BY FELICITY BARRINGER
For many Americans, public lands have one overriding synonym: parks. And parks have had a broad cultural embrace, for 150 years or more, as places where the natural world forms a bond with the individual. As these bonds proliferate, the citizenry feels a special kinship to the landscape. When it comes to caring for parks, the government’s job is akin to a museum curator’s: assembling and caring for natural works of art.
But this view is alien to another group of people that radiates out around the Four Corners area: out west to Nevada, north to Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and even Alaska. Public lands are part of the neighborhood here, and the wellspring of local livelihoods and cultures. Here, families ranch or cut timber. Here, the heavy machinery of big industry pulls oil, gas, and minerals from underneath the land. Here, the federal government is an absentee landlord.
The divergence in these two perspectives began at least a century ago, and today the distance between them has become a chasm. Increasingly over recent decades, rules for the use of public lands have changed as the calls for preserving both beauty and natural habitat have grown louder. When the federal government, seeking the chimera of sustainability, curtails historic uses, the cultures built around those uses rise up against their absentee landlord.
There are many places this can happen. “I think people in the East are stunned by the sheer volume and the percentage of the West [that] is in Western public lands,” Hayes said. In states like Ohio, New York, Connecticut, Iowa, and Texas, less than 2 percent of the land is federally owned. In Nevada, the figure is almost 85 percent. In Utah, 64 percent. In Arizona, nearly 39 percent. No legislatures in New England have pushed for a state takeover of public lands, as Utah’s has. In Maryland, there has been no armed standoff over grazing cattle on land without paying for it. And there has been no occupation of a wildlife refuge in Illinois.
Why the difference? The answer has its roots in the country’s earliest history. Then, the biggest asset in the American treasury was land. The government’s job was to see vast lands settled by Europeans and put in private hands to help the country and its economy grow as Native Americans were displaced. Officials determined that 640 acres, one square mile‒called a section‒could support a family farm, the Jeffersonian ideal. But at two dollars an acre, that was an investment out of many settlers’ reach. In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act: The government could give the land to settlers who had worked it for some years and made improvements. “The intent was to democratize land ownership,” said Greg Ablavsky, an assistant law professor at Stanford University.
A section of land was sufficient for supporting a farming family in the East. West of the 100th meridian, where rain was a sometimes thing, it was not. The country had developed “a system set up for relatively wet areas,” Ablavsky said. “It was much more poorly suited for dry areas. The section was inadequate to sustain a farm.” There were fewer takers for Western land; the federal government kept what nobody wanted to buy.
But many people still wanted to use it. Bureaucracies developed to manage these prospectors, cattlemen, and sheepherders. And some tracts of land‒a fraction of the expanse where Native Americans once farmed and hunted‒became reservations for the original Americans, paltry remnants of the land they once commanded, now controlled by others. But whether the government is seen as a curator or a landlord, it manages all 640 million acres for everyone.
When public land was misused, the federal government intervened. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 was passed after ranchers realized they were engaged in a classic tragedy of the commons: Everybody grazed livestock hard and the land began to die. After 1934, ranchers had somewhat less control, but still had the major say in who used the land and how. Overall, from the Civil War through the New Deal and beyond, land-use policies favored the economic needs of the users.
For them, the architecture of Yosemite with, its towering redwoods, was heart-stopping art. In 1862, Congress passed a bill to set this land aside. Two years later, President Lincoln signed the measure, putting Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove out of reach of commercial exploitation; it became a California park. In 1872, land in Montana and Wyoming was set aside; Yellowstone became the first national park.
But some, like Pennsylvania-bred forester, Gifford Pinchot, felt land could be sustained and useful. When San Francisco, needing water for a growing population, sought to dam the Tuolumne River, flooding Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, Pinchot supported the idea. In 1913, Congress agreed. San Francisco still gets its water from that dam; some environmentalists are still fighting to tear it down. The Forest Service, first headed by Pinchot in 1905, long lived by that dual ethic. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), cobbled together from the land sales and grazing agencies in 1946, considers its mandate “multiple use.”
The National Park Service was established 100 years ago with a different purpose, reflecting the ethic of the legendary early environmentalist John Muir. The law creating the Park Service called on it to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to leave the lands “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That ethic still animates those who feel nature sustains the human soul, and those who want to protect the beasts and plants that are the essence of the natural world. In the 1960s and 1970s, this ethic infused the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
A similar spirit led to rules that opened or shut roads, kept old-growth forests from timber harvesting, required power plants to curtail their production if their pollution clouded the views in national parks, and took the health of salmon runs into account when licensing dams. Such rules gradually changed public lands policy. Nowadays, the government often acts as a curator—think of how President Bill Clinton turned 1.8 million acres of southeastern Utah into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. But even though land use, particularly widespread grazing, in the monument is little changed from 25 years ago, some locals can find such designations meddlesome and unnecessary at best, and a hostile attack at worst.
In a state like Utah, said Robert H. Nelson, a former high-ranking Interior Department policy analyst, “they feel that national land management is heavily influenced by an environmental movement that doesn’t have the economic values of the West at heart.” Nelson, now at the University of Maryland, added that the federal court system has become another major force “strongly in favor of environmental values.” Some people in the West, he said, “feel their ability to control the use of their lands is being taken away.”
That was the case in the Pacific Northwest in 1992 when two federal court decisions, one involving the Forest Service and one the BLM, temporarily put 24 million acres with old-growth forest off-limits to harvesting, to help preserve the northern spotted owl. In the end, a federal plan accepted by the courts put 80 percent of old-growth forests off-limits.
Utah has been more aggressive than any other state in challenging federal control—indeed, the state is girding for a legal challenge to federal ownership. By contrast, Colorado just declared a “Public Lands Day,” celebrating the ways public lands enrich communities that serve hikers, campers, skiers, and kayakers reveling in nature.
Even as recreation plays a bigger and bigger role in the economy of public lands, resistance to controls on local activities and recreation choices, like all-terrain vehicles, becomes virulent. Restrictions “are challenges to the manhood of the West,” said J. Austin Burke, a former policy specialist at the Interior Department.
That culture, he added, must evolve faster to accommodate a changing climate. These changes can both destroy nature’s art—California red fir trees and lodgepole pines are dying by the score in Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks—and its economics—fighting wildfires consumes an ever-increasing share of the Forest Service's budget.
The arc of the current evolution will only be clear years from now. As President Obama told podcast host Marc Maron in 2015, “The trajectory of progress always happens in fits and starts. And you’ve got big legacy systems that you have to wrestle with. And you have to balance what you want and where you’re going with what is and what has been.”
Felicity Barringer spent more than a decade covering environmental issues for The New York Times before retiring in 2014.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
"1860s photographs of California’s Yosemite Valley crystallized the attitudes of Americans, many far away in the East, about the value of leaving land alone."
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