For more than 100 days, congressional Republicans tolerated many extreme actions by the Trump administration and its supporters. Last week, however, one member of the House decided to take a stand.
The issue was a House amendment to the Republican budget package that would allow the sale or transfer of what conservation advocates say could be about 500,000 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah. The unlikely rebel was Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as secretary of the interior during President Trump’s first term and outraged environmentalists with his support for the oil and gas industry. “It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever,” Mr. Zinke told The Associated Press. His unequivocal opposition to the amendment, echoed by some of his Republican colleagues in several Western states, now threatens the future of what Mr. Trump has called his “big, beautiful” budget bill.
The amendment, which could constitute the largest single sale of the United States’ public lands in modern history, reflects the priorities of Doug Burgum, the current interior secretary. In mid-March, he made an awkward appearance with Scott Turner, the housing and urban development secretary, in a press event streamed on YouTube. “Our federal lands are an incredible asset on America’s balance sheet,” Mr. Burgum said, which could be used “to solve our nation’s affordable housing crisis.”
Selling off public lands would assuredly not do this, since all but a tiny fraction are far from cities and lack basic infrastructure. Some of the parcels targeted by the amendment are adjacent to Zion National Park in Utah and are far more likely to be developed for vacation homes. More fundamentally, Mr. Burgum’s view of the public lands as assets to be exploited is wildly shortsighted and simplistic. It threatens more than a century of progress in one of this country’s most vital and popular shared experiments.
America’s public lands — the approximately 600 million acres overseen by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service — are owned by the American people. Situated mostly in the western part of the country, they are what remains of the more than 1.5 billion acres of North America that the U.S. government acquired on paper from states and foreign governments and violently took from Indigenous inhabitants.
In the late 1800s, when public lands were subject to unbridled logging, grazing and mining, many Americans started to recognize that they had enduring value. Pressed by local and national conservation advocates, the federal government began to impose limits designed to protect public lands for future generations. Eventually it created our national parks, forests, monuments, wildlife refuges and recreation areas — places of great beauty, biological diversity and historical significance.
Recently, the United States has started to acknowledge that its public lands are also ancestral homelands. Since 2001, when President Bill Clinton directed the Bureau of Land Management to oversee the new Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in “close cooperation” with the Pueblo de Cochiti people, tribes and federal agencies have signed hundreds of agreements to steward public landscapes together.
Today public lands test Americans’ ability to work together on behalf of the future, and they more often unite us than divide us. The public, apparently, agrees with Mr. Burgum’s characterization of public lands as “an incredible asset,” but they don’t share his enthusiasm for liquidating it. A recent poll conducted by the Trust for Public Land, an organization that promotes access to the outdoors, found that three-quarters of voters oppose the closure of national public lands, and 71 percent oppose their sale. (Though sales of public land do occur, they’re almost always small and highly regulated, and their proceeds are typically used to acquire lands of greater conservation importance.)
While the public lands targeted in last week’s provision are not national parks or monuments, maps released with the proposal indicate that they include valuable wildlife habitats and access to beloved hiking trails. A few of those acres may, in fact, be appropriate to sell, but not without extensive public input, and not simply to make a tiny reduction in the federal debt. As Mr. Zinke wrote on Facebook last week, “Once the land is sold and access eliminated, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land.”
If the full House approves the provision, it will set a dangerous precedent for even larger disposals of public lands. Utah has already sued the federal government for control of approximately 18.5 million acres of public land within state boundaries. In 2023, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill that would allow the Interior Department to sell federal land to local and state governments, which could potentially then sell it to private buyers. And while a draft of the Interior Department’s strategic plan for the next five years that leaked to the public in late April does not contain specifics about sales of public lands, it de-emphasizes their conservation in favor of cashing in on them.
Though the management of public lands remains imperfect, Americans have learned over several generations to take the past, present and future into account. Those who wish to abandon the experiment of the public lands may see them as simply assets on a balance sheet; the rest of us know that they are, above all, the landscapes that hold us together.
Michelle Nijhuis is the author of “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.”
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