Nature and outdoors groups in the US are expressing concern and fear as the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee budget reconciliation bill text, released June 11, and updated June 14, includes a range of measures aimed at privatising public lands and advancing energy dominance at the expense of public lands and resources.
The bill forces the arbitrary sale of at least 2m acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands in 11 Western states over the next five years, and it gives the secretaries of the interior and agriculture broad discretion to choose which places should be sold off.
More than 255m acres of public lands are eligible for sale in the bill, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas and inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and migration corridors.
The bill directs what is likely the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history. The Wilderness Society said this will cut taxes for the richest people in the country.
“It trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected,” the organization said.
The June 14 updated version of the bill makes land with grazing permits eligible for sale. Although lands with undefined “valid existing rights” are still excluded, that term is now best understood to encompass property interests like oil and gas leases, rights-of-way or perfected mining claims.
The bill’s process for selling off lands runs at breakneck speed, demanding the nomination of tracts within 30 days, then every 60 days until the arbitrary multi-million-acre goal is met, all without hearings, debate or public input, the Wilderness Society said.
The group added that the bill sets up relatively under-resourced state and local governments to lose open bidding wars to commercial interests. It also fails to give sovereign Tribal Nations the right of first refusal to bid on lands, even for areas that are a part of their traditional homelands or contain sacred sites.
National monument lands may also be at risk from this proposal. In a Department of Justice opinion released last week, the Trump Administration claimed the unprecedented legal authority to revoke national monument protections. If they were to attempt to follow through on this, the Wilderness Society noted, another 13.5m acres of “our most cherished public lands could be threatened with sell-off.”
According to statistics provided by the Wilderness Society, Alaska stands to lose the most land to development, with a total of 79.5m acres potentially lost.
