Our Public Lands Are on the Chopping Block Again

What’s at stake, for Bears Ears and other mineral- and fuel-rich public lands, is spelled out clearly in Project 2025, an ultraconservative policy guide created by the Heritage Foundation. Its authors include William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the first Trump administration and called for an immediate boost in coal, oil, and natural gas production on public lands. In a National Review op-ed from 2016, Pendley even argued that the federal government should sell all of its lands. 

In his role leading the U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary Doug Burgum has gotten straight to work enacting this agenda. He’s used his authority overseeing nearly 500 million acres of public lands to deliver a series of political handouts to the fossil fuel industry—from driving forward new policies to effectively ban renewable energy development on public lands to issuing a proposed repeal of the BLM’s Public Lands Rule. 

That rule, put into place in 2024, recognizes that conservation is a core responsibility of public land management and must be considered alongside uses like mining, grazing, and oil and gas development. Its adoption was one of several ways that the agency had recently worked to improve the federal government’s relationships with 574 federally recognized Tribes, including the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and others with deep connections to public lands. 

Just last October, the Biden administration also announced a new Bears Ears management plan that includes input from five Tribal nations and incorporates their traditional ecological knowledge. Abandoning the plan, considered the first of its kind, “would be the continuation of a historic practice that has excluded Native people from being able to access their traditional homelands and their sacred places to practice their religious and cultural beliefs,” says Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund and an enrolled member of the Native Village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. (Campbell has been part of the lead counsel team representing the Tribes in multiple rounds of litigation to defend Bears Ears since 2017.) “Tribal Nations put an immense amount of effort into the creation of Bears Ears, utilizing that as a tool to protect historic sacred places,” he adds.

Bears Ears was protected as a national monument under the Antiquities Act—a law adopted in 1906 to provide protections for “objects of historic or scientific interest” found on federal lands. Trump’s first administration illegally attempted to roll back protections for Bears Ears and for nearby Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, also in southern Utah. 

The first Trump administration’s wholesale assault on public lands was largely reversed by the Biden administration. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante were returned to their original size—protections that NRDC has intervened in court to defend. The application of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA (used to review federal actions for their environmental impacts), was restored and updated. Biden also designated 10 new monuments; among them, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni–the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, where protections were long sought by the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition due to encroaching uranium mining. That landscape now forms part of the largest swath of protected lands in the Lower 48, the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, which is another part of Biden’s public lands conservation legacy. 

But all those added protections provide fresh targets for the Trump administration. Indeed, in July, the Trump administration began rolling out a series of new regulations across multiple federal agencies—including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—that severely weaken NEPA, silencing communities and ignoring growing climate risks.

With more than 35 million acres of federal lands within its borders, Utah has long been on the forefront of public lands battles. 

Advocates like Katie Umekubo, managing director for NRDC’s lands division, expect to see a significant push by the BLM for land transfer in western states like this one. Another way of describing it, Umekubo notes, is land disposal. “That’s basically transferring public lands to states, private entities, or others to get rid of protections and pave the way for extraction,” Umekubo says. 

The state of Utah is already seeking exactly this. It recently filed a complaint with the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging federal control over most BLM land. Though the Court rejected the complaint, Utah has suggested it may try again in other courts. And other states may follow suit: As of last fall, a dozen of them threw their support behind Utah’s attempt to take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land. 

“The idea of viewing federal public lands as open to extractive interests hearkens back to a much older history in the United States, when we were viewed as a continent of boundless resources that could be never exhausted,” says Michael Pappas, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

For more than a century, the federal government doled out land to new states, homesteaders, and industries ranging from agriculture to mining to railroads. It wasn’t until the adoption of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 that the government placed a priority on protecting important natural, cultural, and historical places for people. 

In the 1970s, the country saw more unrest from the “sagebrush rebels” of the West, led by ranchers in Nevada who objected to new federal requirements on livestock on public lands. (The requirements came partly out of a decision in a 1974 court case argued by NRDC, which called for the BLM to begin preparing in-depth impact statements detailing the environmental effects of proposed livestock grazing areas on public lands.) Congress subsequently enacted legislation intended to guide management of public lands, including those used for grazing. 

