What’s Really at Stake in the Public Lands Sell-Off
Why the Senate's proposal to offload millions of acres matters more than the obvious recreation-related reasons
Let’s just come right out of the gate and acknowledge - before any of these lands were "public," they were Indigenous. This is not a metaphor or a gesture toward solidarity - it’s a truth with legal, historical, and ongoing implications. Many of the lands now under threat in the U.S. Senate’s proposed sell-off were once home to hundreds of tribal nations - nations that were forcibly removed, relocated, and stripped of the right to steward the very places we now hike, bike, fish, ski, and camp.
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As someone who is not Indigenous and is a recreator, I think about this often. And here I am, engaging in a campaign to stop the selling of public lands, while in my mind I wonder: are Indigenous communities currently reliving the taking of land that was once theirs?
What’s happening now is not a new assault. It’s a continuation.
This week (last week? what week is it?), buried in a sweeping Senate budget package, a proposal advanced to sell off up to 3.3 million acres of federally managed public lands across the Western U.S. - from California to Utah, Wyoming to New Mexico. The amendment, introduced by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), frames this as a commonsense path to revenue and development. But let’s be clear: this is a threat to more than just outdoor recreation (which of course it does impact). It’s also a threat to environmental policy, wildlife corridors, wildfire management and any shreds of Indigenous sovereignty tribes may feel.
Public land is not just about scenery. It’s about soil carbon, water retention, biodiversity, and climate adaptation. These systems don’t function in isolation. Fragment them enough, and they stop functioning at all. We are already living on the edge of ecosystem collapse - what’s being proposed in the Senate pushes us further.
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Let’s walk through this together, and please feel free to add more in the comments.
Tribal Components
The proposed sales don’t require tribal consultation, don’t prioritize tribal acquisition, and don’t include meaningful protections for sacred sites. These lands hold stories, gravesites, ancestral knowledge, and unceded treaties. When public lands are privatized, Indigenous claims to return, restore, or steward those lands become even harder to realize. This isn't just about removing access; it’s about removing the possibility of justice.
Climate Resilience
Many public lands - especially those managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service - contain intact ecosystems that store carbon in forest soils, grasslands, and old-growth tree cover. Others serve as buffers for wetlands, alpine zones, and desert habitats that are becoming increasingly vulnerable under climate pressure. Once sold off, these lands lose their protected status and become open to extractive development, fragmentation, or permanent ecological loss.
Wildfire Mitigation
Many of the parcels eligible for sale are wildland-urban interface (WUI) zones - the very areas that buffer human development from high-intensity wildfire. These are the places firefighters use as access points, firebreaks, or staging areas. They’re critical to landscape-scale fire mitigation and prescribed burning strategies, and selling them off to the highest bidder guts our ability to manage a worsening fire crisis.
Wildlife Corridors
Bears, elk, mountain lions, pronghorn, and countless migratory bird species rely on large, uninterrupted stretches of habitat to move, breed, and survive. When you carve these lands up into parcels for sale - especially without wildlife planning - you sever migration routes and isolate populations. That accelerates species loss and disrupts entire ecosystems, not just the iconic animals we see in trail cams or on interpretive signs.
Collectivity
We don’t often say it this way in outdoor circles, but public land is one of the few truly collective things we still have. Land we don’t own but can move through. Land held in trust not for profit, but for posterity. This proposal rips at the seams of that fragile fabric, and it opens the door for more. More extraction, more enclosure, more luxury resorts in places we used to trail run. If that sounds dramatic, consider the precedent: once these lands are sold, they’re gone. They don’t come back.
The outdoor community often treats “public lands” as shorthand for adventure, solitude, escape. But we can’t afford to treat them as neutral (see last week’s post). These are contested, beloved, and increasingly threatened spaces - and we have a responsibility to speak up when they’re under attack.
With the **July 4 deadline** looming, this measure could be decided within the next week. Let’s not wait for the worst to happen. Because public lands only stay public when we protect them.
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What We Can Do
Call our Senators and urge them to oppose the public lands sell-off in the Senate budget package. Sites like 5calls.org make it easy, or use the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
Tell Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) that this is not what stewardship looks like. You can reach his office here.
Support Indigenous land stewards working to protect and rematriate land:
Join organizations fighting this proposal, like:
Share this story with your climbing partner, hiking buddy, biking group, fishing friends - anyone who uses and loves public lands.
Lastly, it’s ok to feel overwhelmed. There’s a lot going on right now. Take a breath. Get outside. Remind yourself why we need to do all we can to protect these spaces, for climate and beyond.