Mike Lee Is Coming For Your Wilderness

Following his failed attempt to sell off public land, Utah Senator turns to militarizing it instead

If we had to pick the two issues most responsible for shifting low information voters to the right in last November’s election, they’d be cost of living and immigration. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) first tried to build support for his failed plan to sell off millions of acres of public land using the easily disproven lie that doing so would create “affordable housing.” Now, he’s trying to turn immigration into an excuse to destroy the Wilderness Preservation System, which protects nearly 112 million unspoiled acres nationwide, and open those places up to logging and other forms of extraction.

Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the Wilderness Act created a mechanism by which pristine tracts of public land could be permanently preserved in their wild state through Congressional designation. Areas protected as part of the Wilderness Preservation System prohibit the use of any motorized vehicle or equipment, and any form of mechanical transportation including bicycles. Road construction and commercial enterprise are entirely banned, and you cannot use aircraft to land within them. You’ll often find areas protected by the act referred to as “capital W Wilderness.”

The Wilderness Act was written by Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society, who defined Wilderness as:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Wilderness is the highest level of protection Congress can bestow on areas of federally-managed land. As such, it exists within preexisting areas of National Park, National Forest, BLM land, and similar. It cannot be applied to privately owned land.

You can imagine how strongly the existence of Wilderness must pain Mike Lee who has described the very existence of public land as an “obvious abuse” of power. In addition to trolling members of marginalized communities on Twitter, Lee has devoted his career in elected office to destroying America’s system of public lands, frequently employing outright lies and disinformation in order to justify giving that land over to the extractive industries who fund his campaigns.

On June 28, Lee caved to public pressure and withdrew the amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act he’d co-authored with Montana Senator Steve Daines that mandated the sale of millions of acres of BLM and Forest Service Land. But in so doing, he also promised to revisit the cause of privatizing the places all of us use to camp, hunt, hike, and otherwise recreate outdoors.

“I continue to believe the federal government owns too much land—land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation,” Lee stated in that announcement.

On October 2, one day after the government shut down due to Republican attempts to eliminate healthcare for millions of Americans, Lee introduced the Border Lands Conservation Act, an attempt to ruin the Wilderness Preservation System for the next generation.

According to Lee, that act:

• Authorizes border access roads on federal lands, coordinated with Customs and Border Protection and local partners, to enable agents and first responders to quickly reach problem areas.

• Establishes a standing Border Fuels Initiative to reduce hazardous fuels and mitigate illegal-camp wildfire threats.

• Streamlines authorities so CBP can conduct security measures in areas with overlapping without needless delay.

• Clarifies that conservation lands cannot be used as migrant encampments, preserving resources for visitor access and habitat management.

Read between the lines there, and the important takeaways are road construction, logging (“hazardous fuels” and similar phrases are hallmarks of Republican attempts to expand logging on public lands), and the transfer of authority over Wilderness areas from relevant land management agencies like the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management to Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. There’s also, of course, a healthy does of the fear, hate, and lies that have become part and parcel of Republican politics, as well as racist tropes around immigrants.

The Border Lands Conservation Act text states:

The Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture may not impede, prohibit, or restrict activities of the Department of Homeland Security on covered Federal land located within 100 miles [emphasis mine] of the southern border or northern border—to execute search and rescue operations; or to prevent unlawful entries into the United States, including entries through the southern border or northern border by terrorists and other unlawful aliens; of instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.

Lee’s Act expressly authorizes Homeland Security to construct roads, install military-like infrastructure like surveillance equipment and bases, permit logging operations, and generally run amok on any Wilderness area within 100 miles of the border with Canada or Mexico. That distance includes our nation’s most popular Wilderness—the Boundary Waters Canoe Area—and even Wilderness areas several hour’s drive from a border like Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

Writing in Meateater, journalist Katie Hill analyzes which Wilderness areas would be taken over by DHS, should the bill pass in to law:

If the bill gets anywhere, the amount of wilderness impacted in these regions could account for almost triple the acreage of Lee’s budget reconciliation selloff proposal. In the Lower 48, a known total of 3,318,773 acres across Washington, Minnesota, California, and Arizona would be impacted. Alaska would provide an additional 6,242,479 acres across five wilderness areas. This total does not include Alaska’s two largest border wilderness areas — Wrangell-St. Elias (9.4 million acres) and Mollie Beattie (8 million acres) — where single units of continuous wilderness stretch further than 100 miles from the border.

As we’re witnessing in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific right now, this administration is willing to transfer its efforts at preventing the flow of narcotics into the United States away from Constitutional law enforcement operations and into legally dubious military strikes. Will drones start flying over Wilderness areas, launching Hellfire missiles at anything Kristi Noem interpets might be “narcoterrorism”? If you decide to dress up in a frog costume and start dancing during your next camping trip, will Noem send masked thugs in to beat you up and kidnap you? Does such activity sound like appropriate management of, “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man”?

Worryingly, some conservation orgs are concerned the bill could transfer authority over all 112 million acres protected by the Wilderness Preservation System nationwide to DHS, regardless of their distance from the border.

“While some of the provisions of Senator Lee’s bill appear to limit its reach to border areas, the bill’s provisions that amend the 1964 Wilderness Act apply to every Wilderness in the nation,” states George Nickas, the executive director of Wilderness Watch. “DHS is spread across the entire U.S., and it’s not hard to imagine a Homeland Security Secretary concocting a border security reason to send bulldozers or aircraft or install remote video surveillance systems in any Wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System if Lee’s bill becomes law.”

I can anticipate the obvious question that’s going to come from readers who have been brainwashed into supporting the politics of fear, hate, and lies: “What’s wrong with expanding immigration and smuggling enforcement along our borders?”

The answer is nothing. But the correct way to do that is by empowering the agencies already responsible for managing Wilderness areas to better enforce existing laws. At the same time as we’ve seen HHS’s budget expanded to $150 billion over four years, we’re seeing efforts to reduce the already paltry budgets of agencies like the National Park Service (currently just $3.4 billion, the White House budget proposes slashing this by $900 million), while laying off thousands of their employees.

“Senator Lee’s latest anti-public lands bill would undermine the Wilderness Act and existing wilderness areas along America’s northern and southern borders,” states Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “It has little if anything to do with border security and environmental protection, and everything to do with destroying wilderness areas by blanketing them with new roads, walls, and infrastructure.”

Braden continues: “ If Senator Lee were serious about protecting public lands along the border he would be pushing for increasing funding for chronically underfunded land management agencies.”

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