We Need To Talk About How We Can Effectively Advocate For Better Public Lands Policy

Why the pro-public lands world’s inability to communicate accurately is such a problem, and the steps we can all take to do it better

If Mike Lee and Steve Daines’ failed attempt to sell public land as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act taught us one thing, it’s that a majority of Americans can be united behind the pro-public lands cause. Unfortunately, many of the reporters, outlets, non-profits and whatnot who cover public lands took away a different lesson: that this cause can bring them loads of attention. And, in dramatically chasing that attention rather than prioritizing accuracy or insight, we risk squandering the public’s interest, provide oxygen to the very politicians responsible for the threat, and fail to push for the very thing we need to protect public lands into the future: better policy.

In the first three parts of this series I looked at the Roadless Rule, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Great American Outdoors Act, and the Public Lands Rule, explaining what each actually achieved, and where communications around those policies have failed. Today, I want to talk about the lessons we can all learn, and provide some realistic, actionable, achievable takeaways.

Do you want to effectively fight attacks on America’s public lands? Here’s how.

The Roadless Rule

This sounds sexy, so has attracted the most interest of any anti-public lands measure since the sell-off attempt. And because it’s getting eyeballs, everyone keeps talking about it. But rescinding the rule will have very little real world impact outside of southeast Alaska. Don’t just take my word for it, my former Outside colleague Chris Keyes makes many of the same points.

“But Wes, the comments!!!1!!” One of the things that the Trump administration is trying to undo is the National Environmental Policy Act, and the process for public and stakeholder inclusion it mandates in decision making. That’s really dumb and shortsighted on its own, as I’ve previously explained. Rather than the usual process of conducting multiple public hearings over the course of a year or more, and holding a 90-day public comment period, the USDA (which manages the Forest Service) instead only held truncated 30-day commenting. But that still resulted in 625,737 comments! Surely that’s a big success?!

While yes, public comments—while we’re still allowed to make them—are an important way for us to push back against the exploitation of natural resources, it would help if those comments were about the right thing.

The Roadless Rule is being repealed for one reason and one reason only: Because Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski is in the pocket of a lumber company trying to sell old growth timber from the country’s largest rainforest to China, but can’t do that profitably without using taxpayers to subsidize the very expensive roads they need to log that old growth timber. By extracting the rule’s demise as her pound of flesh for voting in favor of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Murkowski is also choosing that small lumber company’s profits over much larger economic segments that are reliant on on keeping the Tongass National Forest healthy. Those include commercial fishing, tourism, hunting, and more.

What’s the problem? I can find no comments holding Murkowski accountable for the decision. Sure, some environmental non-profits will sue, the fact that the USDA is just going to ignore all these comments will be used as a piece of evidence for an argument that the decision is being made without appropriate, legally-mandated processes, and if that case is heard by a judge who believes in democracy, we might get a decision blocking any roads being built until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in, and by that time there’s a chance we may have a different administration in the White House.

But this isn’t a threat being created by a nebulous “them,” it’s one resulting from a very specific “her.” And that “her” is accountable to her voters, many of whom will be harmed by this.

Imagine if Patagonia’s CEO hadn’t written a non-reality-based op/ed for Time warning that national forests nationwide are about to be vaporized (my summarization here may involve some liberties), but instead chose to make southeast Alaskans aware that their very own Senator is trying to destroy their livelihoods, all so she can use money from their taxes to destroy our country’s largest rainforest, and sell the resulting lumber to China. Imagine if every poetic screed you’d read about the importance of the roadless rule (again, in reality, it’s not all that important) was instead devoted to questioning Murkowski’s suitability for her job, given that she’s trying to destroy her constituents’ way of life. Imagine if all those enviro non-profits, instead of trying to solicit random comment for the federal register, instead spent their donor dollars in Juneau, Skagway, and Sitka, explaining to Alaskans all the ways in which their Senator was setting out to destroy their salmon populations.

I think we’d be having a very different conversation right now.

LWCF And GAOA

LWCF sets aside a portion of offshore oil and gas revenue for the purpose of acquiring land and water for the American public. GAOA permanently appropriates funds for that program so they’re not subject to political whims, and also set aside a bucket of money for addressing the enormous maintenance backlog on public lands.

The trouble is, the current Secretary of the Interior is subverting that budget to provide red states with free money they can use to buy federally-managed land, then sell that off to the highest bidder. Fortunately we’re talking about less money than we would be if anyone involved could actually manage to be honest about any of this.

