“Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.” From a letter signed by Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson to Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the Forest Service, February 1, 1905.
Our public lands are vast and varied. They span rugged mountains, pristine lakes, ancient forest, sinuous canyons, wind-swept beaches, and, where I live in Arizona, desert landscapes that burst with color and new growth after monsoon rains. They are the ancestral homelands of Tribal Nations who continue religious, cultural, and subsistence practices passed down since time immemorial. Our public lands supply clean drinking water for millions of people and minerals, renewable energy, feed for livestock, and fossil fuels, supporting economic progress, technological innovation, and jobs. They are home to a rich array of wildlife species. And they are the places where Americans spend time with their families, explore the wonders of the outdoors, and unplug from daily life.
For more than a century, federal agencies have tried to balance competing demands on America’s public lands through a management philosophy known as “multiple use.” Multiple use—which Congress has codified into law for most of the 400-plus million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service—is simple in theory: it directs the agencies to manage lands for any one or any combination of an area’s potential uses or values, some of which will fundamentally conflict. For example, a mountain bike trail and a phosphate mine cannot occur in the same place.
Agencies have become paralyzed by a paradox of choice, overwhelmed by competing demands and legal requirements, and buffeted by shifting political winds.
In practice, however, multiple use decision making has become increasingly difficult for these agencies. The land use planning process common to both agencies has become full of inefficiency and land use plans have become increasingly outdated and less effective at shaping how management occurs. Agencies have become paralyzed by a paradox of choice, overwhelmed by competing demands and legal requirements, and buffeted by shifting political winds.
America’s public lands face mounting pressures—from escalating wildfire risk and the mushrooming interest of Americans in outdoor recreation, to surging demand for energy and minerals and transmission corridors to connect areas with abundant resources, like the wind-swept plains of Wyoming, to areas with high demand, like Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. It is time to revisit the multiple use management paradigm, to simplify and make more coherent the process of deciding what uses are appropriate on more public lands.
Rather than trying to manage for everything nearly everywhere, what if we—as a country—were to decide on the primary purposes and uses of more of our public lands, and focus management in those areas on achieving those goals?
This concept, which is sometimes called “dominant use” management in public land parlance, already guides the management of some public lands, such as our national park system, national wildlife refuge system, Department of Defense test and training lands, and BLM and Forest Service lands designated as wilderness areas or national recreation areas. In these places, the federal agencies focus their management on one primary goal or use, with other uses prohibited or only permitted to the extent they don’t conflict.
Giving more areas of public lands a primary purpose could simplify and better focus agency management decisions by facilitating more efficient permitting for resource development and infrastructure projects where they are permitted, and by providing more durable protection of non-consumptive uses like Tribal subsistence and cultural practices, outdoor recreation, and biodiversity conservation. A process for designating primary purposes would also enable a more coherent and durable vision for how various uses fit together across the landscapes.
Many public lands should not have a primary purpose designated, at least not anytime soon. A prudent approach would limit designations to those lands we need today to meet our current needs, recognizing that our needs will change. Doing so will ensure that future generations have public lands available tomorrow to meet the needs of the future.
What if we—as a country—were to decide on the primary purposes and uses of more of our public lands, and focus management in those areas on achieving those goals?
Making this shift would require making hard choices about how our public lands can best serve us today, and how to ensure they can also serve future generations. The voices and priorities of local communities would need to be heard and reflected. Likewise, the needs, rights, and sovereignty of Tribal Nations and indigenous communities would have to guide the approach. And science and traditional knowledge would need to serve as the basis for wise decisions.
As discussed below, making it work well would also require Congress. That may seem like a tall order in today’s polarized political environment. But Congress has often found common ground on public lands across party and ideology. Even last year, Senators and Representatives worked across the aisle to successfully oppose a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of public land.
Working together—Congress, federal agencies, States, Tribes, local governments, businesses, conservationists, and all of us who love our public lands—we can forge a new path for public land management. This is the core work of a democracy: making tough but necessary decisions that serve the public interest, for now and for generations to come.
Let’s explore how this could work.
Managing for Everything
The concept of multiple use management began surfacing in natural resource discussions in the early 1900s under President Theodore Roosevelt. It entered the Forest Service's vernacular in the 1920s as an outgrowth of the mission reflected in the letter to Gifford Pinchot quoted above, which he is widely believed to have written himself. Congress first embedded the concept into law through the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, and refined and broadened it in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (which guides the stewardship of BLM lands) and the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (which guides the stewardship of Forest Service lands). The 1976 laws also fused more environmental sensitivity into the multiple use framework by, for example, recognizing conservation as a use and prohibiting unnecessary and undue degradation of the land.
Over the course of three stints in federal service, I’ve had the chance to see some of the challenges that the BLM, in particular, faces in fulfilling its complex mission amid challenging and always-changing political dynamics. Like how to balance conservation of the dwindling greater sage-grouse with oil and gas development.
