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.”
