Why Continue To Invest In Public Lands?
The Wilderness Land Trust is one of the most effective, focused, and agile conservation organizations in the United States. They quickly and efficiently buy inholdings within Congressionally designated Wilderness to transfer to the US Government to trustee for the American people.
That sounds wonky – but it basically means they find private parcels within land that has the some of the highest levels of legal protection of land on Earth. They purchase the land quickly, efficiently, and painlessly from willing private sellers. They then handle the sometimes slow & tedious process to transfer the parcel to the US Government.
Actions from the US Department of the Interior and US Department of Agriculture in the first 6 months of 2025 have undermined the trust of private donors & sellers in the Trusteeship of the US Government. I loved the email that Wilderness Land Trust sent out – and want it to be widely available on the Internet.
Since January, we have seen a steady stream of efforts to weaken protections for public lands, from proposals to sell off large swaths of land, to executive orders and administrative rule changes altering how they are managed. In the face of these challenges, we have received variations of the same question from partners and supporters: why continue to add properties to public lands, given these efforts to weaken protections for them?
The answer is both nuanced and also very simple. To start with the simple: we believe that wilderness and public lands are a legacy that is greater than any one administration or political moment in time, so we continue to work every day to invest in its promise for future generations. The greatest protection for our wild places is not a single piece of legislation or administrative rule, it is how they inspire and touch the lives of people from diverse walks of life, creating wilderness advocates on both sides of the political aisle. It is this broad coalition of support that has halted almost every effort we’ve seen this year to sell off or weaken protections for public lands. And it is why we believe the legacy of wilderness and public lands will endure.
Unlike privately owned lands, which often serve to profit the few, public lands belong to us all and are managed by a public process that gives us a voice in their future. And while that public process isn’t always perfect, and may not always align with our personal views, we have seen it work as it has halted almost every recent effort to weaken public lands. The democratic process that governs our public lands, backed by the strong coalition supporting them, create the foundation on which the Trust’s mission to protect wild places through public ownership is built.
Before the Trust takes on a project, we evaluate how vulnerable it is under private ownership, as well as how vulnerable it would be under public ownership. Almost always, the risk of development to private lands is much greater than to public lands because of the significant public input and oversight that goes into public lands management, often at the local level. Once transferred, many of our projects are added to designated wilderness, which enjoy the highest level of protection of any public lands that can only be altered by an act of Congress, not by executive order or administration directive. For others that are added to National Forest or Bureau of Land Management lands, we work with our local partners to evaluate how wilderness values will be protected under current management plans and rules, as well as how unique attributes of the property, such as motorized access or mineral development potential, might impact how they are managed. We only move forward with projects when we are confident that they will be better protected as public lands than under private ownership.
This is a time when it is important to pay attention to and speak up about decisions being made. But it is also a time when we must continue to believe in and invest in things that transcend the day’s headlines. For many of us, it is exactly that which draws us to wilderness as something that is bigger than any one person or moment in time. As a member of our community, we hope you’ll continue to join us in that belief as we invest in the promise and future of wilderness.
Public lands are one of the many ideas that make America exceptional. They are uniquely bipartisan with members of each party leading the fight for them over the last 153 years since Ulysses Grant designated Yellowstone National Park. They’ve been called the single largest repository of undistributed wealth on Earth. The “government” does not own them. Every American past, present, and future owns them. In legalese, the US Government is the trustee for me and all Americans.
Yes, sometimes there are land managers in office who are not good trustees. They mess up. But the solution is not to turn to the Nature Conservancy or a philanthropist or some other narrowly focused institution that may or may not exist in a generation. The solution is to double-down on fellow citizens, enduring political coalitions, and representative democracy to make sure narrow-minded interests don’t exploit treasure we all own for short-term gain.
