Abstract This essay analyses wilderness debates in the Utah Public Lands Initiative (PLI). From 2012–2016, the PLI sought to answer the “question of wilderness” through a holistic, state-centric public lands bill. The effort was spearheaded by former Utah Representative Rob Bishop who argued that the state could achieve “certainty” through “compromise,” or that the state's problems with wilderness and public lands could be resolved by reaching consensus on how best to use those lands. Bishop sought input from seven Utah counties, who would submit their own proposals for how best to resolve pressing land-use issues in their respective counties. I examine public discourse about one proposal, from Grand County, analyzing county documents, newspaper reports, and citizen comment letters. Following work in rhetorical studies on wilderness, my analysis demonstrates how local communities construct wilderness and its meanings in a particular cultural moment. Reading the county's PLI rhetorics for how citizens valued wilderness and their relationships to public lands, I argue that the county had difficulty attaining compromise and certainty because citizens could not agree on the meanings of “wilderness.”

In this essay, I argue that neoliberalism should be thought of ecologically. Working from the ecological turn in rhetorical studies, I hold that ecology is often used as a framework to describe how rhetorics interact, transform, and alter one another. Understood in terms of interaction, transformation, and alteration, neoliberalism fundamentally transforms (and is transformed by) the rhetorics and discourses with which it comes into contact. I demonstrate this process of transformation through the case of Bears Ears National Monument’s shrinking boundaries as they came into contact with the different neoliberal commitments of two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Following the presidents’ different neoliberalisms, I show that both neoliberalism and the boundaries changed through interactions with factors in the monument’s dynamic ecology.