We exist to protect
America’s public lands.

The MTJP Corps is a national community built to ground-truth threats to America’s public lands and act on what we find. Ground-truthing is a surveyor’s word: going to the place and checking whether the map is telling the truth.

Who runs this

More Than Just Parks is a public lands advocacy organization founded by Jim and Will Pattiz. They came to this work in the field, documenting the national parks and forests for the agencies that manage them, and stayed to defend those places when it became clear they were being handed off faster than anyone was writing it down. MTJP reports on public lands most days, and builds the tools the field was missing: the Threatened Public Lands Map, the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard, and PLAN, the Public Lands Action Network.
More about More Than Just Parks.

Why a Corps, and why now

Every decision on public land starts as a document that describes the ground: what grows there, what road already exists, what the surveys found. Those documents are written by agencies that have been cut to the bone, on deadlines that do not move, and nobody checks them. Before any of it is signed, the agency has to open a comment period and answer what comes in, and anyone at all can write. Then the window closes, the decision gets signed, and from that point a court is only allowed to look at what people put in writing before the signature. Not what was true. What was on the record.

Which means the whole thing turns on who was standing on the ground while the window was open. That has always been true. What is new is that a phone in an ordinary pocket now records where it was and when, well enough to hold up in court, and that our own system reads every open federal decision in the country every day and works out which of their sentences a photograph could disprove. Put those two together and you get this.

What we ask of you

A walk, a phone, and a paragraph in your own words. Nothing more, ever. You choose which missions you take and when you go. Nobody is assigned anything, no quota exists, and there is no leaderboard, because a person racing a scoreboard takes risks that a person checking a document does not.

What we will never do

We will never direct you to a specific place at a specific time. We will never publish your name, sell your address, or hand a partner your identity: to every organization that reads what you send, you are a number. We will never ask you onto closed, posted or private ground, or anywhere a reasonable person would call dangerous. And we will never edit what you wrote.

How the evidence is handled

Your phone records where and when. We read that off the file on our own server rather than trusting anything the browser tells us, give every photograph a fingerprint the moment it lands, a code taken from the file itself that changes if a single pixel does, and never edit or overwrite an original. We check your coordinates against the decision’s own boundary and record how far inside it you were standing. A photograph with no location still counts: pair it with a phone photograph taken beside it and it borrows those coordinates, and the record names the frame it borrowed from. On its own it is filed as it is, marked as carrying no location, and the people who use it judge the weight. Reports on things we do not publish, a nest or a cultural site, are sealed the moment they arrive: counted, and never passed on to anyone.

Who pays for it

More Than Just Parks does. No grant, no partner and no funder has any say in which requests go out or what a member finds. If that ever changes, it will say so on this page before it changes anywhere else.

Reaching us

ask@morethanjustparks.com. A person reads it. Press, see the press page.