But today, the country seems to be pivoting back to this earlier ethos. During the federal budget reconciliation bill debate earlier this year, Utah senator Mike Lee, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, pushed for a fire sale of more than three million acres of public lands—an area larger than Connecticut—that would have resulted in the loss of cherished trails, parks, and recreation areas for people across the country. And specifically for Utah, along with its western neighbor Nevada, the language pushed through the bill’s markup in the House Committee on Natural Resources by Nevada representative Mark Amodei and Utah representative Celeste Maloy would have sold BLM lands in those states. Ultimately, facing opposition from both sides of the political aisle, those provisions were withdrawn; nevertheless, these ongoing threats remain. 

About a third of all federal land sits in Alaska. Among the most majestic wild spaces is the Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. At nearly 17 million acres, stretching for 500 miles north to south, it comprises nearly 80 percent of southeastern Alaska. The forest’s 500-year-old cedars provide shelter for 400 animal species, from bears and wolves to bald eagles. Tongass waterways are home to enormous populations of salmon, a key food source for Indigenous Peoples and the driver for a $986 million annual fishing industry that supports more than 7,000 jobs across the region.

Nevertheless, the Tongass is at risk from increased commercial old-growth logging. The first Trump administration eliminated the Roadless Rule that protects much of the forest from road construction and potential logging. That rule was reinstated by President Biden. But on day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order directing his Agriculture Department to once again undo those protections. 

“The Roadless Rule is incredibly important for ensuring the ongoing ecological integrity of the Tongass,” says NRDC senior attorney Garett Rose, who was part of the legal team that took the Forest Service to court when it ended protections for the forest in 2020. “This forest provides critical habitat and is key in the fight against climate change. It’s the leading carbon sink in the Forest Service system.” 

Rose also points out the landscape’s cultural significance for the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian Tribes of southeastern Alaska. At stake are “traditional cultural uses, hunting, gathering, foods, and medicine,” he says. “They are the leaders in conserving this place.”

Despite the clear benefits of protecting the Tongass, the state of Alaska has repeatedly sought to nix the Roadless Rule there. But these opponents of protections “keep getting knocked back on their heels” in court, Rose says. “It’s a testament to how well constructed the original rule was and the public support for the rule.”

Now, the fight continues. “We’ve been defending the rule since the beginning,” he says, “and we’re going to do everything we can to keep defending it.”

A similar tug-of-war is taking place at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 19-million-acre preserve in northeastern Alaska that’s rich with polar bear, caribou—and oil. In 2017, Congress opened the refuge to oil and gas development. And in 2021, the Trump administration finalized plans to make part of the lands available for oil and gas drilling, ending decades of protection. But the result was underwhelming; the sale attracted limited interest. The most recent lease sale, which concluded the first week of January, was even worse: Not a single company submitted a bid. 

The results suggest that “drill, baby, drill” may work better as a campaign slogan than as policy. The United States is already producing record amounts of oil, and the petroleum industry doesn’t want to reduce profits by increasing production, says Melinda Taylor, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and cofounder of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business. Industry people “will tell you, off-the-record, that they don’t intend to devote a lot of resources to trying to get permits to do additional drilling on federal lands because they’ve promised their investors and their shareholders that they will be profitable.”

Still, prompted by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which greatly expanded leasing mandates and incentivized fossil fuel production, some private companies have begun scooping up public lands all over the map. With the first tranche of leases announced in September, it’s already resulted in “massive encroachment issues,” says Bobby McEnaney, land conservation director for NRDC, “such as leasing in roadless areas in North Dakota that are also home to endangered black-footed ferrets.” (Only 300 of these iconic prairie creatures remain.) 

Tracts of wildlands in Colorado are also now under threat. In the Denver metro area, public lands surrounding the Aurora Reservoir, one of Denver’s most important drinking water reserves, is being targeted for a fracking well—and drawing community pushback.

The Trump administration also quickly moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as well as the National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska’s North Slope (a portion of which was protected last spring). As McEnaney notes, the fate of Indigenous Peoples hangs in the balance. "There’s a way of life up there for certain villages that depends on subsistence hunting and fishing, and that way of life is fundamentally being jeopardized,” he says. “They’re already under tremendous stress from climate change, and that’s accelerated by drilling and fragmenting the landscape.”

It’s because of these stakes that Indigenous communities and NRDC will keep pushing back. Trump’s officials “keep thinking that they can open up the refuge to more drilling,” McEnaney says. “But we’ll continue—as a community and as NRDC—to make sure that safeguards are in place.”