Public Lands, Private Playgrouns, and the Great American Sellout

“As long as there are public lands, there will be those trying to separate the public from the land.”

–Gifford Pinchot, first U.S. Chief of Forestry

The Constitution says nothing about an American’s right to mountain bike Pisgah National Forest. Hiking Shenandoah isn’t covered in the behemoth document either. Right to vote, yes. Right to a comprehensive National Forest system, not so much.

Yellowstone, our first National Park, wasn’t created until 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. The first National Forest followed shortly after, when certain farsighted politicians saw the need to preserve a piece of our forests from the ever-growing timber industry. But naysayers have long questioned the necessity and purpose of our forests and parks, and in recent years, they've lobbied to begin privatizing the National Park and Forest system. From staffing the park service with private companies to selling land outright, there’s a strong movement afoot to move the Department of the Interior’s holdings out of the public domain and into the private sector. The question is, would our public lands be better off in the hands of private citizens and corporations?

The 670 million acres of National Forests, National Parks, and Bureau of Land Management lands make up 29 percent of America’s entire landmass, which makes the federal government the largest single landowner in the United States. Many critics of public lands say it’s too much. Early in 2006, the Bush administration proposed selling 300,000 acres of National Forest across the country in order to fund a rural schools program that was previously subsidized by timber sales.

While this much-criticized project was the largest proposed forest land sale in decades, it wasn’t the first step taken toward divesting the federal government of its land holdings. Bush has been pushing to turn the operating systems of our National Parks over to private companies for years, claiming the introduction of free competition would allow the Park Service to save money. He’s also lobbied to increase the leasing of oil and gas rights inside and near National Park units. In 2005, a bill was proposed that would allow mining companies to claim land in National Forests under the 1872 mining act.

During the same year, the Bureau of Land Management sold 8,049 acres of public land for $16 million-just one in a long history of BLM land sales and leases, most of which went to oil and gas companies. In 1983, president Reagan endorsed the goal of privatizing public lands in his budget statement, declaring the federal government will “reduce the vast holding of surplus land and real property, since some of this property is not in use and would be of greater value to society if transferred to the private sector.”

In his testimony during a 2005 congressional hearing on public lands, Paul J Gessing, speaking for the libertarian special interest group the National Taxpayers Union, said, “Our nation’s current heavily-socialized land management system is tremendously inefficient. This is a flaw that cannot be fixed without the reintroduction of market forces, preferably through the sale of significant amounts of federal lands.”

While the pressure to privatize public lands has been ever-present since the inception of Yellowstone, the recent push has environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts more troubled than ever. Instead of shrinking the public land portfolio, outdoor enthusiasts would like to see the federal government acquire more land, bringing largely unprotected ecosystems under the government’s environmental umbrella. And if the government was ever going to increase its land holdings, the time is now.

According to a recent US Forest Service study, 44 million acres of private forests will be sold over the next 25 years. Many timber companies are seeing bigger profits in real estate and development than in paper, and are divesting themselves of their land holdings. The federal government may own 670 million acres, but the majority of the forests in America are currently privately owned. 1/3 of America’s landmass is considered forest land, and 57% of that is owned by private companies and citizens. In the Southeast, 89% of our forests are privately owned, mostly by timber companies. The forecasted land sale, which roughly equals the size of Maine, could permanently change the landscape of America, presenting environmental organizations with both an opportunity and a reason for panic. If 44 million acres of forest are going to be sold in the next couple of decades, who’s going to buy them?

STATE OF THE UNION

It’s no secret that our National Parks and National Forests are in poor shape. According to a 2005 congressional research study, the backlog of National Park maintenance is estimated between $4.5 and $9.7 billion. The chronic operating shortfall in the parks exceeds $600 million annually. On top of the existing DOI budget crisis, Bush proposed a $100 million cut to National Park funds in his 2007 budget.

Proponents of privatization use these figures to support their cause. Economists Vernon Smith and Terry Anderson of the libertarian CATO Institute suggest public lands should be auctioned off over the next 20-40 years, and they actually claim environmental stewardship as the basis for their argument. “Analysts on the left and the right agree that the federal government has done an exceedingly poor job of stewarding [public] resources,” Smith and Anderson write. “Both environmental quality and economic efficiency would be enhanced by private rather than public ownership.”

That the government does a poor job protecting our lands can’t be denied. “It’s definitely an uphill battle to get our existing public lands protected,” says Chris Joyell of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project. “But the money is there to manage these lands properly. It just needs to be redirected. Currently, taxpayers lose $1.2 billion a year on federal lands because we subsidize private interests like logging.”

While critics of public land are quick to point out environmental failures within the current system, a more common foundation of the privatization movement is a deep-seated distrust of anything that remotely resembles socialism.

In the ‘90s, the state of Michigan began auctioning off pieces of the Pere Marquette State Forest. Senator George McManus, a major influence in the state land sale, believed Michigan owned too much private land and called the practice of acquiring public lands “a little like creeping socialism.”

The senator was right to some degree. The United States’ public land system is based entirely on a fundamentally socialist principle: the redistribution of wealth. In order to build the National Forest and Park systems within the Southeast, the government used federal funds to buy private property and turn it into a public resource. They bought from the few and gave to the many. The Wilderness Act, the principle document that protects vast stretches of America’s forests, was created by well-known socialists. Benton Mackaye, the creator of the Appalachian Trail and a practicing socialist, believed the trail would offer a “retreat from profit." Hehoped that perhaps some hikers would abandon capitalist lifestyles in exchange for communal farm and residential camps along the trail where “cooperation would replace antagonism.” FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps used federal money to employ millions of out-of-work men in order to bolster National Forest protection and soil conservation. When FDR signed the Tennessee Valley Authority into law in 1933, which brought power to some of the most poverty stricken areas of Appalachia and made our National Forest system more accessible to the masses, private power interests called the bill “socialist” in nature.

