“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762)
On June 29, 2025, Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee withdrew a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have allowed the first major sale of public lands since the enactment in 1976 of the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), which declared that all public lands would remain government-owned except in cases of “the national interest.” Despite the withdrawal, during the Senate’s frantic last-minute wrangling over the tax-and-spending package, the initiative may be the opening skirmish in a campaign to change a national policy long-sustained by environmentalists.
The initial June draft would have required the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to identify and auction between 2.2 and 3.3 million acres of federal land in the next five years. Although this acreage only constitutes 0.5% to 0.75% of the two agencies’ land portfolios, a small fraction of federal holdings, a sale this size would be unprecedented in our time, in absolute numbers. And speaking of “precedent,” the provision made more than 250 million acres of public lands eligible for sale (about one-third of all BLM/USFS land), by defining broad new criteria for “disposable” tracts.
The legislation went hunting where the ducks are. Targeted lands span 11 Western states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, but notably not Montana—reportedly in response to objections from that state’s pro-public-land Republican senators), including some areas in national forests and BLM rangelands that are not used for recreation, wildlife habitat, and grazing. The predictable opponents of the initiative, including the National Wildlife Federation, the Wilderness Society, and the Center for American Progress, promptly stated their positions in absolute terms: no sale of public lands, the homes of “struggling wildlife,” with many “significant intact landscapes.” They launched new fundraising campaigns to support lobbying efforts. Proponents, in contrast, framed the sell-off, in part, as a solution to a lack of affordable housing.
The Debate Over “Locked-Up” Land
The rapid and unprecedented initiative, so typical of this administration, did not (as commentators may imply) simply occur to President Trump at breakfast. Senator Lee, chief author of the Senate provision, is a long-time public land skeptic who has questioned the constitutionality of national land ownership and argued that the federal government should “fulfill its promise” to sell off Western lands. His ideas align with the decades-old “Sagebrush Rebellion” ethos in Western states that federal lands should be transferred to states or privatized–an idea Lee and other Utah conservatives have championed.
During the 2024 election, Donald Trump endorsed land sales to “open up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction” that would reduce housing costs. Back in office, the administration moved quickly. In March 2025, it convened a federal task force to identify ‘underutilized federal lands’ suitable for residential development, which became a budget mandate in the current legislation. Thus, Senate Republicans could position the land sales as delivering on Trump’s mandate to open federal land for housing. This has had the intellectual backing of some conservative policy groups. William Perry Pendley, a BLM acting director during Trump’s first term and longtime advocate of selling public lands, drafted a chapter about the future of the Department of the Interior in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” plan.
Such ideas are evident in the language of the bill. For example, the notion that federal land ownership is “excessive” or akin to “federal colonialism” in western states has been a rallying cry of groups like the American Lands Council and think tanks in the Koch and Heritage networks. The bill’s authors cite former President Bill Clinton’s land disposal efforts (in the 1990s, the BLM identified millions of acres for potential sale) as precedent, attempting to give the proposal a veneer of bipartisanship. Still, the intellectual lineage reaches even further back, including to free-market environmentalists who argue that private ownership leads to better land stewardship and that federally protected open space is “locked up” from market forces.
Of course, the legislation included exemptions and guardrails. An exemption for national parks and congressionally protected areas, for example, preempts scare tactics by opponents. Opponents alleged these exemptions are “just for show” : excluding the National Parks is well and good, but rather beside the point considering that BLM/USFS doesn’t manage these lands anyway. Environmentalist groups have attached special labels such as “roadless national forest tracts,” “wildlife migration corridors,” hunting and hiking areas, and sites of “cultural importance” to parcels that might go on the auction block. The bill specified that land sold “must” be used for housing, but opponents pointed out a lack of requirements for the affordability or density of that housing.
Today, the federal government “owns” 640 million acres of land, some 28% of the nation’s total land area of 2.27 billion acres. The history of American land policy chronicles dramatic swings between disposal and retention. Early Americans leaders viewed land settlement as synonymous with national prosperity and security. These choices and policies deliberately applied the ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the ideas of John Locke, whose logic underpinned American settlers’ sense of entitlement to “indigenous lands.”
