As the United States approaches its 250th year as a nation, the festivities are widespread in DC. But even as Americans prepare to celebrate, the Trump administration is quietly working to expose some of our most treasured ocean places to harmful activities like mining, drilling, and industrial fishing.

We should be spending this anniversary lifting up our shared natural and cultural heritage. Instead, the Trump administration is spending this consequential year trashing the very idea of shared heritage by erasing history and selling out nature on land and sea. While there has been extensive coverage about how this erasure is playing out on land, the administration is also aggressively selling out our ocean heritage.

Having worked in the Biden administration and now both leading national conservation coalitions, we hear from communities across the country every day, who are trying to protect the ocean and coasts they love and depend on.

And what we hear is that communities don’t like what they are seeing from the Trump administration. They don’t want to be cut off from their own ocean backyards by corporate pollution. They don’t want dirty and destructive industry off their coasts. And they especially don’t want the Trump administration selling off public lands and waters to the highest bidder.

All of us who love the ocean have a chance now to be a part of the alliance to save its future.

In the Pacific Ocean, expedited permits for deep-sea mining make it easier to sell off the right to mine around the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. Thousands of people in these US territories have made it clear that they oppose these mining ventures because these companies use unproven technology that jeopardizes their livelihoods. Our coalitions have engaged tens of thousands of people voicing their opposition, yet the administration has continued the process of selling off the seafloor to mining companies with little benefit to the communities that bear the risks.

The expansion of offshore oil and gas leases, which would open 34 new sales in waters off the coast of Alaska, California, and Florida, would also benefit just a handful of fossil fuel companies. In one fell swoop, they would sell out the climate; introduce the constant possible threat of........

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