Arizona's Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. (photo: Bureau of Land Management/Flickr)
Keep
It Public: Resisting the Privatization of Public Lands
By Ethan Linck, Jacobin
05 April 17
Public lands place the common good over the profitable. We should
fight any attempt to privatize them.
In
the first day of the 115th Congress, the US House of Representatives passed
a wide-ranging rules package that
included a controversial change to how Congress calculates the cost of
transferring federal lands to states and other legal entities. Observers widely
interpreted the move as a way to ease the sale of public lands, and Utah
representative Jason Chaffetz confirmed these suspicions when
he proposed a bill to transfer “excess” federal holdings to local control in
ten Western states.
It’s
tempting to view public land management as a niche issue, even for
environmental justice activists. With constant assaults on human dignity and
the climate crisis escalating every day, why focus on something so seemingly
bland and byzantine?
Some
supporters might point to public land’s long-term utilitarian purpose or to the
intrinsic rights of the non-human world. The Left, however, should oppose these
transfers for a very simple reason: they represent an assault on arguably the
United States’ most successful experiment in public ownership.
For
Public Use
To
understand why public lands hold both practical and symbolic importance for the
Left, it’s instructive to examine the modern system’s origins. For all intents
and purposes, this dates to Abraham Lincoln’s formal protection of Yosemite
Valley with the Yosemite Grant Act of 1864. The Yosemite Grant explicitly
identified the federal government as the land’s primary manager and the
public as its beneficiary:
[California] shall accept this grant upon the express conditions
that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation. . . .
All incomes derived from leases of privileges to be expended in the
preservation and improvement of the property, or the roads leading thereto.
The
emphasis on “public use” and the demand that revenue only go to “preservation
and improvement” has persisted to the present for the agencies that now manage
most of the United States’ public lands, the USDA Forest Service (USFS) and the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
“The
mission of the USFS,” the agency explains, “is to sustain the health, diversity,
and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of
present and future generations.” The BLM describes its raison d’être in similar
terms: “It is the mission of the BLM to sustain the health, diversity, and
productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and
future generations.”
To be
sure, this mission was initially tarnished by its racist definition of “the public.”
And the lands state agencies preserved were stolen from indigenous Americans
for the benefit of nineteenth-century settler colonialists. Yosemite itself
could only be established after a military force drove the native Ahwahneechee
people from their homes, a move conservationist icon John Muir cheered.
The BLM, formed in 1946 after the fusion of the General Land Office and the
Grazing Service, inherited many of its holdings — including the infamous Malheur National Wildlife Refuge —
from exploitative treaties. In
the 1990s, tensions between Hispano communities in northern New Mexico and the
USFS over the sovereignty of seventeenth-century Spanish land grants exploded into violence.
In
recent years, however, federal land management agencies have struck (occasionally uneasy)
alliances with oppressed groups, establishing new policies to bring indigenous people into
their decision-making processes. The improved relationship has sometimes paid
political dividends for native people, helping them protect sacred ground, return ancestral remains,
and remove hydroelectric
projects to restore historic fishing runs.
Inevitably,
these goals have run up against the interests of extractive industries that
want to exploit public resources for private benefit.
The
Public Trust Doctrine
The
conflict between promoting the good of the commons and promoting the interests
of capital dates back to federal land management’s earliest days.
Less
than a decade after the USFS’s founding, a controversy between
Roosevelt-appointed Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot and Interior secretary
Richard Ballinger threatened to tear apart the Republican Party on the eve of
the 1912 presidential election. Gifford, a pioneer conservationist and wise-use advocate, accused
Ballinger of siding with water and coal-mining interests; Ballinger claimed
that Pinchot was trying to quash “free enterprise” rights.
A century later, lawsuits remain a regular feature of the relationship between
federal management agencies and extractive industries.
The
showdown between Pinchot and Ballinger also foreshadowed a core concept in
modern environmental law: the public trust doctrine.
Though its roots lie in archaic property laws that appeared in Rome, England,
and Spain, the doctrine gained prominence in the US following Joseph L. Sax’s
seminal 1969 paper “The Public
Trust Doctrine in Natural Resources Law.”
Arguing
that the government (or “sovereign”) should hold certain natural resources in
trust for public use regardless of private property ownership, this doctrine
triggered a series of rulings that established its primacy over ownership of
bodies of water, wetlands, and other landscape features. While legal precedent
varies from state to state and from state to federal law, invoking the “public
trust” has become a powerful tool to fight the privatization of the commons
(and launch legal challenges to
major climate change contributors).
As a
result, environmental law is an anomaly in the broader legal landscape, a space
solicitous to collective goods in a legal system notoriously sympathetic
to private property claims.
The
Sagebrush Rebellion
Given
the scale of federal land holdings and their egalitarian implications, it’s
unsurprising that public land management triggered one of the most significant
reactionary responses to environmentalism in American history: the Sagebrush Rebellion. Emerging from land
disputes in 1970s Utah and Nevada, the movement has recently regained national
prominence thanks to the 2014 Bundy Standoff and the 2016 Malheur occupation.
