The threat to public lands just got much worse. How to ensure your kids have them, too | Opinion
If you care about public lands, it’s time to put your head on a swivel.
It is no exaggeration to say that public lands are in their most precarious position in a century. If you hike or climb, hunt or fish, float or ride, graze or recreate on public lands, the next few years could determine the shape of your future in the great outdoors.
Just months after the state of Utah filed its case attempting to seize most federal land within its boundaries, the threat to public lands has become even more dire.
It was bad enough when all that was involved was a court challenge, and one that most experts agreed was of no legal merit. (Your name is now on this argument because Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state of Idaho supporting Utah’s position.)
But legal merit matters less and less as the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly not only ideologically conservative but partisan.
Now the recent election, after which Republicans will likely hold all three branches of government, has amplified that threat considerably.
It’s likely the push to dispose of federal lands will no longer simply be pushed in the courts, but through the House and Senate. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has been named chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Lee has for years been a supporter of Utah’s federal land-grabbing movement.
“We’re heading toward the most anti-federal public lands congress in history,” said Michael Carroll of The Wilderness Society. “We can anticipate that everything that’s being advocated for by Utah’s lawsuit will also become legislation.”
And the incoming Trump administration has been clear that its public lands priority will be more resource extraction. That was crystalized by the announcement that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum would be nominated to lead the Department of the Interior, with just one directive: drill more.
(Don’t count on more jobs. Trump has a history of failing to meet these promises. Bolstering the coal industry was a key pledge of his first campaign. Nothing he did changed the steady course of its decline.)
The arguments against federal landholding are obviously meritless. Idaho, Utah and every other western state agreed that the federal government would continue to own large tracts of land in perpetuity, and wrote that agreement into their state constitutions. This was a condition of becoming states admitted to the union. The effort is now to go back on those promises.
But when a single party holds the power to write, interpret and enforce the laws with no substantial checks or balances, as will be the case for at least the next two years, all bets are off.
The basic problem with transferring public lands to the states is the same as it’s always been: States have no hope of being able to afford managing these lands — at least not as a public trust, the way the federal government does. So if the land transfer movement succeeds, the most likely outcome is huge swaths of public land ending up on the auction block, transferred to private hands, lost forever to the general public.
We’ve lived in a world where being an American means you can get out into nature — at least in the West, where public lands haven’t been disposed of the way they have in the rest of the country.
There is an alternate model: one where nature is accessible only to the highest bidder. As Nicole Blanchard reported last year, there’s been a growing movement to treat access to the outdoors as a primarily money-making commodity.
This isn’t just a private-sector phenomenon. Many states have experimented with it as well through auctioning hunting tags.
Want a tag in a prime hunting unit? Instead of entering your name in a fair drawing, the way Idaho does, you can put in a bid, and for the low-low price of $390,000, you can get a mule deer tag, as one Canadian guide bid for a chance to hunt on Antelope Island, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
That was in 2015. Today, that’s chump change. A Nevada man recently paid $750,000 for an Arizona statewide mule deer tag, according to Outdoor Life.
And there’s no reason the same thing can’t happen for access to hiking, mountain biking, trail riding or rock climbing.
What could be coming is a world where the outdoors are increasingly accessible only if you’re rich, and there’s a lot of money in it for whoever controls these lands, so there will be plenty of pigs at the trough. For the rest of us, just locked gates and “no trespassing” signs. Only sustained pressure from the public can hold that world at bay.