In the 19th century, federal policy overwhelmingly focused on disposing of public lands into private or state hands to encourage westward expansion. The prototype was the Homestead Act of 1862. Over the act’s 124-year lifespan, about 270 million acres–10% of all U.S. land–were granted virtually free to 1.6 million homesteaders for family farms. The Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s gave railroad companies more than 130 million acres as incentives to build transcontinental lines, while new Western states received school land grants. About 97% of these federal-to-private land transfers occurred before 1940—that is, in the nation’s first 150 years.
At the turn of the century, attitudes were shifting toward federal “stewardship.” Starting with Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the government set aside huge tracts of lands for public use and “protection,” a new ethos that some landscapes had intrinsic value beyond economic exploitation. This gradually solidifying logic achieved near-consistent expression in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976, which declared that public lands would remain in federal ownership unless disposal served the national interest. Not everyone was pleased. The Sagebrush Rebellion of Western ranchers and some state legislators demanded that federal lands (especially BLM range lands) be turned over to states or private owners.
To put the debate in context: About 60% of U.S. land, 1.3 billion acres, is privately held by individuals and companies. Just under 40% remains public land, with the federal government managing the lion’s share (around 28%) and states and local governments holding the rest. Percentages vary dramatically by region; Western states are the epicenter of federal land–over 90% of federal acreage lies in the 12 westernmost states and Alaska.
Why Sell Public Lands
Pragmatic arguments for land sales are mixed with ideological justifications. The immediate argument is that freeing up federal land will “spur housing construction,” alleviating the shortage of homes. With millions of acres open to development, proponents envision new subdivisions, possibly entire new towns, being built on what is currently government ground. In western metro areas hemmed in by federal land, local officials have complained that they cannot expand or build infrastructure. By selling select parcels on the outskirts of fast-growing communities (for example, around Boise or Las Vegas), the bill aimed to “get Washington, D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” in Lee’s words.
Developing public land also enlarges the local tax base. Once private, formerly tax-exempt federal lands can be taxed by counties and should create jobs in construction and real estate. Meanwhile, the federal treasury would receive a revenue boost from land sale proceeds—billions to fund infrastructure or reduce deficits. Not to mention that maintaining vast tracts of land costs money (for wildfire management, upkeep of facilities), so selling off a portion reduces federal expenditures long-term; in an era of budget deficits, this has appeal. Of course, the entire context of the land sale provision was a budget bill laden with tax cuts and starving for new revenue.
Private ownership, in principle, is more efficient and innovative than government ownership. Conservatives criticize Washington bureaucracies for mismanagement by locking up resources, imposing one-size rules, and failing at basic tasks like wildfire prevention. Private property is treated better and brings the land into the marketplace to find its most economically desirable use. Free market environmentalists point out that if land has value (for recreation, timber, housing, etc.), an owner will maximize that value, whereas public land is prone to overuse or neglect because “no one owns it.” In the words of Senator Lee, “We’re turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value.”
Arguments from philosophic and economic principles are in no sense absent from the debate. Individuals have a right to “homestead” unowned land. The federal government’s continuing claim permanently and in principle to “ownership” of one-third of a country is incompatible with liberty. From this perspective, each acre the government holds is an acre withheld from Americans; transferring ownership to private citizens (through sales in this case) actually restores the natural order of things. Jefferson and James Madison never envisioned the federal government as the massive permanent landowner; early federal policy, as mentioned, was to dispose of land to private citizens as quickly as possible. Proponents of the 2025 plan argue for a return these core American principles. It is a view that celebrates creating of wealth, progress conquering wilderness, and a free market’s “highest and best use” of natural resources to advance human well-being. By the same logic, leaving land wild or sparsely used is a missed opportunity. Proponents of land sales point to vast western spaces and ask why building homes, ranches, or businesses is not a “noble” use of land but “locking land away” for conservation or recreation is a noble use.
Why Save Public Lands?
Opposition to public land sales unites conservation organizations, outdoor recreation groups, some local communities, most Democrats, and even a few Republicans. Of course, opposition groups addressed such issues as home building, commercial development, state land management, and risks of “misuse” of sold lands for resorts, “non-affordable” housing, and worse… The Center for American Progress lambasts the proposal as “a shameless ploy to sell off pristine public lands for trophy homes and gated communities” under the guise of housing. They argue Congress should enact targeted housing policies (like zoning reform or subsidies) rather than “seize” public lands. They must make these arguments, of course, to address the “headline” rationales for the proposed sales.
