Last week, while Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy met to discuss the debt ceiling, Carole King walked through the rain to the Capitol to make her case for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, a bill that would designate millions of acres in the West as wilderness and put an end to logging in these areas. “You can get members of Congress when they’re walking out,” she said of the south entrance to the Capitol. “When I came here with Representative Carolyn Maloney”—the main sponsor of the bill—“she brought Mark Meadows over to me, and he said, ‘I’ll take a look at your bill.’ I knew he wouldn’t.” King, who carried a LeSportsac backpack and an umbrella from MOMA, has periodically ventured to the Capitol over the past few decades to lobby for her conservationist bill. “In the nineties, I came here with these mountain guys from Montana who just put suit jackets on with their jeans,” she said. “My last husband lived in a tepee.”

“The Forest Service is not what people think it is. It’s arm in arm with the timber industry. The forest is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because they consider trees a crop!”

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