According to critics of public land, these socialist roots are at the heart of the National Park and Forest service’s current failures, and the introduction of capitalism would save the environment. “Private property will end up in the possession of those who value it most,” says Jerry Taylor of the CATO institute. “That is an iron clad law of economics.”

PRIVATE PLAYGROUND

The Virgin Falls Pocket Wilderness in middle Tennessee consists of 317 acres of pristine forest outside of Nashville-and it’s owned by a paper company. Bowater Southern Paper Corporation owns the Virgin Falls Pocket Wilderness and operates the area for public recreation as part of Tennessee’s Natural Areas Program, a joint effort between the state and private corporations to preserve sites of ecological importance. The private landowners of 50 Tennessee Natural Areas enter into a non-binding voluntary agreement to protect their lands. The Virgin Falls Pocket Wilderness sits next to the Bridgestone/Firestone Centennial Wilderness, donated by the tire company to the state for environmental protection.

This is the sort of voluntary protection that proponents of privatization hold up as the ideal situation. “The fact is, irreconcilable differences exist between ranchers, environmentalists, sportsmen, and tourists over the purpose of federal lands,” Gessing says. “The number of interests tugging at the various federal land management agencies are impossible to satisfy.” Private landowners, on the other hand, only have to satisfy themselves.

Environmentalists admit that the current system of land management is inadequate. “Protection boils down to a question of who gets more influence, the citizens who co-own the land or the industrial interests that use the land for resource extraction,” Joyell says. “Currently, the industrialists have the government’s ear. Money talks.”

The frustration with the government’s compromised protection policies have led a number of environmental and recreational groups to become private property owners themselves. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has been buying and protecting ecologically significant land for 55 years, conserving 15 million acres of land during its tenure. When International Paper, a timber company with millions of acres of forested land spread across the country, announced its intention to sell a significant portion of its real estate in the Southeast, TNC jumped at the opportunity.

“A lot of people aren’t interested in dealing with the government,” says Bill Ginn, the director of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Forest Initiative. “Nonprofits can be more flexible than the government, so The Nature Conservancy can fill the niche between the government and private landowners and make sure the best of these properties are protected for future generations.”

When Boat Rock, a popular bouldering field in Atlanta, Georgia, was put on the market for development, the Southeastern Climbers Coalition didn’t bother lobbying the government to protect the land from becoming a high end neighborhood. They simply bought the field themselves.

“When you own the land, you get to say what happens to it,” says Brad McLeod of the Southeastern Climbers Coalition.

With 44 million acres of private forest entering the auction block in the next couple of decades and the federal government’s inclination to unload current public land, can environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy snatch the majority of these lands up for protection and recreation?

Probably not. When International Paper put six million acres up for sale, the Nature Conservancy was able to purchase 283,000 acres of it, and it took a coalition of three major conservation groups to swing the $383 million price tag. It was the largest single land purchase in the Southeast’s history, and it managed to protect only a fraction of IP’s holdings.

“The reality is we were only competitive in 5% of the IP land transactions," admites Ginn. "The government has to give incentives to private landowners to conserve their property, and non-profits have to step up and take a more active role. We can’t do it alone.”

Ultimately, the environmental protection that the federal government offers is often more stringent than what private non-profits can offer. Faced with mounting mortgage payments on vast real estate holdings, many conservancies are forced to open their protected lands to certain logging and development interests. And since the lands are privately owned, these decisions can happen quickly and without public input.

The public’s voice in the future of our National Forests and Parks is the core principle of public land. Robert Marshall, one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, emphasized the importance of the public’s role in his book The People’s Forest: “Public ownership is the only basis on which we can hope to protect the incalculable values of the forests.”

The Forest Reserve Act, which Teddy Roosevelt used to establish some of this country’s first National Forests, authorized the declaration of public forests specifically to protect the natural resources from private interests.

“With public land, we have the tenets of democracy on our side," says Joyell. "As co-owners, we have the right to provide input on how this land is managed.”

THE VALUE OF LAND

It’s unlikely that Bush’s 300,000-acre forest service land sale proposal will make it out of Congress. Even Gessing of the National Taxpayers Union admits that the large-scale sale of public lands is unlikely in the near future. But it is obvious that the role of the federal government in environmental protection is changing, and the notion of privatizing our public lands isn’t going away. If anything, it’s only becoming more of a threat. The Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform Act (FLAIR) is a bill currently being considered by Congress that would force the Department of Interior to identify any property no longer required to be owned by the federal government. It’s considered by many to be the first step in unloading sizeable federal land holdings and turning our public lands into a profit-rearing business.

Meanwhile, the average American yard is shrinking. According to the National Organization of Homebuilders, each American homeowner can expect 9,000 square feet to call his/her own. That includes the house that sits on it. In the next few years, the American yard will drop to only 7,000 square feet. America’s vanishing personal property is obviously a phenomenon that our founding fathers didn’t foresee when writing the constitution, but maybe President Grant understood the growing need of public space when he declared Yellowstone to be “set apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”