How can a student of public land history and policy respond to Walter Donway’s essay, “Challenging 50 Years of Environmentalist Public Land Policy”? He starts with a bill introduced by Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) in June 2025 that would have required the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to dispose of between 2.2 and 3.3 million acres of land. But he doesn’t seem particularly interested in the details of the bill or even detailed analysis of the problems with federal public land ownership and management. (This is clear when he explains that the 250 million acres of land that could be offered for sale constitute about one-third of BLM and USFS land, when the two agencies manage only a combined 438 million acres.) Nor does he explain what exactly he means by the last 50 years of environmentalist policy, other than citing the decision Congress made in 1976 to declare permanent federal ownership of public lands managed by the BLM. Finally, while Donway clearly supports transferring public lands to private ownership, it isn’t clear which lands and why, other than a principled commitment to private property and free markets: he repeats free-market talking points that “[p]rivate ownership, in principle, is more efficient and innovative than government ownership. . . . Private property is treated better and brings the land into the marketplace to find its most economically desirable use.” So what exactly is he challenging, and why?
My best guess is that Donway’s argument is buried in his conclusion and is an apology for his broad, ideological convictions rather than a serious engagement with public land issues. It is time, he insists, to return to Lockean principles, “Proposing an Enlightenment ‘modernist’ view of land as a human resource against the dominant Rousseauian ‘postmodernist’ view.” This, he explains, would restore “the natural order of things.” That is, immediately after criticizing Rousseau for seeing nonhuman nature as pure and Edenic, Donway calls readers back to the garden of Locke’s state of nature, where individuals could pursue life, liberty, and property without the crushing corruption of government.
Does the debate to sell federal public land really represent the collision of two great worldviews that vie for the soul of American politics? Of course not, at least not for most Americans. Donway himself suggests as much when he laments Senator Lee’s call for federal safeguards that would prohibit foreign nationals from buying public lands, which fails Donway’s libertarian purity test: “A better argument would have been consistent: Transfer public lands to private ownership, which is an American/Enlightenment principle, and rely on ownership and free markets for the outcome, another such principle.”
The primary problem for Donway is that meaningful arguments about changing federal land management and ownership patterns will always fail his purity test, because the public lands exist not in the ideological ether but in a concrete and complex political economy. The point here is not to dismiss Donway or broader debates about political ideology. These broader debates are essential to a thriving democracy. The point is simply that Donway does not engage the public land debate in a meaningful or helpful way. I’ll highlight just a few problems with Donway’s argument before pointing out the obvious: Senator Lee’s bill was not the opening of a new debate, since bills like his are introduced quite frequently in Congress, and the BLM already has legal authority to sell or lease public lands.
Free Markets & Political Economy
First, Donway’s sweeping and idealistic assertions about free markets, and the “most likely” outcomes of Senator Lee’s bill becoming law, are deeply problematic. The simple fact is that public lands cannot be transferred from federal ownership to private ownership unencumbered. The federal government initially acquired sovereignty over the public domain lands from European powers and Mexico, and it acquired title through almost 400 treaties with Indigenous tribes on anything but free-market terms. And public lands today are the product of, and embedded in, a complex political history and economy in which federal ownership coexists with private, state, and county property rights and privileges. There simply is no simple, free market into which the public lands can been transferred. For example, the federal government is still adjudicating mining claims and road rights of ways on land managed by the BLM and Forest Service. And privileges such as grazing permits, are tied to private property values, even though they are not themselves rights. Any serious effort to privatize public lands will need to address the rights and privileges that have accumulated over the last 200 years.
Intrinsic vs Economic Value
Second, Donway frames public land history anachronistically as an ongoing battle between those, like deep ecologists, who argue public land needs to be federally owned and protected because of their “intrinsic value” and those who demand privatization because it will alleviate a housing shortage (most often a specious argument), increase local tax bases (true, but that would replace funding the federal government currently provides to counties in lieu of taxes as well as billions of dollars invested in wildland fire suppression and other management activities), and lead to “more efficient and innovative” management. He wants to dismiss public land supporters as primitivists who pine for Rousseau’s noble savage, and he wants to laud advocates of privatization as champions of true American values.
It is historically inaccurate to put this frame, as Donway does, on public land retention in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Yes, primitivism and an appreciation of the sublime helped build support for the national parks, but those weren’t the only factors. The parks were and are justified as a public good that, along with private property, public education, national defense, etc., are necessary to support a thriving democracy. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted made perhaps the most eloquent case for this in the late 19th century. Given that Donway likely supports government provision of some public goods, he should explain why the national parks do not fit legitimately in this category.
Donway’s Locke/Rousseau binary is even more problematic when applied to the land identified in Senator Lee’s bill: land managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the BLM. The early national forests were established to provide a continuous flow of timber and to protect water quality. Yes, this challenged the laissez faire capitalism of a cut and run timber industry that left behind a landscape of devastating wildfires and soil erosion. But this doesn’t change the fact that the national forests were established for their economic value (timber) and to protect public goods like water quality, rather than as an effort to protect intrinsic value or lock up resources.
