Picture this: America’s forests, rivers and deserts—beloved public lands—are managed for the future, for all of us. Managed for delivering clean air, clean water, recreation, timber, energy security, wildlife habitat and, above all, healthy lands. Picture our national parks providing visitors a deep sense of well-being, enabling them to celebrate the wonder of nature and learn the story of our country. Picture 50 years from now, your grandkids or great-grandkids experiencing the same freedom to camp, hike, hunt and fish on wild lands that you have today.
Why isn’t delivering what the vast majority of American people want from their public lands easy? Why is our shared common ground so often a political battleground when Americans understand their value and support their protection? And how can it be that our country’s elected leaders today refer to our public lands as the nation’s balance sheet—assets whose value lies in the stripping, in the price they would fetch at auction?
The answers are as complicated as our history, but much is explained by knowing most of the laws governing our public lands were written 50 to 150 years ago, when public sentiment was very different and science-based management was in its infancy.
Nonetheless, the laws and policies that guide decision-making on our public lands and waters are not written in stone. I’d wager that if asked to create the system that oversees our public lands, no person reading this would choose to build exactly what we have today.
One entity that realizes the promise of public lands under one roof doesn’t exist. Currently, the U.S. Department of the Interior, created in the 1850s, contains the agencies that manage America’s national parks, national wildlife refuges and public lands. It is also responsible for upholding the government’s trust responsibilities to Tribal nations. Yet national forests are the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture, and national marine sanctuaries and sea life are the responsibility of the Department of Commerce. The Department of Energy doesn’t issue permits for energy development on public lands; the Bureau of Land Management at Interior does that, unless it’s on land managed by the Forest Service, then they do it.
This is a peculiar way to organize and run a government.
The laws and policies that guide decision-making on our public lands and waters are not written in stone.
Early in my career, I witnessed the kind of frustration that can result from the clunkiness of our policies and institutions. At the confluence of two rivers, an aging dam was failing and needed to be removed. Three federal departments each held a share of responsibility for the site, but each hid behind the other. The public didn’t care whose job it was—they just wanted the dam taken out.
Developers hold the same frustrations: bureaucratic barriers across different departments and agencies can contribute to a wide range of bad outcomes, from slow approvals of energy, timber, and minerals projects to patchwork management of wildlife habitat and inefficient management of scarce water supplies.
I led the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the country’s largest land management agency, for four years. I saw pragmatic, committed civil servants consistently come up against major barriers to fulfilling the public’s expectations for how their lands and waters should be managed.
I often heard frustrated staff say they spent more time behind a computer’s screen than out on the land, learning from it.
Just look at any map, with all the various colors representing all the various land managers: green for Forest Service, yellow for BLM, purple for parks, and so on. The primary threats to the health of our public lands and waters—from the fragmentation of wildlife habitat to the spread of invasive weeds—are rarely confined to one of those colored parcels. These problems typically cut across boundaries and demand landscape-scale, cross-jurisdictional approaches. Elk, migrating birds, and everyday Americans do not care whether lands are managed by BLM, the Fish and Wildlife Service, or the Forest Service. They just need those lands and waters to function ecologically. Despite long-running efforts to improve coordination, federal agencies remain—in law, culture, and practice—deeply siloed.
That slow-moving bureaucracy is no match for climate change, which is causing rapid shifts in wildfire risk, available water, and fish and wildlife movements. To respond to these fast-changing realities, federal agencies need to be able to make decisions faster and to update outdated strategies more easily. Yet the procedural requirements they must follow were meant to be methodic, not nimble.
Environmental analysis is often guided by the lawsuits that agencies expect to come. The goal of analysis becomes how best to win in court, not how best to serve people and the resource. This wastes time and money and promotes cynicism. I often heard frustrated staff say they spent more time behind a computer’s screen than out on the land, learning from it.
Meanwhile, half a billion people visit public lands each year, and demand for outdoor recreation is beginning to outpace supply.
Agencies—especially the Forest Service and the BLM—are not adequately funded or staffed to offer the world class recreation experiences they should be offering. When I ran the BLM, its recreation budget across the entire 245 million acres it manages—10% of the country—was smaller than the state of Idaho’s recreation budget. It’s gotten worse since, not better.
We need more parks, conservation areas and trails to relieve long lines and conflicting uses at the most popular sites, and we need to solve the unfortunate reality that it is far too difficult for far too many people to affordably and safely get outdoors near where they live.
It’s hard to be nimble when the laws that govern your work are almost 100 years old. The Taylor Grazing Act was written in 1934 to get a handle on rogue overgrazing during the Dust Bowl. It’s now perceived by some as granting the right to graze on public lands, rather than a privilege. In this century, as drought again ravages the landscape and well over half of our public lands do not meet land health standards, how is it that billionaires buying up ranches in the West expect the automatic right to graze adjacent public lands? Instead, why shouldn’t the transfer of the ranch give land managers a moment to pause, assess the health of the public lands in question, and determine if grazing remains the appropriate use and, if so, at what level? While this question makes sense, it amounts to heresy.