Ironically, as soon as they move on to “fundamental” objections to the sale of federal lands, they contradict themselves and reveal their true “interests.” I do not believe they would approve even of “affordable” housing developments—or any development—on any federal lands. I would suggest to you that their real outlook is that development is a fundamental, far-advanced threat to “nature” and “wildness”—just as the energy industry is framed as an existential threat to climate and human life, just as “resource extraction” transfers the birthright of America to “billionaires.”
For example, they argue that sold federal lands cease to belong to all Americans. These areas at present are now our public lands–for hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, and other recreation. Opponents point to public lands serving ecological functions: wildlife habitat, watersheds, carbon sinks, and intact natural ecosystems. Private ownership fragments habitats, increases pollution, and degrades ecosystems. Many lands flagged for sale include wildlife migration corridors and winter ranges for mule deer and pronghorn, and, always, threats to pristine landscapes. The Wilderness Society and Sierra Club argue that privatization would undermine decades of progress in conserving biodiversity and open space. Just “open space.”
I will not say that “in the end” these objections reduce to philosophical premises—because they reduce to such premises in the beginning, middle, and end. A great deal of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy focused on “Nature”; today’s environmental ethos did not emerge as an academic discipline until the 1970s. It rode the momentum of a sense of crisis created earlier in works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1963), Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Donella Meadows and his MIT team’s Limits to Growth (1972), and earlier American literature on the environment by John Muir and Aldo Leopold.
Emerging especially in the United States, Australia, and Norway, environmentalism—including “deep ecology”—quickly injected into academic studies and scientific journals such Rousseauian ideas as moral obligations toward ecosystems and species, a critique of “human chauvinism” and “the Western super ethic,” the legal standing of trees and other natural objects, animal “liberation,” “green parties” in Europe, and perhaps the crowning concept from deep ecology of “biospheric egalitarianism”—the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others.
All of it was a rallying (or regrouping) in our time of anti-Enlightenment themes in the framework of emerging postmodernist philosophy and the neo-Marxism of the German Frankfurt School. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: “An often-overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. While classical Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labor and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of ‘human alienation’ from nature.”
Sometimes what is most determinative of our direction is invisible because it envelops us, as vital and invisible as oxygen. It is difficult to overstate how the concept of indispensable wilderness has pervaded our culture in every guise of media. Books, articles, TV programs, editorials, movies, environmentalist funding campaigns, and statements by public figures, including politicians, have all hammered home the core environmentalist creed, starting in the 1960s and 1970s and continuing ever since. Messages like that of Bob Marshall, co-founder of the Wilderness Society, on “repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every inch of the whole earth,” to that of David Brower, Executive Director of the Sierra Club from 1952-1969, on “wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.”
Rousseau Redux: Romanticism and the Roots of Opposition
At root, opposition to land sale is not “practical,” but philosophical, moral, even spiritual. Impassioned critics speak not just of development pressures or loss of habitat, but of desecration. Their language of “violation” traces directly to the anti-Enlightenment and later Romantic revolt against Enlightenment values—especially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose vision of the “state of nature,” expressed in Émile (1762) and elsewhere. rejected civilization as corrupting, artificial, and destructive:
“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
In Rousseau’s view, moral purity resided in nature, in wildness unspoiled by human striving. The logic of Locke that land becomes property through labor and use was, to Rousseau, the first sin of inequality and alienation. The sentiment gained new life in the 19th-century American Transcendentalism of Thoreau, who wrote in Walden (1862): “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
This ethos animates much of today’s environmental resistance movement. The Wilderness Society declares that “these lands are sacred—places where wildlife thrives and humans reconnect with what is essential.” Sierra Club leaders warn that turning wildlands into housing tracts is not just unwise, but profane. A recent campaign by the Center for American Progress calls the 2025 land sale proposal “a desecration of the American spirit.” The language channels the deep ecology of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’s The Shallow and the Deep (1973): “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves… independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”
In this framework, nature is not a resource but an entity with intrinsic rights and moral standing. In the words of environmental writer Wallace Stegner, our parks and wildlands are “the geography of hope.” To “unlock” them for housing, as the bill proposes, is seen not as rational development, but unfastening a chastity belt preparatory to spiritual degradation.
