A Bipartisan Public Lands Bill, For the People By the People

The “old-school green deal” was years in the making, and helps pave the way for new-school green new deal success.

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Government support for public anything is increasingly rare, and public lands in particular have appeared in the cross hairs of the Trump Administration. Ryan Zinke, the Trump Administration’s disgraced former Secretary of Interior, worked to shrink national parks and monuments by millions of acres and expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands, including Alaska’s iconic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So it feels a bit shocking that on Tuesday the Senate pulled together, 92-8, to pass the Natural Resources Management Act. The bill “address[es] the management and preservation of some of our nation’s most precious natural areas,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose leadership (or lack thereof) during the recent government shutdown placed enormous burdens on public lands.

All eight nay votes were from Republicans: Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Inhofe and James Lankford of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Sasse of Nebraska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The measure, which now heads to the Democrat-led House of Representatives, adds 1.3 million acres to wilderness in the West—a designation that creates a firewall against private enterprises like mining and logging, and prohibits roads and motors, both of which are often a source for land and water degradation. The newly protected wilderness includes public lands and hundreds of miles of rivers in California, New Mexico, Oregon,, and Utah. The bill also permanently protects more than 370,000 acres of land from mining around Yellowstone and North Cascades National Park in Washington.

The measure would add 1.3 million acres to wilderness in the West—creating a firewall against private enterprises like mining and logging.

During the shutdown, images of the trashing of Joshua Tree National Park shocked the nation. The new bill adds acreage to Joshua Tree as well as to Death Valley and Mojave National Preserve.

“I was especially pleased to see that sixty Senators voted to table Utah’s amendment to the bill that would have allowed Utah to opt out of the Antiquities Act,” observed Tom Martin of the nonprofit group River Runners for Wilderness in an email. “This is good news all around.”

The Antiquities Act, a key strategy for public lands defenders, has been targeted in the past by conservative lawmakers. It was used, for example, by President Barack Obama to declare or expand more than thirty national monuments, a move some viewed as federal and executive overreach.

“Key pieces in this bill are wilderness and wild and scenic components,” Nicole Cordan of the Pew Charitable Trusts told the Daily Yonder in January, when the public lands bill stalled as a result of the government shutdown. “In Utah [it] includes a 2,500-acre Jurassic National Monument, an area with one of the largest concentrations of dinosaur bones in the world.”

Public lands advocates are also heartened that the act establishes permanent authorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The fund, created in 1964, uses fees and royalties paid by oil and gas companies drilling in federal waters to pay for trail building, forest management, boat launches, baseball diamonds, and other projects that help people use public lands.

Traditionally, half of the program’s funding is sent directly to states and local governments to expand recreation opportunities. Although resoundingly popular, the fund has previously only received temporary funding, repeatedly facing impending shutdown between budget approvals.

Permanent support of the fund, as part of the first major public lands bill to pass in a decade, may be a sign that lawmakers are finally catching on to the will of the people. Public opinion polling has long indicated solid support for outdoor recreation, wilderness, the creation of new protected public lands, and the need to invest in proper management of public space.

The passage of the nearly 700-page bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat from Washington, was the fruit of years of work involving a diverse cadre of public lands defenders and political allies. Key allies included Native American tribes, hunters, fishers, and other outdoor sports fans, and the tourism industry. Bowman and hunters advocated for more access to hunt. Anglers pushed for river protections. Business owners outside Yellowstone worked for years to eliminate the prospect of gold mining near the park, threatening the tourism economy.

The move is helping address a backlog of deferred maintenance in our parks totalling nearly $12 billion, and contains numbers of “exchanges.” Utah’s Emery County, for example, blessed the addition of 661,000 acres of new wilderness as a compromise for gaining more than 75,000 acres of land that it can develop elsewhere.

The Natural Resources Management Act also makes clear the link between protecting public lands and honoring our national heritage. It creates four new historical monuments, including the Mississippi home of civil rights activists Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams and the Mill Springs Battlefield in Kentucky, home to the decisive first Union victory in the Civil War. bill also creates 241,786 acres of wilderness in southern New Mexico in an area containing numerous Native American and Hispanic archaeological and cultural heritage sites.

Other significant public land protections include permanently withdrawing from industrial-scale copper mining 99,653 acres in Oregon to protect spawning areas for wild steelhead and salmon and 340,000 acres of the Methow river watershed in Washington, among other things, spotted owl habitat.

The move to protect public lands is also an element in the Green New Deal, sponsored by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. The ambitious plan, aiming to respond to climate change as well as economic inequity, is notoriously light on specifics, but emphasizes the role of public lands and waters in reaching goals, calling for “restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage,” including land preservation and planting new forests.

The Green New Deal recognizes that “public lands and waters are a cornerstone of any comprehensive strategy for solving the climate crisis,” Kate Kelly, public lands director at the Center for American Progress told Huffington Post. “We should protect the land and waters that will help protect us from the impacts of climate change.”

Both the House and the President are reportedly prepared to support a final passage of the bill into law. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M Grijalva described the bill to The Washington Post as “an old-school green deal,” saying he and the top Republican on his panel, Rob Bishop, Representative of Utah, “are happy to work together to get this across the finish line.” The House will likely take up the measure after their February recess.

If it is finally signed into law, millions of Americans who take pride and pleasure in their shared public lands, waters, and monuments, can breathe a sigh of relief.