Plans are in motion for the United States to sell at least 2 million acres of public land across 11 Western states to the highest bidder. These plans are real and they represent the largest public lands fire sale of recent memory. One can follow this link to see the more than 250 million acres of land that are eligible to be sold.
Your favorite trail may soon be paved over; your favorite hunting spot, privatized; your favorite stream to fish, fenced off.
Proponents of the bill cite the need for housing and provide this as a rationale to sell the land. Housing indeed is a real concern, but the text of the bill provides no guidance on which land is to be sold. By all indications, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and the Forest Service will decide, without congressional guidance, which land to sell.
How would selling National Forest land deep in the Uintas, or BLM land in Skull Valley alleviate housing concerns for the Wasatch Front? In an age where the ultra-wealthy are snatching up ski resorts to create their own personal oases for themselves and their friends, how can any American ever be confident that the public lands fire sale is nothing more than an opportunity for the richest among us to cash in on our country’s greatest natural treasures?
Proponents cite the need to sell the land to “unleash American energy,” but do not be fooled by this red herring. American energy is already “unleashed,” no sale necessary. Extractors are already permitted to drill, locate and remove oil, gas and minerals on these lands. And on top of that, the U.S. is receiving royalties for much of this extraction. Sell the land, and any future extraction is done without any benefit to the U.S. The bill may protect “valid existing rights” in the land sold, but ultimately it closes much more land to energy development than is currently open.
What makes public, undeveloped land valuable is not its monetary value. In nature we go from the oppressive drudgery of modern life to the sublime, from being hurried to being inspired, from feeling stress to feeling peace. You cannot put a price on this. Losing this land, we lose a piece of ourselves.
Public, undeveloped land is finite. Once it is gone, it is never coming back. Even if Congress wanted to, there is no clawing back the land post-sale.
Utahn and writer Wallace Stegner, reflecting on Glen Canyon’s incomparable beauty, which was to be buried under hundreds of feet of water to create Lake Powell, remarked that by “(g)aining the lovely and usable, we have given up the incomparable.”
May we, like our forebearers, protect the “incomparable,” so future generations can enjoy public land as we have.