SALT LAKE CITY — For David Garrett Byars, using Utah was a no-brainer.
The documentary filmmaker and self-described “born-in-the-wool redneck” has a new documentary, “Public Trust: The Fight for America’s Public Lands,” premiering nationwide on YouTube on Sept. 25. “Public Trust” examines America’s federally owned public lands, and how much of that wilderness is being systematically turned over to the states. (That doesn’t necessarily sound bad, but the documentary argues that the consequences could be devastating.)
“Public Trust” focuses on three pieces of public land currently facing ownership battles: the Boundary Waters Wilderness (Minnesota), the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Alaska) and Bears Ears National Monument (Utah).
“Utah’s been the epicenter of federal land disputes forever, since public lands were a thing,” Byars said during a recent interview with the Deseret News.
“When Bears Ears was proclaimed, you knew, I knew, all Utahns knew that was going to be a very controversial thing,” he continued. “So it really made sense to kind of dive straight into a conflict that was ongoing right now.”
Utah has played a big part in Byars’ career. His documentary short “Recapture,” about the 2016 Recapture Canyon protests in Blanding, Utah, introduced him to what was happening with America’s federally owned public lands. That topic has guided much of his professional work since then.
Public lands, Byars said, capture so much of the “American experiment,” and that experiment’s constant, purposeful reconciling of individual liberty with the common good.
Those two ideals aren’t reconciled so easily, though. And in the case of public lands, it often leads to major, widespread misconceptions about how public lands really work, Byars argues.
“Public Trust” delves into many of these misconceptions. Ahead of the documentary’s Friday premiere, Byars outlined three of them for us.
Misconception No. 1: It’s a partisan issue
The sale of federally owned public land is often characterized as a Democrat-versus-Republican issue. But it’s hardly that partisan.
In “Public Trust,” the locals standing between the federally owned lands and the corporations that want it aren’t a bunch of granola-eating hippies. Rather, many are blue-collar Americans who depend on that land for their livelihood. The economies of these smaller rural communities often revolve around this federally owned public land, through things like hunting, fishing and tourism — practices that are more sustainable and community-based than those of large corporations.
“These (citizens) are people who care about the land,” Byars said. “They’re not there because they’re liberal. They’re not pro public lands because they have a certain ideology, and the tail is wagging the dog. … The fact that there are 640 million acres that belong to all of us, and (citizens) want that, I think that that’s a good thing. And that’s not partisan. That’s like wanting clean air, clean water.”
“Public Trust” spends considerable time outlining the Trump administration’s large-scale dismantling of federal public land ownership. Byars pointed out, however, that politicians aren’t simply split down party lines on this issue. While the Obama administration was generally considered favorable toward public lands preservation, Byars noted how that administration also lifted America’s ban on exporting natural gas.
“Which has opened up our federal public lands to insane amounts of fracking,” he said. “It made us into a gas and oil superpower. So it’s just infinitely complicated, how I feel about the federal government.”
Misconception No. 2: Corporations are evil
Watching private corporations buy public land, then extract its resources, then leave the cleanup bill to taxpayers, doesn’t exactly make these corporations seem virtuous. But according to Byars, they aren’t explicitly evil either. They’re just doing business.
“These corporations … have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to maximize profits. It’s not good, it’s not evil, it’s agnostic,” he said. “If they can lean on the levers of government, make it political, to get at a resource to create more profits for the shareholders, they will. And that’s what happening.
“And you might think it’s evil, but it’s corporations maximizing profits within legal bounds,” Byars continued. “So they’re doing everything they can that we allow them to do. These are us and our politicians that are allowing them to do this. These are loopholes that could easily be closed. But these are things that we have decided, that we have allowed, to happen. So the burden falls on us to decide what corporations are allowed to do.”
Misconception No. 3: When states own public land, they preserve it
“As a proposition on its face, local control and care of land sounds correct,” Byars said. “It sounds like the right thing to do — the people who are next to the land, they know more about it, they should control it, they should decide what’s best for it. But you have to dig a little bit deeper into it.”
State-owned lands, Byars explained, are not managed the same way federal lands are managed. When public land is federally owned, the land is managed for multiple use — a mix of extraction, conservation, recreation, etc. And this largely keeps costs low for the average camper, hiker or hunter.
But most states, including Utah, are encouraged under their state constitutions to optimize revenue. And when it comes to public lands, those profits are given to schools and other public institutions. Per a recent report on Utah land ownership, “Since the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration is legally obligated to optimize financial return for schools and beneficiaries, they engage in land sales, land leases and investments. Mineral land leases and developed land sales have recently yielded the highest returns” (page 19).
So if a state claims public land that was once federally owned, the state is incentivized to raise the price of access, “in terms of permits, camping fees, et cetera, to the highest price that the market would bear,” Byars said. “And that’s the best-case scenario, if you transfer federal lands to the state.”
In most cases, the state quickly sells this land to private businesses — states just don’t have the resources or infrastructure to take care of that much land that quickly.
According to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert’s website, 75% of the state’s public land is federally owned. (Other sources list the percentage as 63%.) The state-managed public land, by contrast, is only 7%. For Utah, suddenly assuming responsibility for that additional land could be a monumental, perhaps impossible undertaking, according to Byars.
“That’s 10 times more land than they were managing before,” Byars explained. “And when you’re talking about 35 million acres, you can’t scale up like that. You can’t go from 3.4 million acres to 35 million acres overnight and just build that infrastructure. That’s your BLM offices, that’s your forest service offices, those are your national wildlife refuges, those are your military bases, those are everything. So transferring this land to the state is a giant proposition. And I don’t think people understand how small the state trust lands are in comparison to the federally managed public lands.”
On the whole, public land use can be a pretty complicated topic. But as things currently stand, Byars summed it up this way: “This is a proposition to have us divest ourselves of what we already own. ... And once those lands are gone, they’re gone forever. There’s no large-scale re-publicing of the land in the future.”