The big problem here is that the pro-public lands world is so invested in talking about GAOA as as a “once in a generation” achievement that they’ve been unable to acknowledge that Republicans hoodwinked them into using it to help elect one of the Senators who just tried to sell public land. And that hoodwinking was so effective that same Senator who wants to sell your public land has plans to again use LWCF to greenwash his image before the mid-terms. And instead of wising up, and working against the election of a person hellbent on destroying public lands, it looks as if the pro-public lands world is going to let him get away with that again.

Yes, there’s an analogy about Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football to be made here. But no one writing op/eds or sending out press releases seems to be prepared to make that connection, or work to fix the obvious problem. Learn from your mistakes, admit you made them, and play a different game people.

The Public Lands Rule

With the best of intentions, the people managing DOI and the BLM during the Biden administration set out to try and partially correct a fundamental flaw in the laws governing permitting on BLM land. Those have historically always been biased strongly in favor of extraction, at the expense of any of those other, supposedly “multiple” uses.

That word “use,” has a specific definition in legislation, and it’s not one agencies themselves can change, that would take an act of Congress. Since that branch of government is broken, those agency managers knew they couldn’t make progress there, so they instead came up with a novel type of lease, one which would in no way compete with any of those legally-defined “uses,” given so much priority. It seems that, faced with pressure to demonstrate any sort of achievement, they then got ahead of themselves with messaging, issued a bunch of statements declaring conservation a “use,” and that was then parroted by pro-public lands world media, causing many oil executives to ruin their ostrich skin cowboy boots by spitting chewing tobacco on them in outrage.

How To Fix This, And Why It’s Worthwhile

Picture a Senate where we had (popular three-term Montana Democrat Governor) Steve Bullock instead of Steve Daines, or one in which Lisa Murkowski was forced to actually live up to the “moderate” identity to which she clings with increasing fragility.

If we were able to more accurately communicate policies like these, it is not far-fetched to think that could be our reality right now. That might even be the kind of body in which it’d be conceivable that we could introduce a bill modifying the Federal Public Lands Management Act to genuinely consider conservation a “use” of BLM land, or one in which we could declare important areas formerly protected by the Roadless Rule as Congressionally-dedicated Wilderness.

All that would take would be a concerted effort from the pro-public lands world to adopt accuracy as the guiding principal of its communications around policy.

The Roadless Rule was only ever an agency regulation. And one that never achieved what most people thought it did. It did not even ban road construction from areas it applied to, it only prevented taxpayer money being used to build roads for the express purpose of logging. Agency regulations can be overturned by those same agencies, as management shifts between administrations. Laws cannot. The better way to protect those areas would be with Wilderness designations, which are laws that it would also take acts of Congress to undo.

How could we convince Congress to get back to the business of protecting areas of public land with Wilderness designations? We’ve seen the broad consensus public lands can create across the country, and we’ve even got lawmakers pretending to be public lands champions in order to win elections. Take those things one step further: let’s hold those politicians who pay lip service to public lands accountable.

Instead of clinging to GAOA as an achievement, we need to admit that we allowed Republicans to use it as a campaign tool, then immediately turn around and subvert the program in an attempt to privatize those same public lands. Using our collective messaging power to make the Senator responsible—Steve Daines—answer for it, and prevent him from following through with his plans to do the exact same thing next year could net us at worst some legislative action as Republicans scramble to save his seat, and at best a better Senator. Either could, if pressure is applied with accuracy, net us some Congressional oversight around stuff like the misuse of LWCF money.

The same is true of Lisa Murkowski. She’s only able to get away with using taxpayer funds to sell America’s largest rainforest to China because no ones out there screaming that she’s doing that except me. Put that sentence on some billboards, buy some ads, warn Alaskans their Senator is trying to kill their salmon, and she wouldn’t just have to knock it off, she’d need to repair her image.

I guess what I’m saying here is that making progress on public lands legislation is very much possible, even in today’s insane political environment. By focussing the public’s attention on stuff that actually matters, and directing it towards effective advocacy about the responsible politicians, we can fix this stuff. But if we keep pretending that every little thing is an emergency, keep failing to provide any actual insight into why this stuff is happening or who’s responsible, and keep letting the very politicians trying to destroy our public lands get away with using them as a campaign tool, then we are contributing to the very destruction of the thing we claim to hold dear. Let’s chase impact rather than just attention.

Top Photo: USFS

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