Tony Webster
Portage trail, Bower Trout Lake in Northern Minnesota.
It was a warm, still August evening in 2007 when dozens of families camping on Basswood Lake in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area area heard motors and loud bangs. For hours into the night, two boats carrying men firing semi-automatic weapons and letting off fireworks motored up and down the lake, hurling abuse and expletives at campers. The swearing, gun-toting men landed at one camp and told the campers they were going to kill and rape them. They later vandalized a water gauging station and stole a canoe and other equipment.
Among other things, the men yelled at campers to “get off our land.” Subsequent reporting described the incident as fueled by lingering resentment among residents of Ely, Minnesota, over the creation of the public wilderness in the late 1970s. One of the ringleaders, Barney Lakner, was sentenced to three years in prison. He was again detained in 2014, after ramming a conservation officer’s snowmobile while illegally joyriding in the Boundary Waters, again flaunting the rules against motorized vehicles.
Lakner is not alone in harboring a festering rage over public lands. As the 2016 armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge makes crystal clear, where there’s wilderness, there’s a fight.
In his new book, In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer (Temple University Press), Steven Davis, political science professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, takes on the “privatizers.” His book is an even-handed and thorough look at public lands in the United States. Although public support for wilderness, national parks, and other public lands is high, Davis is rightly concerned that these open spaces—from national parks like Yosemite to county-owned lands—face serious threats.
The sentiments that led to the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use Movement are not in the past, Davis tells us. In his first chapter, “Public Land and its Discontents,” Davis details how, since the gains of the Tea Party in 2010, those against public lands have the support of a large number of office-holders in state and federal legislatures. “What was previously seen as the intemperate agitation of fringe activists is now the standard stuff of political platforms, floor debates, and campaign speeches,” he writes.
The Republican Party’s 2012 platform, for example, stated, “Congress should reconsider whether . . . federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.”
And since 2010, conservative lawmakers have introduced proposals to open all national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges to roads and motors; to require the government to transfer, without sale, thirty million acres of their holdings; to sell all lands in the Rocky Mountains states to the highest bidder; to shield timber sales from any kind of public or environmental review; and to prevent the creation of any new wildlife refuges. Many of these initiatives are based on template legislation created by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
With Donald Trump in office, lawmakers have doubled down on efforts to open public lands to extractive industries and corporate development. The Department of the Interior under the direction of Ryan Zinke has opened two million acres of land in two national monuments in Utah and overseen the largest lease sale ever (10.3 million acres) of Alaskan federal lands for oil and gas extraction.
NPS
Field trip! Class visit to Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Utah.
State lands are even more vulnerable. Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney recently applauded Trump’s decision to shrink Utah’s national monuments and has argued for more state control over federal public lands, saying, “I think the state would do a better job because we care so deeply.”
In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker has sold dozens of parcels of state-owned lands, sometimes to political supporters, and without real public process. Davis also describes an insidious “soft privatization” of state-owned public lands, in which state budget crises are used to shift priorities toward revenue-generating ventures like resorts, golf courses, and convention centers. “Some states, such as Wisconsin under Governor Scott Walker, have entirely zeroed out their state park budget lines, forcing them to rely on revenue alone,” he writes.
Davis describes an insidious “soft privatization” of state-owned public lands, in which state budget crises are used to shift priorities toward revenue-generating ventures like resorts, golf courses, and convention centers.
The book provides a brief history of public lands in the United States, and describes the various government agencies charged with their administration and protection. Davis then systematically defangs the arguments of privatizers. He resists rhetorical soapboxing, and does the hard work of laying out arguments of the opposition, examining them in light of a wealth of ecological, historical, and economic data.
Davis describes arguments from privatizers who see science-based environmental management as a “moral crusade” and “utopian,” and who would argue that even the Grand Canyon needn’t have special status because “any place so special would be better protected by selling access, which, because of the scarcity of places like it will be worth a lot.” He exposes their profound distaste for political process, and their misplaced faith in market-based economics.
“Without a better, healthier environment,” he writes, “what they have left to offer the American public is pretty thin gruel: the bitter medicine of “market discipline,” a lot of “No Trespassing” signs, and $300 tickets for Disney’s “Yellowstone Experience.”
Yet Davis does not glorify public lands management. “It would be a grave error if . . . the complicated and decidedly mixed record of public management was sugar-coated and its failures, fiascos, and disastrously bad decisions were overlooked,” he writes. A list of failures includes overgrazing, clear-cutting, predator “control” programs, and massive water projects.
Davis acknowledges that public land management agencies have struggled to balance professionalism and “scientific management” with openness to diverse clientele, local knowledge, and citizen participation. This criticism is found on the left as well as the right. As David Harvey has notably written, “control over the resources of others, in the name of planetary health, and sustainability of preventing environmental degradation, is never too far from the surface of many western proposals for global environmental management.”
Looking at customer satisfaction surveys, scientific evaluations of agency management, and the accountability of public land agencies, however, Davis puts forth a convincing argument that “because they are public and thus ultimately accountable entities, these same agencies were slowly, and not without great difficulty, pulled in the direction of openness and responsiveness.”
In other words, public land agencies do a pretty good job.
When public lands and wilderness advocates first appealed to state and federal governments to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe area in 1909, much of the once-massive upper-Midwest forests lay in shambles. Davis quotes William Shands’s book on the history of Wisconsin’s northern woodland in the late 1920s:
“The whole world of northern Wisconsin was on fire in those years. You could choose a high point in any one of today’s ranger districts and see miles of cut-over, burned-over land. Tree stubble and smoldering slash littered the landscape.”
Wilderness advocates around the turn of the century managed to rescue a portion of boundary waters region from further logging. Defenders of the boundary waters organized again during the 1960s and 1970s, after an unregulated tourist industry had inundated the area with retreats, seaplanes, and motorboats. The area, although it is designated as a federal wilderness and is the most visited park in the country, continues to be threatened by proposals to open new mining operations.
The clean lakes and lush wooded islands that Barney Lakner screamed about as “his land,” in other words, have been repeatedly rescued from ecological ruin resulting from unmitigated private and corporate extraction. Although not perfectly managed, the Boundary Waters have thrived in the context of science-driven decision-making and public participation.
This is, as Davis acknowledges, a messy, political process. It is also a progressive strategy: rational, discursive, and science-based. In a world full of tempestuous and ahistorical opinionating, this is a welcome relief.
Davis argues that the maintenance of public lands is integral to a well-functioning democracy. They are one way that citizens of the United States can work together to uphold “collective values” and celebrate the potential of collaborative, future-looking stewardship.
In making this connection, Davis’s book offers an important and timely contribution toward both protecting precious natural and cultural heritage as well as a progressive political process itself.