We Need To Talk About Advocacy Around Public Lands Policy

It’s stupid to try and sell public lands, or reduce their protections. But a lot of attempts at protecting them aren’t much better.

The Roadless Rule is being unwritten. The Land and Water Conservation Fund has been subverted. The Public Lands Rule will be rescinded. All that sucks, but so does most of the reporting and advocacy around those changes, and the policies themselves. If we are going to achieve effective protections for our public lands into the future, we need to do better from top to bottom. Here’s how to understand all the above, the ways in which none of it works for you, the public, and how we can all do (much) better.

This is a topic I’ve been wanting to tackle since all of us worked together, and saved public lands from mass sell off efforts led by senators Mike Lee and Steve Daines. That worked because a sell off is easy for a generally disengaged public to understand, and simple to create messaging around if you’re a non-profit, advocacy org, or even a journalist with only a casual understanding of policy.

Unfortunately, a lot of damage can be done even if the public retains ownership of public lands, and even during the relatively short period that this administration will have to achieve its harm. To badly paraphrase Heather Cox Richardson: building stuff is hard, wrecking it is easy. But, communicating the nuances of policy, and the history of how and why that policy was created, is also hard.

I’m going to split all of this into four sections, published across four days. Today I’ll tackle the Roadless Rule, then LWCF, and then the Public Lands Rule. And I’ll cap all that off with an actionable explanation of a genuinely effective path to fighting all of this.

The Roadless Rule

I’m writing this today because I just read two pieces that very much get it wrong. Everyone is up in arms around the repeal of the Roadless Rule right now. Despite very few people knowing what that was two months ago, it’s got a sexy name, so post sell off hullabaloo, it seems to be the thing most able to capture people’s limited attention spans. It’s a shame then that no one can figure out an accurate way to talk about it.

On Sunday, Utah’s Deseret News published an interview with U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, in which the outlet reprints his words with no attempt at fact checking. Schultz used the opportunity to repeat all sorts of easily disproven talking points, for which I’ll briefly do Deseret’s job for them:

Schultz: “If I was a landowner, which the American public is a large landowner of all of these lands, I’d want access for any number of things. Roads are key to this system.”

Reality: The Roadless Rule does not prevent road building.

Schultz: “We’re talking 60 million acres nationally, and the inability to manage those lands. In many cases, they need to be managed.”

Reality: Republicans use “manage” as a euphemism for logging. Simply replace any mention of “manage,” “managed,” “managing” or similar with “logging,” in anything they ever say about national forests.

Schultz: “The second one is looking at just making local decisions. Anytime we try to take things off the table and not allow for local conditions, local public input into that process, that is somewhat problematic.”

Reality: The Trump administration is busy eliminating the mechanisms of local input in decision making on public lands, which before they took over, was enshrined in federal law. By using an accelerated public comment period around the repeal of the Roadless Rule, for instance, and failing to conduct the usual public hearings or the rest of the NEPA process around it, they’re ignoring the public, not listening to it.

Schultz: “The big one is just the opportunity for multiple-use management, and including wildfire protection in that.”

Reality: The administration is also eliminating the Public Lands Rule, which sought to add in some consideration of land uses beyond extraction. And, subbing “logging” for “management we can read this sentence as, “…the opportunity for logging…”. Logging cannot be shown to reduce wildfire risk, except when performed immediately adjacent to buildings.

Anyways, you get the idea. The interview continues, and everything Schultz says in it is an easily disproven lie. What regular readers of this newsletter may find more surprising is that something similar can be said about the op-ed Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert just wrote for Time Magazine. Let’s look at some of his claims:

Gellert: “By rolling back protections and opening our national forests to industry…we put more than 25,000 miles of trails, nearly 800 miles of whitewater runs and more than 8,500 climbing routes at risk of being lost forever.”

Reality: Rescinding the Roadless Rule will not suddenly turn millions of acres of public lands into apocalyptic wastelands. The only thing the rule does is prevent USFS from using taxpayer funds to build logging roads in areas it protects. Other forms of road can and have been built through “Roadless,” areas to support other activities, like mineral extraction, hydroelectric power, and community projects. Hundreds of those have been permitted nationwide since 2001, when the rule was implemented. While some trails, whitewater runs, and climbing routes may eventually be lost to new logging projects as a result, the total impact will be far less than the numbers Gellert cites.

Gellert: “While the outdoor industry, which accounts for $1.2 trillion in economic output, relies on access to these areas to do business, so too do the communities that surround them. An estimated 158 million visitors to our national forests contributed $13.7 billion to the economy and helped support 161,000 related jobs.”

Reality: The Roadless Rule currently prevents USFS from using taxpayer funds to build logging roads into about 58 million acres of land managed by that agency. USFS manages 193 million acres in total. Even if every one of those 58 million Roadless acres were suddenly to get vaporized, and even if every acre were to account for an equal amount of economic activity, we’d be talking about a 30 percent reduction in output from USFS visitation.

Gellert: “Elected officials like Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke came to public lands’ defense before, and we’ll need their support and that of citizens again—and again and again for as long as this continues.”

Reality: Earlier in the same piece, Gellert references Bears Ears National Monument, and the first Trump administration’s rollback of its protected acreage in service of the oil an gas industries. Who was responsible for that decision, the largest reduction in public land protections in American history? Ryan Zinke, who was later fired from his roll of Secretary of the Interior for rampant penny grifting. Zinke is not suddenly working to protect public lands because he’s found religion or something, he’s doing it because he’s extremely vulnerable in the upcoming mid-terms and is desperate to save his political skin. Working to get corrupt charlatans like Zinke out of office, rather than giving them the ammunition they need to continue to cause harm, is the only effective approach here.

So how much harm will the Roadless Rule recision cause? The administration is budgeting $50 million to USFS over the next five years for new road construction. New road construction is the activity prohibited by the rule. Even if every penny of that is spent in formerly Roadless areas, we’re not talking about many miles of road.

It’s also important to remember here that many of the acres protected by the Roadless Rule were left roadless when that rule was implemented in 2001 because they are too difficult and expensive to build roads into. And that was through over a century-long history of aggressive, largely unregulated, industrial logging on public lands. After public lands logging peaked during the 1980s, the timber industry pivoted to tree farming on private lands. Now, over 90 percent of timber produced in this country comes from private lands. Farmed trees are easier to work with than wild lumber, which is typically considered to be of lower quality. Sawmills are now set up to work with farmed lumber only, and aren’t necessarily located close enough to Roadless areas to make serving any timber produced on them economically viable.

The administration knows this. Its goal for USFS is to increase timber production on lands managed by that agency by 25 percent over the next five years, taking totals from under 3 billion board feet to about 3.7 billion. As recently as 1988, USFS was producing over 12 billion board feet annually.

The biggest problem in all this is that, as I explained at length previously, that additional logging will be permitted in the dumbest ways possible, amplifying both the risk and severity of wildfire. Combine that with both the administration’s incompetent efforts to combine wildfire fighting into a single federal agency and the accelerating impacts of the climate disaster, and it looks like we’re going to lose a lot more acres of places we care about to fire rather than chainsaws.

Stay tuned for a discussion of LWCF tomorrow, and the other two pieces in this series following that. At the end, it’s my goal for all of you to understand what an effective approach to fighting all of the efforts to harm America’s system of public lands should look like, and through actually understanding these issues, give you some tools that I think will allow us to create better protections in the future. I really think we can do that, but I also think that must begin from a position of fact and reality, not fear and ignorance.

Top photo: USFS. Pictured is Nooya Lake in the Tongass National Forest, the area that’s actually the target of of these efforts.

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