As a wilderness hunter, trapper, and fisherman, I am a longtime devotee of public lands. The best hunting, fishing, and one-on-one talks with God are had the farthest distance from developed areas.
As a political conservative, I have historically seen public lands as one of the few things that government generally gets right, most of the time, regardless of who is in power and managing them at a particular time. Even when a public land manager or an administration screws things up, the land yet remains for the next president or governor to manage properly. But I am writing this essay now for a bunch of separate reasons, all of which have recently snowballed into one big gripe that many other Americans share.
A couple decades ago, I served as the Pennsylvania director for The Conservation Fund, a national land conservation group I had long admired. While there, I helped conserve a lot of land, adding tens of thousands of acres to state Game Lands, Pennsylvania State Forests, and parks, as well as having some signature land protection projects at the Gettysburg National Military Park and at the Flight 93 crash site. It was willing seller -–willing buyer work that produced tangible results, that protected the environment without regulating private property rights, and that received overwhelming popular support.
Years later, after starting my own land and timber business, I scored a rare elk hunting tag here in Pennsylvania. While pursuing elk with a .62 caliber black powder rifle over my shoulder, I was joined by some hunting buddies who camped out with me on a state forest log landing. We were in the heart of a former 12,500-acre parcel I had negotiated the purchase of in 2002, while at TCF. Being in that specific spot made everything about the hunt feel pretty perfect, despite not getting an elk. And yet, something in the way some of the state forest staff had interacted nagged at us, as we sat talking around the campfire at night.
Public lands belong to the public, to the citizens of America. As government exists solely to serve We, The People, so too does public land exist solely to serve the American people. Multiple use has always been the guiding principle behind managing public lands, with some logging here, some mining there, some dedicated wildlife habitat there, some scenic views protected there, and some recreational uses here, there, and almost everywhere. And yet, despite there being a healthy amount of public land from sea to shining sea, it is clear that from New Jersey to California, public lands of all types (local, state, federal) have become increasingly dominated by one type of land manager: an authoritarian ecologist, who views humans as a pox upon the land, and not as a historic and integral part of the landscape.
From more grizzly bears than can be socially sustained in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon to far more wolves than can be environmentally sustained across the west to using public lands as a weapon to shut down adjoining private property rights and against traditional land uses and lifestyles, public land managers seem to be at war with the American public. The extremely narrow views and purposes that today’s public land managers implement in the field are far away from where President Theodore Roosevelt started things over a hundred years ago. They are also way far away from where they should be in a democratic society that treasures private property rights and government service instead of government control.
There is the very recent example of Charles and Heather Maude in South Dakota. Fourth-generation ranchers adjoining federal land, the Maudes found themselves criminally targeted by the Biden DOJ’s far-left U.S. attorney Alison Ramsdell (still in office), charged with federal felonies and $250,000 fines each over a mistaken hundred-year-old remote boundary line involving a rugged couple dozen acres. Despite an amicable and professional meeting with the U.S. Forest Service staff in early 2024, weeks later, the husband and wife were violently arrested and charged separately, forcing them to get separate legal counsel at greater cost, while also put under a gag order not to speak publicly or even to each other about the subject.
Although the Trump DOJ just ended the Maudes’ lawless persecution, the question remains why this happened at all. Some speculate that it was to drive the Maudes off their ranch so their land could be more easily turned into U.S. Forest Service land. Whatever the reason, it was a wild miscarriage of official injustice to use public lands for this evil purpose.
My own most recent experience with federal land managers involves the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 1959 Kettle Creek flood control project in northwestern Clinton County, Pa. Ostensibly created to hold back rain water and prevent flooding in downstream communities, the aggressive eminent domain taking of private lands also blocks adjoining private property rights — notably oil, gas, and minerals (OGMs) — from being accessed and brought to market. Sixty-five years later, Kettle Creek Lake is heavily silted in, its floodwater capacity a small fraction of what it was originally supposed to hold. And yet the environmentalist land managers at the U.S. Army Corps refuse to accommodate reasonable access to OGMs they artificially shut off from the outside world, for no reason other than to provide a pretty scenic view to boaters on the government’s shallow lake.
Fixes to public land mismanagement are easy: Hold land managers personally accountable for their overreach and lawlessness; require good deeded access to all adjoining and nearby private lands and OGMs cut off from public roads by public land; require public reimbursement of litigation costs to private citizens trying to get access to their private property. Finally, implement a simple principle: If the public has an interest in environmental protection, the public must pay for it. The price of environmental protection can no longer be borne on the back of the private property owner, like the Maudes, or the Americans of Kettle Creek Valley, Pa.
Josh First is a two-bit land investor and timber pimp in Pennsylvania. He is a conservative political activist when not cutting down trees to hurt liberals’ feelings.
Image via Picryl.
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