Water has always held a sacred place in Black life. Long before environmental policy debates filled congressional hearing rooms, water shaped our stories. Creeks, marshes, and wetlands provided both livelihood and refuge when access to land and opportunity was denied elsewhere. For many Black communities, water is not just a resource. It symbolizes memory, survival, and possibility.

Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.

Until now, the rivers, lakes, and streams that flow through national parks and other federally protected landscapes have been spared this fate. Despite bipartisan support for protecting our nation’s most beloved lands and waters, their future is at risk. Some are losing long-standing safeguards, opening the door to mining, fracking, and data center development. We’re seeing this right now in the West, where the administration recently slashed Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by a staggering 91%.

These two landscapes are sacred to Tribal Nations that have called them home for millennia, carefully tending the cliffs, canyons, and plateaus as well as the rivers that run through them. They have fought tirelessly to close them to development. At Bears Ears, the administration abruptly dissolved an Inter-Tribal Coalition meant to co-manage the lands, ignoring the long history of stewardship by the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe, and jeopardizing their ability to hunt, fish, and collect plants and medicines. The Tribes are fighting this decision, backed up by a broad range of partners that understand the shared stakes for people and the planet.

Let’s make sure we’re electing leaders who will fight for the rights of communities that........

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