A new book tackles a Grand
Canyon-sized debate.
by Mrill Ingram
June 26, 2018
It was a warm, still August
evening in 2007 when dozens of families camping on Basswood Lake in Minnesota’s
Boundary Waters Canoe Area area heard motors and loud bangs. For hours into the
night, two boats carrying men firing semi-automatic weapons and letting off
fireworks motored up and down the lake, hurling abuse and
expletives at campers. The swearing, gun-toting men landed at one camp and told
the campers they were going to kill and rape them. They later vandalized a
water gauging station and stole a canoe and other equipment.
Among other things, the men
yelled at campers to “get off our land.” Subsequent reporting described the incident as fueled by lingering
resentment among residents of Ely, Minnesota, over the
creation of the public wilderness in the late 1970s. One of the
ringleaders, Barney Lakner, was sentenced to three years in prison. He
was again detained in 2014, after ramming a conservation
officer’s snowmobile while illegally joyriding in the Boundary Waters,
flaunting the rules against motorized vehicles.
Lakner is not alone in
harboring a festering rage over public lands. As the 2016 armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife
Refuge makes crystal clear, where there’s wilderness, there’s a fight.
In his new book, In
Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer (Temple
University Press), Steven Davis, political science professor at Edgewood
College in Madison, Wisconsin, takes on the “privatizers.” His book is an
even-handed and thorough look at public lands in the United States. Although
public support for wilderness, national parks, and other public lands is high, Davis is rightly concerned that these open
spaces—from national parks like Yosemite to county-owned lands—face serious
threats.
The sentiments that led to the
Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use Movement are not in the past, Davis tells us.
In his first chapter, “Public Land and its Discontents,” Davis details how,
since the gains of the Tea Party in 2010, those against public lands have the
support of a large number of office-holders in state and federal legislatures.
“What was previously seen as the intemperate agitation of fringe activists is
now the standard stuff of political platforms, floor debates, and campaign
speeches,” he writes.
The Republican Party’s 2012
platform, for example, stated, “Congress should reconsider whether . . .
federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West
could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.”
And since 2010, conservative
lawmakers have introduced proposals to open all national parks, forests, and
wildlife refuges to roads and motors; to require the government to transfer,
without sale, thirty million acres of their holdings; to sell all lands in the
Rocky Mountains states to the highest bidder; to shield timber sales from any
kind of public or environmental review; and to prevent the creation of any new
wildlife refuges. Many of these initiatives are based on template legislation
created by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
With Donald Trump in office,
lawmakers have doubled down on efforts to open public lands to extractive
industries and corporate development. The Department of the Interior under the
direction of Ryan Zinke has openedtwo million acres of land in two national
monuments in Utah and overseen the largest lease sale ever (10.3 million
acres) of Alaskan federal lands for oil and gas extraction.
State lands are even more
vulnerable. Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney recently applauded Trump’s decision to shrink Utah’s
national monuments and has argued for more state control over federal public
lands, saying, “I think the state would do a better job because we care so
deeply.”
In Wisconsin, Republican
Governor Scott Walker has sold dozens of parcels of state-owned lands,
sometimes to political supporters, and without real public process. Davis also
describes an insidious “soft privatization” of state-owned public lands, in
which state budget crises are used to shift priorities toward
revenue-generating ventures like resorts, golf courses, and convention centers.
“Some states, such as Wisconsin under Governor Scott Walker, have entirely
zeroed out their state park budget lines, forcing them to rely on revenue
alone,” he writes.
The book provides with a brief
history of public lands in the United States, and describes the various
government agencies charged with their administration and protection. David
then systematically defangs the arguments of privatizers. He resists rhetorical
soapboxing, and does the hard work of laying out arguments of the opposition,
examining them in light of a wealth of ecological, historical, and economic
data.
Davis describes arguments from
privatizers who see science-based environmental management as a “moral crusade”
and “utopian,” and who would argue that even the Grand Canyon needn’t have
special status because “any place so special would be better protected by
selling access, which, because of the scarcity of places like it will be worth
a lot.” He exposes their profound distaste for political process, and their
misplaced faith in market-based economics.
“Without a better, healthier
environment,” he writes, “what they have left to offer the American public is
pretty thin gruel: the bitter medicine of “market discipline,” a lot of “No
Trespassing” signs, and $300 tickets for Disney’s “Yellowstone Experience.”
Yet Davis does not glorify
public lands management. “It would be a grave error if . . . the complicated
and decidedly mixed record of public management was sugar-coated and its
failures, fiascos, and disastrously bad decisions were overlooked,” he writes.
A list of failures includes overgrazing, clear-cutting, predator “control”
programs, and massive water projects.
Davis acknowledges that public
land management agencies have struggled to balance professionalism and
“scientific management” with openness to diverse clientele, local knowledge,
and citizen participation. This criticism is found on the left as well as the
right. As David Harvey has notably written, “control over the resources of others, in the name
of planetary health, and sustainability of preventing environmental
degradation, is never too far from the surface of many western proposals for
global environmental management.”
Looking at customer
satisfaction surveys, scientific evaluations of agency management, and the
accountability of public land agencies, however, Davis puts forth a convincing
argument that “because they are public and thus ultimately accountable
entities, these same agencies were slowly, and not without great difficulty,
pulled in the direction of openness and responsiveness.”
In other words, public land
agencies do a pretty good job.
When public lands and
wilderness advocates first appealed to state and federal governments to protect
the Boundary Waters Canoe area in 1909, much of the once-massive upper-Midwest
forests lay in shambles. Davis quotes William Shands’s book on the history of
Wisconsin’s northern woodland in the late 1920s:
“The whole world of northern
Wisconsin was on fire in those years. You could choose a high point in any one
of today’s ranger districts and see miles of cut-over, burned-over land. Tree
stubble and smoldering slash littered the landscape.”
Wilderness advocates around
the turn of the century managed to rescue a portion of boundary waters region
from further logging. Defenders of the boundary waters organized again during
the 1960s and 1970s, after an unregulated tourist industry had inundated the
area with retreats, seaplanes, and motorboats. The area, although it is
designated as a federal wilderness and is the most visited park in the
country, continues to be threatened by proposals to open new
mining operations.
The clean lakes and lush
wooded islands that Barney Lakner screamed about as “his land,” in other words,
have been repeatedly rescued from ecological ruin resulting from unmitigated
private and corporate extraction. Although not perfectly managed, the Boundary
Waters have thrived in the context of science-driven decision-making and public
participation.
This is, as Davis
acknowledges, a messy, political process. It is also a progressive strategy:
rational, discursive, and science-based. In a world full of tempestuous and
ahistorical opinionating, this is a welcome relief.
Davis argues that the
maintenance of public lands is integral to a well-functioning democracy. They are
one way that citizens of the United States can work together to uphold
“collective values” and celebrate the potential of collaborative,
future-looking stewardship.
In making this connection,
Davis’s book offers an important and timely contribution toward both protecting
precious natural and cultural heritage as well as a progressive political
process itself.
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