Understanding Public Lands and Why They Matter: Part 1
A Brief History of Public Lands in American Politics
If you’ve been paying attention to US political news recently, you may have caught glimpses of headlines highlighting Public Lands. From the armed standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, Patagonia’s boycotting of Utah, and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s review of US National Monuments, the conversation around public lands is sometimes contentious. This is why understanding Public Lands and why they matter is an important topic and why we’re going to cover the topic. We have a lot of “ground to cover” so let’s get started!
Controversy over public lands isn’t a new thing and goes back to their very beginnings. As soon as the ink dried on the Louisiana Purchase people argued over how “open land” should be owned and managed. Should they be owned by the federal government at all? Should they be exploited, scientifically conserved for long term use, or be preserved as wild and untouched spaces?
If Land and Religion are what people most often kill each other over, then the West is only different in that the Land is the Religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession.
Timothy Egan, author and historian
Background
We cover the issue of public lands pretty extensively at Basin and Range Magazine since outdoor recreation depends upon places to recreate outdoors. If you are a hiker, mountain biker, hunter, angler, OHV’er, or climber; it’s likely that your passion has taken you to some kind of federally managed public lands like a National Forest or a National Park. The 13 western US states have come to depend on public lands for their economic well being – leveraging them for a variety of uses ranging from destination tourism (Yellowstone or Yosemite for instance), to everyday outdoor recreation, as well as long-term resource extraction. In August of 2017, the Outdoor Industry of America published a report that revealed what impact the outdoor recreation industry has on the American economy. The numbers are impressive:
- $887 billion in consumer spending annually,
- 7.6 million American jobs,
- $65.3 billion in federal tax revenue
- $59 billion in state and local tax revenue
It’s arguable that this economic powerhouse couldn’t exist like it does today without access to the West’s large tracks of public lands for people to recreate on. But, like anything else that has always “just been there,” it is easy to overlook the difficulties it took to establish these great places. Since knowledge is power, we thought we should do our part to help our readers understand public lands and why they matter. So, we hit the books and found out the fascinating stories behind these wild places and how they came to be – as well as what’s at stake.
Public Lands Part 1: The Prequel
The story of America’s Public Lands begins in the early 1800’s. The western boundary of the new nation expanded to the foot of the Rocky Mountains thirty years after the United States gained independence from Great Britain with the Louisiana Purchase. The purchase roughly doubled the size of the US at the time and included land that would become several of today’s western states like New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. While generally seen as a successful negotiation, it didn’t come without some controversy.
The Federalist Party argued that it was unconstitutional for the US Government to acquire any territory, any time, anywhere, at all. When the initial debates were settled in the US Supreme Court, the lands included in the Louisiana Purchase were ceded to the federal government, and created a vast shared space just west of the Mississippi River. This newly opened land spawned a cultural movement of exploration and settlement that would become known as Manifest Destiny. This powerful movement would be an overriding social force for the next three generations of Americans.
The Homesteading Era
The call of westward expansion was answered by individual “Yeoman Farmers” and commercial land speculators who poured into the newly acquired western territories – bumping elbows with numerous Native Americans along the way. Homesteaders were incentivized by the US Government’s initial rounds of legislative efforts to populate the West starting with the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862. The 1862 Act gave 160 acres to just about any US citizen willing to take the risk to move Westward. In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders.
The original Homestead Acts and the era they created were originally intended to support the Jeffersonian view of an agriculturally centered society full of small, industrious, independent farmers. The idea became known as the Homestead Principle and it formed the basis of the Free Soil political party (later becoming the Republican Party after 1854). Members of the Free Soil Party demanded that the new lands be made available to independent farmers, rather than wealthy Southern plantation owners who would likely develop it with the use of slaves.
While partially successful to their original goal, the well-meaning Homestead Acts also created an era of rampant abuse through monopolistic busines practices and political corruption. This is the same era that are most often romanticized in the pop cultural consciousness as “The Wild West.” This was an era punctuated by the boom and busts of gold mining towns, land speculation, railroad building, “cowboys and Indians,” and cattle drives. But this era of abuse wouldn’t last forever.
“…great quantities of valuable coal and iron lands, forests of timber, and the available agricultural lands in whole regions of grazing country have been monopolized.” and “…in timbered regions, the forests were being appropriated by domestic and foreign corporations through suborned entries made in fraud and evasion of law.”
US General Land Office bulletins of 1882 and 1885.
Conservationism’s Early Roots
In the years immediately after the Civil War, the US Government began to enlist teams of surveyors, painters, photographers, and cartographers to explore, map and document the immense landscapes of the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Pacific Coast. It wasn’t long before the monopolistic corruption of the 1840, 50’s and 60’s began to get noticed. Alarmed by wide-scale deforestation and near-extinctions of several large mammal species (most notably the American Bison), people began to advocate for the protection of several of the West’s most beautiful places.
The biggest changes in the public’s perception about the value of the West would come in the 1870’s – spawned in large part by an entirely new organism to the American landscape… the Tourist. It wouldn’t be long before the federal government would respond to new social & political pressures. Congress began setting aside notable sections of land for the “…benefit and enjoyment of the people,” kicking off with the designation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 – the world’s first “natural” park of its’ kind.
Ph: Keystone view Co.
It wasn’t until the passage of the General Revision Act of 1891 that the corporate monopolies would begin to lose their grip on Washington politics. The General Revision Act reversed key policy decisions stemming from the Homestead Acts and gave the president the ability to set apart unclaimed forested lands as public reserves for “scientific” resource management as well as other purposes. These “other purposes” would eventually become the seeds of modern-day Recreational Use.
Today, the General Revision Act is seen as the first of several reforms that would lay the groundwork for the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, and where the modern notions of Public Lands began to form. Following the Act’s passage in 1891, over 50 million acres of privately held land was transferred back to the public domain. This was land that was generally owned by railroad companies and obtained through the heavily discounted deals of the 1860’s.
This shift in property ownership sparked new controversies on the legality of public lands. The arguments came down to this: those in favor if free market economies (namely the railroads at this time), rallied against the Revision Act. Those in favor of sustainable resource management strategies often sided in favor of the Act. And while the railroads had a powerful voice in Washington, their influence was fading. The heroes of Conservationism like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt were ready to take their place in history.
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