional acre-feet of water to the lake every year.

That is not a problem we solve through voluntary lawn tips alone.

We need a measurable water budget for the entire Great Salt Lake basin, with annual public reporting on how much water was conserved, legally protected, and actually delivered to the lake. We need continued agricultural optimization, expanded split-season leasing, protection for conserved water, secondary-water metering, and stronger accounting for industrial and mineral-extraction depletion.

We also need enforceable milestones. A plan without deadlines, measurements, or consequences is not a recovery plan. It is a hope.

And while conservation must remain the first and most immediate tool, I do not believe leadership means pretending that today’s tools will automatically be sufficient under every future condition. I am open to serious examination of ambitious regional restoration concepts, including ideas that look across the connected hydrology of the Great Basin.

But large-scale solutions must be evaluated honestly. No speculative pipeline, transfer, or engineering project should move forward without independent analysis of energy requirements, environmental consequences, legal feasibility, long-term operating costs, and who would ultimately pay. Thinking big is not an excuse to stop thinking carefully.

The status quo is already an enormous and dangerous experiment. Exploring alternatives responsibly is not radical. Allowing the lake to collapse because every meaningful solution felt too difficult would be.

The rapid growth of large-scale data centers adds another layer of urgency. These facilities can consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, water, land, and supporting infrastructure while creating relatively few permanent jobs compared with their resource demands.

Utah took an initial step in 2026 by requiring certain large data centers to notify water providers and submit preconstruction and annual water reports. That transparency is necessary, but disclosure alone is not accountability.

The proposed Stratos data and energy campus in Box Elder County shows why a stronger framework is needed. Based on limited information released publicly, an independent analysis by Utah Clean Energy estimated that powering the full project with nine gigawatts of on-site natural-gas generation could increase Utah’s carbon-dioxide emissions by more than half and consume billions of gallons of water annually, depending on the technology used.

Those are estimates, not final permit figures. But the possible scale is too large to wave away or study only after commitments have already been made.

I do not accept a future where families and farmers are told to ration water, conserve energy, and absorb higher infrastructure costs while enormous corporate facilities receive discounted rates, private agreements, or approvals made without a complete public accounting.

If an industry wants to build one of the largest resource-consuming facilities in Utah history, it should have to prove that the benefits outweigh the costs and that Utah families will not be left subsidizing it.

That is why I have proposed treating large data centers more like extractive industries through a Data Extraction and Infrastructure Tax.

The state should meter and publicly account for six major impacts: electricity consumption, water consumption, land footprint, emissions, thermal output, and on-site power generation. Major projects should make an upfront infrastructure contribution tied to their projected buildout, rather than waiting for residents and utilities to discover years later that transmission lines, roads, water systems, and public services must be expanded at public expense.

An ongoing severance-style assessment should then be based on what the facility actually extracts and imposes over time. At least 25 percent of that revenue should remain in the host county or region to address local infrastructure, environmental, housing, and public-service impacts. The remainder should be invested in a permanent statewide endowment supporting education and the infrastructure Utah will need for its 22nd-century future.

That is not punishment for innovation. It is the price of responsible development. Environmental responsibility also means confronting extractive models that leave Utah holding the bag. Mining, drilling, mineral extraction, data centers, and other major industrial projects must be subject to full-cost accounting.

Before extraction begins, companies should provide reclamation bonds sufficient to cover the real cost of cleanup and restoration, including long-term monitoring. Those bonds should be updated when project costs or environmental risks change. They should not be symbolic deposits calculated to satisfy a form.

If a company cannot afford to prevent contamination, reclaim the land, restore damaged water systems, and manage its long-term waste, then the project is not economically viable. Its business model depends on transferring the real cost to the public.

Privatized profit paired with public harm is not free enterprise. It is exploitation.

A sustainable future also requires integrating land use, housing, transportation, energy, and environmental limits into one coherent strategy.

Building endlessly outward, forcing every household into car dependency, paving over natural drainage, and ignoring air and water constraints is not planning. It is denial.

Smart growth means building more housing where infrastructure can support it, especially near reliable transit, jobs, schools, grocery stores, parks, and public services. It means walkable neighborhoods, safer bicycle routes, energy-efficient buildings, urban tree cover, heat mitigation, and communities where daily life does not require two or three cars simply to function.

It also means refusing false choices. We do not have to sell off the canyons to address housing affordability. We do not have to sacrifice clean air to create jobs. We do not have to choose between growth and water security.

Those choices appear inevitable only when policymakers refuse to do the harder work of planning well.

Energy policy is central to stewardship. A diversified, resilient, and increasingly clean energy system reduces pollution, protects public health, creates jobs, and prepares Utah for the future rather than locking us into infrastructure that will become more expensive and fragile over time.

That means accelerating solar, wind, geothermal, energy storage, efficiency, and grid modernization. It also means evaluating emerging nuclear technologies with full transparency about cost, safety, fuel, waste, water use, and public liability rather than treating any technology as a magic answer.

Sustainability is not about permanent scarcity. It is about building abundance that lasts. Stewardship also has a cultural dimension. When people lose access to nature, they lose a source of connection, perspective, and responsibility. Parks, trails, open spaces, outdoor education, conservation programs, and accessible recreation are not extras. They are part of how a society teaches care across generations.

A child who grows up experiencing nature is more likely to understand why it deserves protection. A disabled person who can actually use a trail or park is more likely to feel that public land truly belongs to the public. A community with trees, shade, clean water, and safe outdoor spaces is healthier and more connected.

That is intergenerational responsibility in practice. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations applies to ecosystems as much as it does to people. Diverse systems are resilient systems. Monocultures are fragile. Ecosystems stripped of redundancy and variety become more vulnerable to disease, fire, drought, and collapse.

Protecting biodiversity, migration routes, wetlands, native vegetation, pollinators, and ecological balance is not sentimental environmentalism. It is systems thinking.

At its core, my environmental vision is about competence, humility, and care. It recognizes limits without surrendering hope. It welcomes innovation without abandoning responsibility. And it insists that progress and protection are not enemies. Done well, they are partners.

We do not inherit Utah from our ancestors. We borrow it from our descendants.

They will not judge us by our slogans, our press releases, or the promises we made when consequences were still far away. They will judge us by what still works, what still flows, what still breathes, and what we chose to protect when we had the chance.

My commitment as a legislator is to govern as if the future matters, because it does.