Selling Off Our Public Lands Is a Bad Idea

Opinion|It Turns Out Republicans in Congress Do Have a Red Line

For more than 100 days, congressional Republicans tolerated many extreme actions by the Trump administration and its supporters. Last week, however, one member of the House decided to take a stand.

The issue was a House amendment to the Republican budget package that would allow the sale or transfer of what conservation advocates say could be about 500,000 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah. The unlikely rebel was Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as secretary of the interior during President Trump’s first term and outraged environmentalists with his support for the oil and gas industry. “It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever,” Mr. Zinke told The Associated Press. His unequivocal opposition to the amendment, echoed by some of his Republican colleagues in several Western states, now threatens the future of what Mr. Trump has called his “big, beautiful” budget bill.

The amendment, which could constitute the largest single sale of the United States’ public lands in modern history, reflects the priorities of Doug Burgum, the current interior secretary. In mid-March, he made an awkward appearance with Scott Turner, the housing and urban development secretary, in a press event streamed on YouTube. “Our federal lands are an incredible asset on America’s balance sheet,” Mr. Burgum said, which could be used “to solve our nation’s affordable housing crisis.”

Selling off public lands would assuredly not do this, since all but a tiny fraction are far from cities and lack basic infrastructure. Some of the parcels targeted by the amendment are adjacent to Zion National Park in Utah and are far more likely to be developed for vacation homes. More fundamentally, Mr. Burgum’s view of the public lands as assets to be exploited is wildly shortsighted and simplistic. It threatens more than a century of progress in one of this country’s most vital and popular shared experiments.

America’s public lands — the approximately 600 million acres overseen by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service — are owned by the American people. Situated mostly in the western part of the country, they are what remains of the more than 1.5 billion acres of North America that the U.S. government acquired on paper from states and foreign governments and violently took from Indigenous inhabitants.

In the late 1800s, when public lands were subject to unbridled logging, grazing and mining, many Americans started to recognize that they had enduring value. Pressed by local and national conservation advocates, the federal government began to impose limits designed to protect public lands for future generations. Eventually it created our national parks, forests, monuments, wildlife refuges and recreation areas — places of great beauty, biological diversity and historical significance.