Public Lands and the New Geography of Community Prosperity
Americans have debated the best uses of our public lands for more than two centuries. Should they be managed primarily for resource production and settlement, or conserved for their environmental, cultural, recreational, and civic value? Who decides, and how is that value measured? These questions have never had permanent answers. Each generation before us has had to find its own.
In recent months, the federal government has reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by 90%, repealed the congressional mandate for balanced management of public lands, narrowed protections under the Endangered Species Act of imperiled species and their habitat, and proposed a rescission of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, putting 45 million acres of public forest lands at risk. These actions have raised, once again, the same fundamental question: what are America's public lands for, and what public value should they create?
Public Lands and Manifest Destiny
America's “manifest destiny” – its westward expansion – accelerated in the 1800s, spurred by the federal government's acquisition of nearly 2 billion acres of public domain land stretching from the original colonies to the Pacific. The Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and the Alaska Purchase were the largest of these acquisitions, but far from the only ones.
Congress viewed these lands as instruments of nation building. In 1812 it created the General Land Office (GLO), later the Bureau of Land Management, to survey and oversee the disposition of the public domain and encourage its settlement and productive use. Over the following century and a half, the GLO transferred two-thirds of that 2-billion-acre estate through grants to new states, railroads, mining and logging companies, and homesteading citizens by the millions.
The remaining lands were distributed differently: to federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Department of Defense, and to Native American Tribes, most held in trust by the Department of the Interior. Disposition, not stewardship, was the organizing idea of the era.
The Rise of Public Lands for Public Value
The first crack in that idea appeared in 1872, when Congress set aside Yellowstone as the nation's first national park. It was an acknowledgment that some landscapes held value beyond balance sheets. Theodore Roosevelt later extended that vision, arguing that public lands shaped not just the economy but the character of the citizens who visited them.
By the mid-twentieth century, the era of large-scale disposal of the public domain was largely over, and the central question shifted from how to dispose of public lands to how to manage them. Population growth, a maturing science of ecology, and rising public concern over pollution, wildlife loss, and vanishing open space gave Americans a new vocabulary for that value with words like habitat, watershed, wilderness, heritage, recreation, and renewal. None of it reducible to board feet or tons of ore.
Congress answered with one of the most productive legislative periods in the nation's history: the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act (1973), and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and National Forest Management Act (both 1976). These laws did not abandon productive use, they placed it within a broader framework of conservation, environmental review, multiple use, and long-term stewardship.
This was more than a policy shift. It broadened what Americans understood their shared lands were for, an understanding we are challenged to reach for again today.
Public Lands and a New Geography of Prosperity
A new chapter in the story of America's public lands has begun. A chapter being written not only in Washington but by the places, especially in the West, closest to the land itself.
Cities and states have historically competed for growth using business incentives, infrastructure and industrial parks. Today they're competing increasingly on something incentives can't buy: quality of life. Alongside schools, housing and culture, that means trails and open space in and near our communities, water clean enough to fish or swim in, and views of public land that no developer can touch.
Communities are learning what residents and businesses have already figured out: many people don't just move for jobs anymore. Jobs still attract people, but increasingly people are drawn to the qualities of a place worth living in. Businesses, too, increasingly recognize that quality of life matters in attracting and retaining talent.
This is the new geography of prosperity. National forests, national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, even state and city parks and open space, are no longer backdrops to the economy. They are critical elements of what makes community prosperity possible.
Public lands shape a community's identity. They protect the water people drink and the biodiversity that sustains it. They support the physical and mental health of the people who live near them. They safeguard cultural heritage for future generations. And they are, increasingly, the reason a family puts down roots, a business relocates, or a young person decides to stay rather than leave. These are assets that, once diminished, cannot be rebuilt on any timeline that matters.
The federal government is taking a different approach today, making sweeping revisions to the rules governing the conservation and management of public lands. Some of these changes moved forward despite overwhelming opposition voiced through the government's own public comment processes and formal objections from members of Congress representing impacted states. Tribal Nations, who under federal law expect to be consulted on decisions affecting their homelands, were bypassed altogether.
Multiple use has always been, and should remain, essential to the value of public lands. But multiple use should not become a justification for returning to an older hierarchy of values—one that places resource extraction above the broader public benefits these lands provide.
America has broadened its understanding of the value of public lands before. We can do so again by recognizing these landscapes not simply as places we conserve, but as integral to the quality of life in healthy, distinctive and prosperous communities. Their value is defined not only by what we extract from them, but by what they make possible for the people who live and work near them, and for all who visit seeking inspiration, understanding and renewal.
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