In the 14 months since Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-NY), and Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) have led congressional members in efforts to reverse a decade of legislative obstruction and stagnation in U.S. land, water, and wildlife conservation.
In the eight years before this most recent Congress, the United States lost an estimated 19,000 square miles of natural area to urban sprawl, oil and gas fields, and other human development. In that same period—with a Congressional Republican anti-parks caucus blocking nature bills—Congress protected less than one-tenth of the amount of natural area that disappeared to development.