The BLM manages about 10 percent of America’s land—some 245 million acres—and, even before the current hollowing out of the federal government began, was perennially short on funding and staff. It has, frankly, done a remarkable job with the resources and under the authorities it possesses.
Sometimes multiple use management is relatively simple, because there are ways for different uses to coexist in some places. For example, roads in Wyoming can be designed to accommodate the annual migration of pronghorn antelope, easing tension between the transportation needs of humans and nonhumans. Similarly, virtual fencing built on electronics rather than posts and barbed wire can keep cattle from disturbing sensitive riparian habitat, enabling ranching, outdoor recreation, and biodiversity conservation.
Often, however, one use precludes or substantially degrades others. This passage from the BLM’s 2004 draft resource management plan for the Price Field Office in Utah provides a good illustration:
Consider for instance the Nine Mile Canyon area. This region includes habitats for wildlife. Rock art from ancient civilizations adorns the walls of the “World’s Longest Museum.” Below the surface of the ground are fluid mineral resources that can be extracted and provide important energy resources for the region. Still again, areas of the canyon are suitable for livestock grazing. Views in and through the canyon, including the cultural resources, attract recreationists. Among recreationists, some seek to enjoy the canyon in automobiles or off-highway vehicles, while others seek a quiet and reflective experience, void of noises and distractions from the modern world. All are valid uses of the land, but they are also mutually exclusive in some ways.
Multiple use management leaves each potential use of Nine Mile Canyon, and every other area, on the table and doesn’t provide any direction on how to prioritize or resolve conflicts.
While multiple use management looms large in how we think about public lands today, its deficiencies should come as no surprise. The congressionally-created, bipartisan Public Land Law Review Commission, whose 1970 report lead to the enactment of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and National Forest Management Act, criticized the multiple use authorities extant at that time for “failure to specify or provide standards for determining priorities of use or guidelines for resolving conflicts.” Congress failed to listen to this concern then.
The Unraveling of Land Use Planning
The BLM and Forest Service are supposed to rely on their land use planning process to implement multiple use management and decide where to allow which uses to occur, but land use planning has become increasingly inefficient and irrelevant.
The agencies are required by law to develop landscape-wide plans that prescribe how various uses should be balanced and managed. The law requires the agencies to involve local communities, other stakeholders, and the public in developing land use plans, and the agencies have invested heavily in doing so. These plans are supposed to be updated regularly to ensure that they keep up with society’s changing needs and evolving science.
Management of public lands cannot be static because we live in a dynamic world. Our needs and technologies evolve, our scientific knowledge expands, and climate change and other ecological forces reshape our natural world.
For Nine Mile Canyon, the BLM’s land use plan—informed by extensive local input and numerous public meetings—selected conservation and recreation as the uses of the area. And the BLM has engaged in smart and creative efforts to use land use planning to promote specific uses in designated areas. For example, the BLM’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) identified areas of the California desert where solar energy projects would be permitted more quickly and with more predictable conditions and mitigation requirements. The 2024 Western Solar Plan expanded this approach across the West.
But the effectiveness and utility of BLM and Forest Service land use plans have been declining for years. Plans have remained in place decades longer than intended—the oldest BLM plan that remains in effect dates to 1975—becoming increasingly antiquated and unhelpful. Efforts to use the planning process to address common issues across landscapes, such as the designation of West-wide Energy Corridors, have been stymied by complex and overlapping legal requirements, uncertainty over their usefulness, and litigation. Instead of comprehensively updating plans—which is resource and time intensive—agencies often amend them piecemeal through the permitting process for a specific project. For example, the plan for Nine Mile Canyon would not prevent the BLM from authorizing oil drilling so long as a project-specific amendment to the land use plan occurs. A narrow plan amendment like that is much easier and quicker to complete than a comprehensive revision to a land use plan. Doing so may not even appreciably affect the length of a project’s permitting process. As a result, plans can’t really resolve the question of which uses to allow where.
Moreover, while planning efforts like the DRECP and 2024 Western Solar Plan may enable quicker permitting for specified categories of projects, they do not require the BLM to manage for those uses or prevent it from authorizing other inconsistent uses instead. That may be why the first Trump Administration, which expressed a strong preference for fossil fuel sources over renewables, didn’t bother amending DRECP. Instead, it simply declined to process any renewable energy projects under it.
Last year, Congress dealt a further blow to land use planning when, for the first time ever, it invoked the Congressional Review Act, a statute under which Congress can overturn an agency “rule” by a simple majority vote, to revoke three BLM land use plans - one in North Dakota, one in Montana, and one in Alaska. If any plan revision or amendment can be undone through a congressional resolution, agencies will be further dissuaded from undertaking the time-intensive and politically challenging work of comprehensive planning, instead defaulting to the easier path of making project-specific decisions likely to avoid congressional scrutiny.
Project-by-Project Land Management
We seem to have entered an era in which the only multiple use management decisions that last are authorizations for development. But those decisions tend to be costly and time-consuming because the agencies lack effective tools to resolve use conflicts before permitting begins. Even those decisions, once made, can be undone, as President Trump’s efforts over the past year to unwind renewable energy permits demonstrate.