This is the Rousseauian vision reborn: faith that civilization endangers virtue, that economic motives debase moral life, and that untouched nature is the last refuge of what is best in the human soul. The Enlightenment ideal—reason producing from nature what is needed to serve human life—is cast as original sin. Against the Lockean view that property rights protect human flourishing, these voices proclaim a moral imperative to leave land untouched, because the touch corrupts.
Thus, opponents of converting public lands into housing tracts see not mere replacement of pine forests with lawns and gardens, but a profanation. Many conservationists have viewed the remaining federal wildlands as the fortress, the citadel, against the complete domination of nature by man–a space where non-human life can flourish and where people can reconnect with it. The Wilderness Society’s name reflects the terminology of Thoreau and the ethos of Rousseau.
Rousseau’s worldview became the first thoroughgoing attack on the fundamental ideas of Age of Enlightenment leaders like Voltaire and Denis Diderot, who came to view him as an apostate. For the Enlightenment, “natural lands” were a blank slate for writing the human story. Endowed by reason to survive on Earth, learning scientific methods, and accumulating knowledge made possible improvement of human life, enjoyment of nature, and gradual escape from nature’s exactions through disease, famine, and natural disasters. This same philosophical divide was evident in the discourse surrounding the Big Beautiful Bill, one side framing land in terms of development, output, and utility, the other in terms of legacy, metaphysical identity, and ethical duty.
A Better Argument for Private Land
Let’s return for a moment to Sen. Lee’s comment in withdrawing the public-lands provision as Congress rushed to meet its self-imposed deadline of sending President Trump a bill to sign by July 4. Sen. Lee mentioned that given that time pressure, he had not been able to insert “safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families.” The comment highlights the tension in making the case for public-land sales between ideology (for example, American liberties) and government planning (for example, enforceable development guidelines).
For example, if the provision had become law, sales at auction for fair-market value would have meant the likely bidders would have included local and national homebuilding companies, investment firms specializing in land speculations, and possibly resource extraction companies for lands with timber or mineral potential (justified as “community infrastructure” for local jobs). Wealthy individuals might bid for attractive parcels near amenity-rich areas justified by claiming community benefit. Perhaps most likely is that major homebuilders like Lennar and D.R. Horton, along with regional land developers, would be primary purchasers. They would subdivide and build as allowed, probably in areas near existing towns where demand is highest.
By creating ambiguity in their case—between the argument for liberated entrepreneurship, with public lands available to Americans via proven market mechanisms, and the argument for intervention—with housing outcomes guaranteed by government economic planning—proponents made it highly vulnerable. Opponents could scoff (credibly) at pretensions to successful bureaucratic directives and guarantees and, at the same time, count on decades of arguments creating suspicion of “uncontrolled development,” threats to “wild places,” romanticizing “nature.” 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. From that base, opponents could have been characterized as collectivist and statist—protecting the government monopoly on land against individual enterprise—and the radical roots of their true anti-development stance exposed. Instead, opponents were handed the powerful argument that government economic planning cannot be relied upon.
Now, It Is a Debate
Secular shifts imply extended timeframes, but a precedent has been set in proposing and debating a return after a half-century to land use policy from a Lockean point of view. Proposing an Enlightenment “modernist” view of land as a human resource against the dominant Rousseauian “postmodernist” view. The 2025 budget fight is the first time in decades that Congress has seriously entertained the idea of making vast American public lands available to Americans for reasons other than transfers to tribes or the creation of parks.
Now joined, the debate is likely to persist beyond this budget cycle. The coalition opposed to the provision will remain vigilant because they have tasted a rare (albeit very slender) bipartisan moment of agreement that America’s public lands should not be on auction. Broader national conflicts over conservation, climate resilience, renewable energy siting, mining for critical minerals, and urban sprawl all intersect with public land management.
Are America’s Romantically dubbed “wild places” permanent land banks of untapped economic potential or sanctuaries for nature unmarred by human striving? The Wilderness Society invoked the philosophy of Rousseau to argue that Americans in commodifying the last wildlands would cross a line—irreversibly—into a new and unknown world. Against that apocryphal warning against American hubris, proponents of land sales advanced an unstable amalgam of Lockian Enlightenment logic and promises to solve a long-term housing crisis by means of government intervention into the market to achieve highly specific outcomes. We may well have begun a new chapter in shaping the American landscape for generations to come.
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