And it is willful ignorance to suggest that BLM public lands were retained to protect their intrinsic value or that environmentalists have been dominant in shaping BLM management. These lands are what is left of the original public domain lands, and they remained open, technically, to homesteading and sale until 1976. They remained in public ownership not because of restrictive government policy but because had such limited economic value in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
President Hoover even tried to give the remaining public domain to the Western states in 1929, while retaining subsurface minerals and continuing their privatization. The states rejected this offer. As the governor of Utah at the time explained, “The States already own . . . millions of acres of this same kind of land, which they can neither sell nor lease, and which is yielding no income. Why should they want more of this precious heritage of desert?”
And environmentalists did not drive the congressional decision to declare permanent ownership of BLM public lands in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. If FLPMA had reflected “environmentalist policy,” it would not have affirmed the Mining Law of 1872 or other public land laws that privatize public resources at virtually no cost.
Ideology Meets Practice
Third, Donway’s analysis is so focused on ideology that it remains utterly detached from decision-making about public lands. He brushes past the legal arguments, economic arguments, and interest group demands that dominate public land debate. Remember, he laments Senator Lee’s decision to seek any kind of government regulation, even if it is simply to regulate land sales. The problem with this, he writes, is that it is an “unstable amalgam of Lockian Enlightenment logic and promises to solve a long-term housing crisis by means of government intervention.”
Geography John Wright once described land tenure as “the special musculature of the American West.” Over and against Donway’s grand narrative of competing worldviews, Wright argues that the “morphology of landscape is part accident, part assertion, and always contested . . . in the American West this robustly Darwinian process rarely results in the extinction of land claims, and places are best seen as shifting stages where the exercise of power and resistance to it vie for dominance.” The Sagebrush Rebellion, for example, flared primarily over grazing issues, as the Bureau of Land Management implemented the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, along with a host of new environmental laws, under a presidential administration committed to environmental protection. The Western states fought new regulation by challenging federal ownership as unjust and unconstitutional, passing legislation demanding that the federal government transfer BLM public lands to the states. Most lawmakers knew that the legal argument held no weight, given the last century of jurisprudence, so their actions were acts of political protest rather than serious legal action. So what quelled the Sagebrush Rebellion around 1982? It clearly wasn’t a turn to the free market; rather Interior Secretary James Watt gave western states what they really wanted, which was greater control over public land management.
Demands by Western states to transfer federal land to state or private ownership are still engaging more in political protest and theater than anything else. Yes, privatizing public lands would allow the states to tax them, and giving land to the states would allow state governments to manage them for higher revenue output. But the states are also keenly aware of the tradeoffs. In its most recent analysis, the state of Utah determined that owning public lands managed by the BLM would be revenue positive only if it acquired the subsurface mineral rights and oil prices remained sufficiently high. That is because the state would need to absorb the cost of fire prevention/suppression and other management tasks now handled by the federal government. And Utah counties would lose revenue currently provided by the federal government through a variety of programs, from revenue sharing to payment in lieu of taxes. Joseph Taylor and his team provide an excellent history of this funding through The Spatial History Project at Stanford: “Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands.”
And Donway should look at what has happened in the past when congressional Republicans have tried to sell or transfer large areas of federal lands. In early 2017, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R, UT) introduced a bill that would have sold 3.3 million acres of public land in the west. He limited the land in question to parcels the BLM had identified as difficult to manage and not serving the public interest. Chaffetz faced powerful opposition from across the political spectrum, including conservative hunters and anglers. And this occurred despite the fact that the Republic platform in 2016 (as well as 2020 and 2024) included a commitment to transfer public land out of federal ownership. Chastened, Chaffetz took to Instagram, writing, “I hear you and HR 621 dies tomorrow.”
Dealing Seriously with Public Land Issues
Donway argues that Senator Lee’s bill set a precedent for “proposing and debating a return after a half-century to land use policy from a Lockean point of view.” As evidenced above, this simply isn’t true. Senator Lee’s bill is neither novel nor more serious than other efforts over the last fifty years to dispose of public lands. The primary public land debates have been about state’s rights to own or at least control resources on public lands, recognizing private property rights in certain privileges (e.g. grazing permits), increasing natural resource development on public lands at below market rates, and generally unravelling public land regulation. Calls for land disposal in the last 50 years have been driven more by these concerns than by a commitment to completely free markets.
What is more, public land issues do not require the shift in worldview that Donway calls for. Existing federal law already provides authority for land sales and leases, even if the tools are cumbersome. How else could the departments of interior and housing and urban development announce an agreement this year to sell and lease public land for housing projects without any new legal authority. (Again, in my view, the housing argument is specious, but that is beside the point.) And Congress has also provided some place-based legislation to address development needs, as seen in the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998. The act authorizes BLM to sell 67,000 acres of land outside of Las Vegas, which is ringed entirely by public lands, at fair market value. And section 7(b) authorizes below-market sales for development of affordable housing. The law is definitely what Donway sees as an “unstable amalgam” because it is the product of political compromise, including provisions to use revenue for conservation work. Donway’s time would be better spent analyzing why BLM has not sold all those 67,000 acres, rather than waving Locke’s treatises on government.
About The Author
