G R E AT S M O K Y M O U N TA I N S N AT I O N A L PA R K . PHOTO COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES
Everything Is for Sale The Privatization of Your Public Lands BY WILL HARL AN
I LOVE MAPS. I CAN SPEND HOURS STARING at a topo and studying its contours. Maps provide perspective: they show how everything fits together and help me find my place within the big picture. I used to think that all the green-shaded areas of maps were protected. The green parts of a map are usually public lands—national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges—and I assumed that they were all basically managed the same. I was completely wrong. Most public lands—especially national forests—aren’t really protected at all: industrial logging, commercial clearcutting, mining, oil and gas drilling, private cattle grazing, and pipeline construction all occur on our public lands. The United States is home to 640 million acres of federally owned public lands—around 27 percent of the country. No country on Earth has this much property that belongs to the people. You are a co-owner of these public lands, and your taxes pay for them to be managed. Public lands are intended to be managed by the government for the benefit of everyone.
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BLUE RIDGE OUTDOORS
But that’s not how it actually works. Nearly three-quarters of public lands today prioritize private extraction over protection of natural resources. Most of our public lands are being intensively and industrially plundered by private entities.
Your Property Managers Of course, all U.S. lands are stolen lands. Indigenous communities inhabited these lands for millenia. Only in the last few hundred years did the landscape get pillaged and parceled. Today, U.S. public lands are primarily managed by four federal agencies: the National Park Service (parks), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (national wildlife refuges), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM land), and U.S. Forest Service (national forests). 1. The National Park Service aligns most closely with the majority of Americans on how public lands should be managed. The National Park Service protects natural resources and
provides sustainable recreation. No logging or mining is allowed in national parks. Most Americans assume that all public lands operate like national parks. 2. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a close second. National Wildlife Refuges are protected from most extractive uses like logging, mining, and drilling. 3. The U.S. Forest Service has five multipleuse areas of focus: water, wildlife, recreation, range, and timber harvest. The Forest Service chooses to prioritize timber harvest over all other priorities. Most of the Forest Service’s budget and personnel are focused on logging. Unlike the other three agencies, the Forest Service is managed by the Department of Agriculture rather than the Department of Interior. As a result, it tends to view forests as agricultural commodities to be harvested rather than ecosystems to be protected. 4. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), like the Forest Service, prioritizes extraction over