An early draft of the One Big Beautiful Bill included a provision to sell 2-3 million acres of federal land in the American West for the construction of homes and infrastructure. The Senate Parliamentarian stripped that provision, but supporters have vowed to revisit the issue. Future proposals should include “stranded lands” because their sale would improve public safety and forest health without diminishing recreational uses.
More than six million acres of federal land in the western United States are surrounded by private land and lack public road or trail access, making them legally inaccessible under most circumstances. Blocked access prevents the public from enjoying the land and makes it harder to prevent and suppress wildfires. A 2021 study published in Environmental Research Letters found that such physical and legal inaccessibility exposes stranded land to larger wildfires.
[F]or more than a century, insufficient thinning and controlled burns on public land allowed trees, underbrush, pests, and deadwood to accumulate.
The researchers studied more than 258,000 ignitions on western public land over 23 years and found that wildfires on stranded land are 14-23 percent more likely to “escape” containment and grow. In Montana, Nevada, and Utah, stranded fires are two to three times larger than non-stranded fires, on average. Overall, stranded fires across the West are 18 percent larger than fires on accessible public land.
Crews and machinery cannot be easily brought into landlocked areas to thin forests, cut firebreaks, perform controlled burns, or extinguish ongoing fires. Stranded land is 20 percent less likely to receive any treatments to prevent fires. The “checkerboard” nature of land ownership in such areas means that airplanes and helicopters are the primary means of access to avoid violating trespass laws.
Stranded land should be transferred to private stewards, which would reduce wildfire risks through better land management and improved road access. Doing so would also facilitate the creation of mutual aid pacts, easements, and the bundling of land for optimal access and safety.
Government Mismanagement
Governments underinvest in land management because officials view land as a liability. Maintenance is seen as a pure expense, rather than as an investment generating future returns. Governments derive little revenue from their land holdings, and officials cannot personally benefit from land use, so the economic potential of government-owned land is seldom maximized. Unfortunately, the problem is more extensive than that.
Leading environmental groups pressure lawmakers and bureaucrats to preserve public land in a “pristine natural state,” advocating for quick fire suppression and little or no fire-prevention measures such as vegetation thinning and prescribed burns. State and federal regulations have furthered those bureaucratic failings.
As a result, for more than a century, insufficient thinning and controlled burns on public land allowed trees, underbrush, pests, and deadwood to accumulate, creating ideal conditions for conflagrations. That is especially true on stranded land, where “there are so few fuels treatments applied.”
In contrast, private individuals and companies have strong incentives to ensure that their land is protected — whether they use the land for profit, conservation, or both. Private parties do not want their assets to go up in flames, so they tend to act as good stewards.
Farmers and ranchers establish fuel breaks, create buffers, and manage the land for long-term productivity and wildfire resilience. Timber companies manage forests for sustainable growth, tree health, and wildfire prevention. Miners and loggers build roads deep into forests, which also serve as access points for fire prevention and suppression activities.
Evidence indicates that road networks in areas with more privately owned forestland relative to government-owned forestland are denser and have better surfaces. Improved road access has been shown to reduce fire size and acres burned; reduce the risk of high-burn severity; and make it easier to produce fire control lines and extinguish fires.
Private stewards also tend to have similar interests, which facilitate the negotiation of mutual aid pacts, such as voluntary fire protection associations and easements for fire management and recreation. With mixed public-private ownership, multi-party agreements are harder to reach and often get strangled by red tape across multiple agencies and levels of government. Special interest groups with divergent agendas also strive for control and slow collaborative responses.
Through sales, transfers, and swaps, stranded federal land should be made available to private stewards who will consolidate fragmented land to extend road access, enhance public safety and forest health, and balance recreation and conservation with housing, infrastructure, and resource development. A measure that accomplishes those commonsense goals would be a “big beautiful bill” indeed.
READ MORE from Lawrence J. McQuillan:
How the Next Pope Can Liberate the Poor
The Phantom National Homelessness Crisis
Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D., is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is coauthor of “California Wildfires: Key Recommendations to Prevent Future Disasters.”