In the documentary Public Trust, outdoor journalist Hal Herring detailed growing pressures within the federal government to lease and sell off public lands for resource extraction and exploitation. After referencing corporate funding for legislation that would push these sales, Herring admits, “How public lands got mixed up in all this, I’m still working on that one.”
You don’t need to do much homework to understand why public lands are always in danger of being sold off and misused. Excluding the National Park system, federal public land managers like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were borne out of land exploitation. I have written about this before, so here is a summary of the BLM’s formation:
The Bureau of Land Management is a pretty young agency compared to the granddaddies like National Park Service and Forest Service. It was formed in 1946 during a combination of two older agencies, the General Land Office, which sold land, and the U.S. Grazing Service. The former agency even contributed to the formation of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, when 18 million acres of forest resources were transferred to the Department of Agriculture. The latter agency speaks for itself (though after reading Spott’s article, maybe it’s a surprise to everyone). The Bureau of Livestock and Mining it is, then.
The Bureau of Land Management was formed to systematically exploit, lease and sell the land resources it owned. With such a comparatively small budget to manage so many millions acres of land (about 1.1 billion dollars annually), the agency made a name for itself with backpackers and RV enthusiasts around the West due to the commonly fee-less, laissez-faire camping spots. Little did the non-Wikipedia-reading fans of BLM’s camping practices know that the agency was already making enough cash destroying the land from the inside out. (“The BLM ain't here for you or me.”)
From this point in the documentary, I began to think that its producers were well-intentioned but willfully ignorant of the original objective held for most public lands and what truly motivates federal land management agencies.
I first saw this ability for pro-Federal conservationists to ignore the facts at hand after reading about a former BLM bureaucrat’s surprise that the agency was so hellbent on maintaining grazing rights for ranchers:
Most of its managers are hard-wired to a multiple-use mission rather than conservation, meaning they believe land should be open to exploitation for mining, logging or ranching. Congress has reinforced this by failing to reform the 1872 Mining Law, raise grazing fees to fair market rates, allow voluntary grazing permit buyouts or otherwise modernize relevant statutes.
The bureaucrat, Richard Spotts, differentiated between “multiple-use mission” and conservation, which egregiously ignores what conservation has been the for the U.S. Government: The supposedly sustainable exploitation of land and water for resources.
Furthermore, “conservationism” entered the governmental lexicon with Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. Forest Service as a means to specialize the governmental exploitation of trees and animals. As said before, the General Land Office was a primary contributor of acreage to the budding U.S. Forest Service in the 1870’s. The GLO, created to survey and sell off public lands for cheap in the hope of developing the West during the earlier 19th-century frontier days, transferred forest lands to the Department of Agriculture under the Division of Forestry, which would soon turn into the Forest Service.
All of the shuffling of federally-owned lands didn’t change the nature of what they stood for: Mining, drilling, logging, grazing. It was only off-hand that they were open to the public for recreation. Take note that the U.S. Forest Service is organized under the Department of Agriculture: for a majority of Forest Service lands, managers consider trees as crops, and lease off large acres for either clear-cutting or logging trees that meet the threshold policies of a given area.
I just want to remind the reader that I didn’t need more than Wikipedia to figure out “why public lands are mixed up in all this.” Land exploitation is the core objective of federal public land managers; recreation is a far distant second; the well-being of Americans a non-third.
People like to repeat the phrase “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, yet here we have a documentary that wants to isolate the issues of public lands to specific individuals and corporations, where we see the root cause of the endangerment of people’s land, culture, and history is because they were incorporated into the public land system in the first place. This brings me to the most damaging assertion by Hal Herring and this documentary: That privatizing public land would be bad.
When Herring frames land privatization, he points to the fact that politicians currently pushing for it are really trying to help corporations buy it up and exploit it. This is very true, but Herring is only giving one side to the privatization story; perhaps this is because it is the only story we know so far.
Let me give you another story about land privatization, one that exists but is not commonly thought about because centralizing Federal control over land is an easier story to tell.
This is a story in which the Ute and Navajo peoples are given the Bears Ears National Monument so they can manage and take care of the land their ancestors resided in. This is a story in which the Montana and Wyoming ranchers are given the local lands so they can graze affordably. This is a story in which local communities are given a turn to take stewardship over the land, and let the land be represented by those who live in, around, and off that land. This is a story about privatization: Not for the state, not for corporations, but for the communities whose identities are tied to the federal government-controlled lands they enjoy and share so much.
Despite Hal Herring not wanting to reach this conclusion, the root cause of the strife caused by public lands is because it is owned by an entity that lives like “wind over the buffalo grass”; using weak resolutions like the Antiquities Act or even Congressional legislation to protect land, these presidential and legislative acts can be overturned by the next election. It was frustrating to see the Inter-Tribal Coalition celebrate President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to institute the Bears Ears National Monument because I know what will happen just a couple years later: Another politician, another administration that can undo it all and remind people that this governmental system does not truly represent local communities, but the wanton desires of some Americans during each election cycle.
As an Inter-Tribal Coalition member said, “They were going to make a scenic byway on a waterway that we owned, without our input. They were going to put some recreation areas in our lands without our involvement.” This utterance is the most deft summary of modern American democracy and governance I have ever found. Yet this same coalition thought that an executive order or bill could stand the test of time?
The root cause of public land exploitation is that they were public lands to begin with, held by federal and state agencies tasked with its exploitation and paradoxically brand themselves as “conservationists” or stewards or protectors of land, much to the confusion of the American public; this mixup has even compromised this documentary’s coherence.
To solve the issue of public land exploitation, the federal government must take democracy to its logical conclusion: By transferring these lands back to the local communities who live in, around, and off the land. Let the community decide their future, not far off politicians.
We also need to redefine what “public lands” means, because it has been a dangerous and backwards rhetoric to say that public lands can’t be private. There are land trusts managed by non-profits and individuals who open up their lands for everyone’s use—and all the better, because guests commonly take care of these semi-private lands better than the National Parks or other public lands. This is because once a piece of land becomes a community’s, to damage one is to damage the other; finally, a land may be treated with the same respect we’re supposed to apply to the people who live around it.
It will not be an easy process to take the land back from the federal and state governments; these land management agencies want to exist for themselves, despite the dangers they pose via corruption and their inherent objective to exploit. To return land back to the community would be to poke the beast in the eye, who believes every acre should be under its thumb. But we’ve seen for two centuries now that this beast is unable to attend to the needs of American communities and should be abolished.