Threat to public lands just got worse – Las Vegas Sun News

If you care about public lands, it’s time to get your head together.

It is no exaggeration to say that public lands are in the most precarious position in a century. If you hike or climb, hunt or fish, swim or ride, graze or recreate on public lands, the next few years could determine the shape of your outdoor future.

Just months after the state of Utah filed a lawsuit seeking to seize most of the federal land within its borders, the threat to public lands has become even more dire.

It was bad enough when it was just a court challenge, and most experts agreed it had no legal merit. But as the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly not only ideologically conservative but also partisan, legal value matters less and less.

Now the recent election, with Republicans likely to hold all three branches of government, has significantly increased that threat.

It’s likely that the push to divest federal land will no longer simply move forward in the courts, but rather through the House and Senate. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has been named chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Lee has been a longtime supporter of the federal land grab movement in Utah.

“We are headed for the most anti-government Congress in history,” said Michael Carroll of the Wilderness Society. “We can assume that everything advocated for in Utah’s lawsuit will become law.”

And the new Trump administration has made clear that its priority on public lands will be greater resource extraction. This was made clear by the announcement that North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum would be named head of the Interior Department with only one instruction: drill more.

(Don’t count on more jobs. Trump has not followed through on these promises in the past. Strengthening the coal industry was a central promise of his first campaign. Nothing he did changed the steady course of his decline.)

The arguments against federal land ownership are obviously unfounded. Idaho, Utah, and all other Western states agreed that the federal government would continue to own large tracts of land in perpetuity and wrote this agreement into their state constitutions. This was a prerequisite for states to join the Union. Now it’s about keeping these promises.

But when a single party has the power to write, interpret and enforce the laws without significant oversight, which will be the case for at least the next two years, all bets are off.

The basic problem with transferring public lands to the states is the same as it always has been: The states have no hope of being able to afford to manage that land—at least not as a public trust, as the federal government does. So if the land transfer movement is successful, large swathes of public land are most likely to be auctioned off, transferred to private ownership, and lost to the public forever.

We have lived in a world where, as an American, you can go outdoors – at least in the West, where public lands have not been disposed of like the rest of the country.

There is an alternative model: one in which nature is only accessible to the highest bidder. As my colleague Nicole Blanchard reported last year, there is a growing movement that views access to nature as primarily a profit-making commodity.

This is not just a private sector phenomenon. Many states have also experimented with this and auctioned hunting tags.

Would you like a day in a first class hunting unit? Instead of entering your name into a raffle, you can place a bid and get a mule deer tag for the bargain price of $390,000, as a Canadian guide bid for a chance to hunt on Antelope Island, according to a statement to the Salt Lake Tribune.

That was in 2015. Today it’s change. According to Outdoor Life, a Nevada man recently paid $750,000 for a statewide mule deer tag in Arizona.

And there’s no reason why the same can’t apply to access to hiking, mountain biking, hiking or climbing.

What could be coming is a world where nature is increasingly only accessible if you’re rich, and where a lot of money goes to whoever controls that land, so there will be a lot of pigs at the trough. For the rest of us, there are only locked gates and “No Trespassing” signs. Only sustained public pressure can keep this world in check.

Bryan Clark is a columnist for The Idaho Statesman.