As a corollary, conserving public lands for Tribal cultural or subsistence uses, outdoor recreation, or biodiversity generally means a perpetual fight to block development. The fight against any particular project might be won—much to the dismay of a project sponsor who has spent years of time and a lot of money to develop a proposal—but the win is a temporary one.
The ephemeral nature of planning has understandably led the agencies to often postpone hard decisions about how to resolve broader conflicts among potential uses until they consider whether to authorize specific projects, often based on applications filed by the businesses that seek to carry them out. Resolving conflicts among the potential uses of public lands through individual projects decisions results in fragmented land management that is a poor way to ensure that public lands as a whole best serve the public over the long run.
It’s hard to develop a comprehensive vision for how our public lands can serve the public with a system rigged against long-term thinking and comprehensive planning.
Management of public lands cannot be static because we live in a dynamic world. Our needs and technologies evolve, our scientific knowledge expands, and climate change and other ecological forces reshape our natural world. How we manage our public lands must also adapt. But it’s hard to develop a comprehensive vision for how our public lands can serve the public with a system rigged against long-term thinking and comprehensive planning.
From Multiple Use to Primary Purpose?
A framework through which Congress would designate some areas as primary purpose lands—that is, where management focuses on a particular primary use or purpose for the designated area—would promote broader and longer-term thinking to identify the use for which areas will be managed on the front end. So, a landscape might be divided into areas designated for things like renewable energy, mining, recreation, or as corridors for transmission and wildlife migration. Thereafter, the agencies would no longer evaluate where those uses should occur. Instead, they would consider only how those uses should occur within the designated areas.
Designating development or resource extraction as the primary purpose for an area would not give carte blanche for the degradation of public lands. The agencies would continue to have the authority, and obligation, to determine how such activities can occur. Other facets of the land management process, such as the obligation to engage with adjacent communities, would also remain intact.
Let’s apply this approach to a power company applying for authorization to build a transmission line within an area for which transmission has been designated as the primary purpose. The agency reviewing the application would not need to decide whether transmission is appropriate for the area, because that is the area’s primary purpose. The permitting process would be predictable and efficient, focused only on any requirements to address impacts. For example, the agency could require electrical poles to be designed to minimize the risk of electrocuting golden eagles, or construction activities could be restricted during mating season for the greater sage-grouse. If the management agency has already established requirements for projects within the corridor, the permitting process could be even speedier.
Because the agencies would retain the authority, and obligation, to evaluate and impose conditions and mitigation measures to address environmental impacts, areas designated for intensive uses would not become environmental sacrifice zones where anything goes.
A Path Forward: Congress and Landscape-Scale Legislation
The best path to primary purpose management runs through Congress. A basic framework could involve legislation directing the BLM and the Forest Service to submit to Congress information and recommendations about which areas of public lands it manages are suitable for which primary purpose. Then Congress could review, amend, and enact legislation to designate areas for uses such as Tribal subsistence and cultural practices, renewable energy, transmission and infrastructure, minerals development, outdoor recreation, wildlife migration, and biodiversity.
This framework could also include direction for the agencies to develop standard terms and conditions for projects within an area’s primary purpose to address impacts to natural and cultural resources and local communities. Done well, this approach would make the permitting process for such projects more efficient and predictable without neglecting other important values.
The political process in Congress is ultimately the most appropriate place to strike a proper balance among these categories of uses. Congress should expect the agencies to provide sound scientific information to inform decisions. But Article IV of the Constitution makes Congress ultimately responsible for stewarding our public lands, and science cannot render the ultimate judgment about what mix of uses will best serve public needs. A mixture of compromise and balance has been a recipe for past Congressional action on public lands. Lopsided legislation that shortchanges an important use category would be unlikely to be enacted.
The process could be incremental and iterative. The BLM and the Forest Service could present Congress with a manageable set of designations on a prescribed schedule. This would resemble the manner in which Congress approves U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects biannually through the Water Resources Development Act, which has a solid record of enactment. Returning to the task of designating primary uses for new areas, in a predictable rhythm, could build Congress’ muscle-memory about how to work collaboratively. Perhaps it’s a lesson that could spread into other aspects of Congress’ work.
Congress could revisit primary use designations after they are made and at a later time. But the rarity of Congress modifying wilderness areas, national parks, and other existing primary purpose designations suggests that these designations would be durable.
Stewardship for the Long Run
Enabling designation of more primary purpose lands could transform how we think about and manage public lands. We could think more broadly about how different uses of public lands should fit together across the landscape to meet our needs. We could convene States, Tribes, local governments, businesses, conservationists, ranchers, miners, and other stakeholders to identify areas most important to them and advance an integrated set of designations to promote collaboration rather than conflict. And we could promote durable, democratic decision making to steward our public lands for current and future generations.
