Last month, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner penned a thoughtful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating the use of excess federal land to address the nation’s housing crisis. President Donald Trump has long argued for using federal lands for this purpose. That’s especially true when it comes to the American West, where federal lands dominate.

Last week, however, Patagonia’s CEO Ryan Gellert decried the Secretaries’ proposal as “risky,” “specious,” and one that threatens “dismantling and destroying the places we’ve loved for generations.” Patagonia sells high-end outdoor clothing and gear. Gellert also opposes using federal lands to discover, develop, and deliver energy resources owned by the people. He fails to understand the balanced approach that Congress, to which the Constitution entrusts sole authority for “property belonging to the United States,” has embraced in its treatment of federal lands. Consider, for example, the Congress that created Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first and greatest, and also enacted the General Mining Law, which, initiated by private citizens, will permit Trump to pursue the development of “critical mineral deposits.”

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Gellert further claims the Secretaries’ plan would splitter support for “[p]rotecting nature,” which “has been a bipartisan issue for decades.” 

Sadly, he is too late in attempting to close that barn door. Indeed, federal land management was a bipartisan issue for decades, that is, until President Jimmy Carter decided to do the bidding of radical environmental groups. Carter’s embrace of those extreme policies infuriated Western governors, most of whom were Democrats, and spawned the “Sagebrush Rebellion.” Sadly, President Joe Biden mirrored Carter’s approach.

“Our public lands,” writes Gellert,” “inspire wonder and an appreciation for wilderness.” 

True, some of them do, which is why Congress set aside hundreds of millions of acres as national parks, national preserves, national landmarks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, and wilderness areas. As to the latter, however, a federal wilderness area does not simply constitute “wide open spaces,” which we have in abundance in the West. Specifically, a wilderness area established by Congress is undeveloped federal land “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 

Like the hammer for which everything is a nail, Gellert sees federal lands as where “hikers, hunters, rock climbers, backpackers, artists, and families find deep connections to nature.” Of course, there are millions of acres of federal land open for those purposes. In fact, when I ran the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump during his first term in office, we kept all of its 245 million acres open when everything else, including national parks, was closed due to COVID-19. Nonetheless, federal lands, as Congress has recognized for decades, are for more than recreation. By federal law, Congress provided specifically for those multiple other uses.

Gellert not only misunderstands the federal government’s disparate land holdings, the nature of multiple use and sustained yield by which most federal lands have been managed since the 1960s, and that all special lands set aside by Congress, including, but not limited to, national parks and wilderness areas, are not available for land sales. In addition, he fails to appreciate the long history of federal land holdings, their disposal, and retention.

The Founders intended to sell or otherwise convey all federal lands. In fact, the predecessor agency to the BLM was the General Land Office. Its task was disposing of those lands. In 1976, however, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), Congress ended the “disposition era” and embraced the retention of almost all federal lands. Over the decades, Congress ensured some special federal lands would never be disposed of but would be retained as, for example, “pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”  Even so, in FLPMA, Congress authorized the sale of federal lands that are “difficult and uneconomic to manage [to] serve important public objectives, including but not limited to, expansion of communities and economic development.”  

Four years later, Congress passed, and President Carter signed into law the Santini-Burton Act, which authorized the sale of excess federal lands in Clark County and the use of the proceeds to acquire environmentally sensitive lands around Lake Tahoe. The legislation was an enormous success. Yet, it did not go far enough. In 1998, Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act.

Over two and one-half decades, SNPLMA generated over $4 billion and permitted privately owned land to sustain homes, schools, and businesses. As one career BLM official told me in 2020 as he drove me through miles and miles of his handiwork, “Everything you are seeing was once on BLM land. None of this would have been possible without SNPLMA.”

In addition to the 1.7 billion offshore acres owned by the U.S., the federal government owns one-third of the nation’s land mass. Most of it is in the American West, for example, Nevada (85% federally owned), Idaho and Utah (each 64% federally owned), and Alaska (61% federally owned).  Local units of government are even more subordinate to and hence hemmed in by federal landlords.  For instance, although “only” half of my home state of Wyoming is federal land, 97% of Teton County is federally owned. In that regard, even states east of the Mississippi share this misfortune, such as recently hurricane and flood-ravaged western North Carolina, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and northeastern Minnesota.

TRUMP BETRAYS MAGA WITH HIS GREENLAND OBSESSION

Trump’s plan, as enunciated by Burgum and Turner, will provide needed relief, economic opportunity, and housing for families. Moreover, it is fully consistent with and supported by Congress’ historic approach to federal lands.

Frankly, time’s a-wasting.

William Perry Pendley is a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer. He has victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump.