For Sale?
Many of America's public lands face an uncertain future
President Trump wants to put millions of acres of America’s public lands up for sale to help pay for tax cuts and expand real estate development. Critics are organizing opposition, saying public lands are an extension of democracy, and should be kept accessible to all Americans—regardless of their income, race and politics—for generations to come. The battle is just getting started.
NEW YORK—It sounds like something straight out of the popular Paramount/Peacock TV series, Yellowstone—(a drama about the political battles over control of the wide open spaces of pristine wilderness in the American West) —but it’s real.
A group of Senate Republicans, led by Mike Lee of Utah, who heads the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees public lands—have been pushing a Trump-backed plan to require the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to put up for sale as much as 3.3 million acres of public land for housing development. The group also wants to lift restrictions on another 250 million acres of pristine land across 11 Western states, which would make it possible for some of America’s most beautiful, undeveloped public lands to be sold off to the highest bidder.
On a recent podcast hosted by conservative Glenn Beck, Lee said President Trump’s desire to enable the potential sale of public lands would help to raise needed revenue for the U.S. Treasury, help fund Trump’s tax cuts and spending bill and address what Lee says is the country’s housing crisis.
Lee and his group of Senate lawmakers tried, but failed this week, to avert Senate rules by slipping the public lands privatization plan into Trump’s big tax and spending bill without debate. Lee now says the group will introduce the plan as a new, free-standing bill in the House and Senate after the July 4th recess.
State of play
Critics are howling. Nonprofit environmental organizations and other advocates for the conservation of America’s wilderness are raising serious concerns. More than 100 conservation groups, including the Sierra Club and Scenic Utah, have warned Democratic leaders the proposal lacks meaningful restrictions and could, therefore, allow millions of acres of public lands and parks to be converted into “golf courses, luxury resorts, strip malls or private vacation homes.”
Some GOP loyalists in some of the rural states are also questioning the plan—despite a caveat recently added to it that would exclude some of the big national parks, including Yosemite and Yellowstone, along with national monuments, and some public recreation areas. But long-used public trails for skiing, and for hiking—like the Trinity Alps “four loops” area of public hiking trails in California— remain vulnerable.
According to a recent analysis by The Wilderness Society, land around Mount Shasta, Big Sur, Mendocino, the Eastern Sierras and along the 2,650-mile long Pacific Crest Trail in California could be eligible for sale and could bring in between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next decade. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said that any money raised by a public lands sale would go into the U.S Treasury to help fund Trump’s proposed tax cuts. Senator Lee has said 5% could go to local governments.
Park Service Impact
The National Park Service is already feeling the heat. Trump made decisions earlier this year by executive order to severely slash the park service’s budget, force retirements of dedicated and experienced park service leaders, and fire those who pushed back. More cuts in NPS staff are planned for later this year. In several campaign speeches, and in remarks made since taking office in January, Trump has said he would consider replacing some current national park superintendents with political appointees to help the private sector ease any changes in the ownership of public lands.
[The Interior Department was recently forced to rehire 1,000 NPS employees fired earlier this spring to handle increased crowds visiting the nation’s parks this summer and enable the parks to continue to keep the parks clean and safe for park visitors—but the park service says the re-hires are temporary. Last year, there were over 330 million visits to the parks—more than professional baseball, football, basketball and the Disney amusement parks combined. This year, the park service says it is expecting a record 400 million visitors.]
The Trump administration also has been trying to erase some historical references on park service signs and in public brochures that are not aligned with his political narrative. Under the direction of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, the park service has been asked to remove references to Black slavery on its webpages dedicated to the Underground Railroad and the Civil War.
President Trump has said the only national park he has visited is the Gettysburg Civil War battle site in Pennsylvania.
Conservative pressure
Some Republican leaders and political analysts acknowledge that Trump’s push to privatize public lands and downsize the National Park Service staff and budget embodies a conservative contradiction—a love for public land alongside support for a party threatening to sell some of it and limit its influence.
Underscoring that contradiction is a recent Pew survey the shows the federal agencies which Republicans feel most favorably toward are the National Park Service (67-point net favorability), followed by NASA (45 points). [The least popular federal agency of the 16 asked about was the Internal Revenue Service.]
Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker of the award-winning, 12-hour, 2009 series for PBS on the national parks, said in a recent interview that the national park system represents a very small percentage of the national budget and “isn’t just a bunch of hiking trails and tourist shops.” Instead, he says, America’s public lands are “symbols of our democracy, because they ensure all Americans have access to the nation’s most magnificent and sacred places.”
Historical precedent
Burns said the idea of preserving this land and starting the National Park Service in 1916, was “as radical an idea as the Declaration of Independence. …You could be a millionaire or you could be struggling, but being a visitor to the parks was a leveling experience that humbled most visitors, was a spiritual experience amid the grandeur of the landscapes, and it built among a majority of Americans, across political lines, the conviction that these lands must be preserved for future generations—not just for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.”
Business interests grappled back then over the idea, Burns said, but those leading the development of America’s railroads and nation’s fledgling tourism industry supported it, given their need to attract visitors to the West, cover their investments and grow the economy. In 1906, then-U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt [who Trump has said he reveres] used his executive power to double the size of the national park system and expand protection of America’s natural landscape and environmental landmarks.
Records show Roosevelt also was moved spiritually by the beauty of the land. Once visiting with pioneer conservationist John Muir on Glacier Point in Yellowstone National Park, Roosevelt proclaimed—after hearing Muir talk about the “spiritual power one experiences being exposed to lands untouched for half as long as the age of the Earth itself”—urged congressional lawmakers to “leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.”
NOTE: This story was updated June 25th to include a decision by GOP backers of the privatization plan to introduce it as a free-standing bill in the House and Senate after lawmakers return from their July 4th recess.