But picture this: the country and our government choosing to give all of the users of our public lands the attention and future they deserve.
That could be possible precisely because of the moment we’re in. It is abundantly clear that from severe budget cuts and mass firings of forest and park rangers to proposals to sell those lands to the highest bidder, our public lands and waters are in serious trouble.
If there is a silver lining, it is this: we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step back, rethink, and reimagine how best to manage our public lands and waters for this century and its unique challenges.
We are witnessing an unmistakable dismantling of the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and similar agencies. These are the people and agencies who keep our parks open, protect wildlife and provide the resources we need: from minerals and timber to clean water and clean energy. They are the people who work to ensure future generations can experience our public lands like we do. Never have they faced this level of upheaval.
A forester recently compared what’s happening to our land management agencies to a megafire—a disturbance so big, so fast and so hot that it incinerates everything in its path.
It’s an apt metaphor. As the flames burn, just as wildland firefighters are trained to do, all of us who depend on and care about our public lands and waters must do everything we can to steer the flames away from the things we cherish most—preventing the sale of public lands, keeping prized hunting, fishing and recreation areas open, and ensuring our country’s proud conservation ethic endures. Even with that triage, we’ll lose so much. Protections for natural and cultural resources—and the history being told in national parks—are being erased. Millions of acres will be leased to oil and gas corporations. Hundreds of years of experience are being swept away as staff leave or are pushed out. The public’s voice is being silenced, no longer sought in decisions affecting their public lands and waters.
An honest telling notes that many of the problems facing us took root long ago. Similar to what has happened in our forests, the enabling conditions for this megafire have been building for decades. Years of declining budgets and staffing, of fire suppression, of our lawmakers playing cynical politics by ignoring plummeting wildlife numbers and climate science, and years of increasing tourism alongside decreasing budgets have pushed our lands, waters and the agencies who manage them to a tipping point. This administration has simply doused it all in gasoline and lit the match.
When the smoke clears, much of the architecture underpinning the management of our public lands and waters will be in ruin. And therein lies the opportunity.
If there is a silver lining, it is this: we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step back, rethink, and reimagine how best to manage our public lands and waters for this century and its unique challenges. We need to prepare to rebuild after the firestorm passes.
Even amid our country’s deep divisions, charting the future of our public lands, our literal and figurative common ground, has the power to bring people together from across political divides, geographies and backgrounds.
We live in a time when it is easier than ever to tear ideas (and people) down, and harder than ever to build them up. This underscores why we need to create the space for the constructive dialogue and debate that is the hallmark of a healthy democracy.
It will not be easy. As the head of one of our country’s largest conservation organizations, The Wilderness Society, I know that reimagining and rebuilding will require us to approach our work differently. We must be willing to challenge old paradigms, reexamine long-held positions, explore new ideas, create new partnerships and take the risks needed to build something new.
It takes really good science, sweat and humility to try to stabilize soils, reseed and replant after a megafire. It will take all of us—working in good faith and in common purpose—to create a healthier and brighter future for the parks, forests, waters, and public lands we share.
We should pursue a vision that delivers more, not less, from our shared lands and waters: more parks, protected places and outdoor opportunities; more clean water and clean air; more clean energy and responsibly-extracted minerals; more forests and rivers that are restored to health; more collaboration with Tribal Nations; more abundant wildlife; and a more equitable distribution of nature’s benefits.
Four times in our history, Congress has convened a bipartisan group of leaders and experts, called a Public Land Law Review Commission, to forge a new paradigm for managing public lands.
The most recent commission, launched in 1964, conducted seven years of hearings, fact-finding, and investigation before publishing “One Third of Our Nation’s Lands,” a report that informed the 1976 Federal Land Policy Management Act, which still guides how the BLM manages 245 million acres of public land.
Sixty years later, we need that kind of big picture rethinking and reimagining for all our public lands and waters. Congress is not capable of this now, but the public is. And as the adage goes, if the people will lead, leaders will follow.
We live in a time when it is easier than ever to tear ideas (and people) down, and harder than ever to build them up. This underscores why we need to create the space for fresh thinking and set an expectation that encourages people to take a risk, float an idea and engage in the kind of constructive dialogue and debate that is the hallmark of a healthy democracy.
Strength in our democracy comes from wide-ranging perspectives and open debate. That is precisely what our public lands and waters and wildlife need now.
That dam that touched the jurisdiction of so many federal agencies eventually came down (because the people demanded it), and it provided me with an important lesson. A couple years after the removal, a botanist found a plant that no one had expected. It had come from a seed that had waited a century, buried and anaerobic under 23 feet of toxic sediment. When it finally got some oxygen and sunlight, it grew.
Nature, it turns out, is bigger than us. When figuring out how best to manage in and for it, humility matters, too. We desperately need that in the years ahead.
Strength in our democracy comes from wide-ranging perspectives and open debate. That is precisely what our public lands and waters and wildlife need now: a wide table where people can build solutions that are durable, practical and rooted in the public interest.
We must be bold, think differently and do the hard, necessary work to create the future we want. Who’s in?