While
the rebellion’s central tenets cannot be fully divorced from an identity
politics of rugged, white, frontier individualism, its political aims are simple.
In Western states, where the federal government manages 20 to 85 percent of the
total land base, Sagebrush Rebels call for nothing less than the wholesale
transfer of these holdings to local — and inevitably private — control.
The
rationales for mass privatization have run the ideological gamut from concerns
about absentee landlordism to explicitly racist opposition to the
welfare state. But the movement’s key animating belief is that
federal management of public lands is designed to redistribute wealth away from
stakeholders in extractive industries.
The
rebels have found a sympathetic ear in elite right-wing circles. Ronald Reagan
famously supported the movement. And one of his economic advisers, Steve Hanke,
delivered one of the rebellion’s foundational speeches, a sympathetic address to a gathering of land
transfer advocates in Reno in 1982.
Decades
later, in 2008, he was still a supporter. “[Public] lands,” Hanke wrote, “represent a huge
socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”
Ownership
Divorced From Wealth
The
connection between retaining public lands for the common good and left politics
should be obvious. But this relationship hides something potentially more
radical: unlike nearly every other aspect of contemporary American society,
public lands have nothing to do with wealth.
In a
country where ownership — and, indeed, basic human rights —
are directly proportional to private purchasing power, this is a significant
anomaly. For instance, workers earning $15 an hour at Seattle-Tacoma
International Airport own as big a share of iconic Mt Rainier as Pacific
Northwest billionaires Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Nor does geographical
proximity matter: Rainier belongs equally to workers in Baltimore, Miami, and
Cheyenne.
This
ownership confers a range of benefits. Most directly, it means that access
to Lincoln’s lands for “use, resort, and recreation” remains truly democratic.
(Though an increasing number of private National Park Service concessionaires threaten
this mission.)
But
more importantly — given the significant structural obstacles that prevent many
workers from taking advantage of recreational opportunities — it means that
each citizen shares the benefits that public lands provide: water, climate
security, agricultural production. Since these are all quantifiable, marketable
commodities, it’s easy to imagine a system in which a handful of robber barons
controlled them all. Since the early 1900s, however, the munificence of public
lands has been treated as a public good.
The
Value of Uselessness
Of
course, any market evaluation of the 618 million federally held acres would
likely find that a large proportion provide few if any economic benefits. But
rather than undermining their importance, this economic uselessness merely
underscores how public lands challenge the assumptions of capitalism. While
not inherently socialist,
public lands do represent an investment in the aesthetic, environmental, and
social as opposed to the profitable.
The
federal government already manages some lands with no consideration of their
profit-making potential. Federally designated Wilderness Areas and National
Parks, for instance, almost uniformly ban extractive industry (except in rare
cases when claims predate federal-designation status). Less stringently
protected lands, such as USFS holdings, may permit logging, mining, and
grazing, but, at least in theory, do so only if the landscape’s other values
are not compromised. Any profits must be funneled into federal coffers
(and are typically returned to land management agencies).
These
ideals have always been contested. Federal subsidies to destructive and
economically unviable ranching operations arguably favor a handful of well-off
constituents over the public at large. Similarly, commercial exploitation of
resources often creates more profits for mining or logging companies than
leasing fees for the government.
But
these questions relate to implementation, not principle. For the moment,
grassroots movements can push for change in management regimes. The land
transfer movement threatens the basis for this democratic contestation.
An
Ethical Necessity
In
light of recent events, it’s easy to see standing up for public lands as a
fight between wealthy, urban liberals and working-class, rural communities.
But
polling suggests that defending public lands has broad support across a wide
swath of the population, both geographically and demographically. One survey found that four
in five people of color nationwide supported the Obama administration’s land
protection measures. And a 2016 poll of the seven states spanning the
Continental Divide — home to the most reliably Republican electorates in the
nation — found an average of 63 percent “strongly opposed” privatizing public
lands.
Chaffetz
himself has had to acknowledge this broad-based opposition. After his constituents
in staunchly Republican Utah voiced strong hostility to HR 621, Chaffetz
dropped the bill. Announcing his decision on Instagram, he wrote:
I am withdrawing HR 621. I’m a proud gun owner, hunter and love
[of] our public lands. The bill would have disposed of small parcels of lands
Pres. Clinton identified as serving no public purpose but groups I support and
care about fear it sends the wrong message. The bill was originally introduced
several years ago. I look forward to working with you. I hear you and HR 621
dies tomorrow. #keepitpublic #tbt
Going
forward, for both their intrinsic value and their political symbolism, public
lands should be at the center of any socialist environmental platform.
At
stake is no less than one of the most popular, most effective cases of public
ownership in the US. And in a future marked by climate change, retaining
control of one of the primary means for
mitigating its effects is more
than important — it’s an ethical necessity.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment