‘Get Out There and See’: As America’s Public Lands Come Under Threat, Here’s Why They’re Worth Saving

Earlier this summer, Republicans in Congress proposed a massive selloff of public lands across the United States, arguing that these lands would be better off in private hands to be used for housing or other economically driven uses like mining or drilling.

The pushback to the proposal from the public, joined by outdoors and land conservation advocacy groups, was swift and loud. But while the proposal was ultimately scrapped from this year’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” budget, the idea of selling off public lands remains alive and well in lawmakers’ minds, most notably Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who promised to bring the proposal back in the future.

Public lands make up around half of the land in the state of California. That includes around 15 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands that themselves comprise around 15% of the state, but “these BLM lands have been under threat to land sale, to private developers and land barons, since their inception in 1946,” said Josh Jackson, author of The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands. For Jackson, this recent effort to sell this land “wasn’t a great surprise.”

“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower, we don’t have the Great Barrier Reef or the Great Wall of China, but what we have in America, and what makes us so unique, is our public land system across the West that we’ve set aside,” said Jackson. “It’s one of the unique things that we get to experience here in the States.”

KQED Forum spoke to Jackson about the history of public lands, the crucial role they play in California conservation, why they’re under threat and how you can get out and discover them for yourself.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

• Jump straight to: How you can make the most of BLM land near you with camping and hiking?

How did this latest Republican effort to sell public lands come about?

Josh Jackson: It came at the last minute in the first reconciliation package from the House of Natural Resources to sell off roughly half a million acres of BLM land in Nevada and Utah.

Thankfully, thanks to a really robust group of people around the West, that land sale was kind of taken out of the reconciliation package, only to be added later by Mike Lee, Senator of Utah.

That proposal was much more dire: up to 1.5 million acres of BLM land to be sold off across the West. And then, also thanks to bipartisan support against these land sales, which was taken out of the reconciliation package as well.

What’s the history of public lands in the U.S.?

Josh Jackson: Behind every story of the places I was going was a heartbreaking story of loss. Through genocide at times and lopsided deals with the government and a number of other factors, these Indigenous peoples who lived and engaged with these landscapes were booted off.

Most of the BLM land is in the Western 11 states and in Alaska. We have 245 million acres across those states. It’s mostly desert, a lot of sea of sagebrush in places like Nevada and Eastern California. You’ve got red rock country in Utah, but then you have these really isolated pockets of BLM lands, for example, in the northwest in California’s King Range in the Lost Coast area, which is old-growth forest of Douglas fir and redwoods.

These 245 million acres: historians often refer to them as the “leftover lands.” They weren’t picked up during the Homestead Act. They weren’t bought by railroads or developers or land barons. The other federal land management agencies did not even pick them up. … As I started diving into the history of these landscapes, I started thinking of them as the scrappy underdogs of our public lands. These places that not many people know about or understand, or even visit.

And Aldo Leopold, one of the great writers and thinkers and ecologists of the 20th century, wrote, “American conservation is, I fear, still concerned for the most part with showpieces. We have not yet learned to think in terms of small cogs and wheels.”

I started to think of these BLM lands as the small cogs and wheels of present-day conservation.

What purpose do BLM and other public lands serve today?

These landscapes that maybe don’t have that same blast of scenic beauty that the national parks have, they serve as really important ecological places for different flora and fauna. These are landscapes that are on the edges of national parks and national forest and provide these really amazing wildlife corridors that are really important. So even if you look out on these places that look like an empty landscape, these are places that wildlife roam.

The Carrizo Plain is the last largest intact native grassland we have in California. The Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys that run through the heart of the state used to be these really diverse, vibrant grasslands. Between agriculture and private ownership, these lands have been turned into a different thing. But we have this last vestige of grassland in the 250,000-acre Carrizo Plain National Monument. It’s only three hours outside of Los Angeles, and it’s this really wonderful place.

This is where a lot of endangered species live, and there’s a lake that, when it fills up after a lot of rain, becomes an important flyover stop for migrating birds. And it’s really important to Indigenous history: Some of the most elaborate rock art in the world is found in the Carrizo Plain at a place called Painted Rock.

Because of agriculture and private land ownership, we’ve boxed in these species that rely on the Carrizo Plain. Luckily, in 2001, it was protected as a national monument under the Clinton administration.

The superbloom is one of those things that draws a lot of people. But to a place like the Carrizo Plain, it’s important that people get out there and see these BLM lands.

What’s the case for making some BLM land private?

The BLM is already authorized to sell small plots of land, and if you’re near one of those or you think that it would be better off, and the BLM could sell it off, that’s an option. They don’t need any Congressional act to be passed.

In 1998, the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act allowed for the sale of BLM lands around Las Vegas to be turned into housing and development. But a lot of those lands weren’t just sold off. They were also traded for other private lands, like in more ecologically sensitive areas.

But even in those places, 85% of the sales went directly back to the state of Nevada for conservation and for new parks around Las Vegas, and they were traded off for lands up in the northwest of Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, that were important habitats or on the edge of conservation areas. That took ten years to hammer out all the details, with lots of compromise involved from both sides of the aisle.

I think it’s an important lesson that really good bipartisan laws take a lot of time and compromise to develop, and the opposite was happening in the last couple of months, where these giant land sales were thrown in without a lot of support from either side of the aisle. Let alone all of the constituents that represent these places.

How can you enjoy BLM land?

On BLM land in California, we have 60-plus campgrounds that are all no-reservation. The fees are typically free to about $10 a night. Those are the easiest places to access BLM land, as are places like national monuments. But you’re often on your own trying to figure out where these places are, how to access them and what road conditions are like.

I would typically build an itinerary before I even left, which was really important to understand, not just the landscape I was going to, in the flora and fauna [and] Indigenous history that existed there, but also how to get there safely.

I would always call the local BLM field office. They were so incredibly helpful because they could give you up-to-date road conditions. And then I used an app called onX Off-Road that allowed me to download offline maps before I went to a landscape, so I never was lost, even if I didn’t have cell reception.

It’s kind of an amazing part of being out in the West. If you have the right toolkit, lots of water, sunscreen, a tent and a sleeping bag, you can pull over and camp on BLM land almost anywhere.