It is insane, but there it is. Even some Republicans are opposing the Republican proposal in the U.S. Senate to sell of a minuscule fraction of the land that the United States government owns.
Republican Senator Mike Lee is pushing the plan, and it has caused a firestorm of opposition. The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that it cannot be part of the Big Beautiful Bill, but Senator Lee is planning to rework the proposal to make it pass muster.
If you read the Pravda Media, you would think that Lee is talking about divesting all or most of the land controlled by the federal government. It is “millions of acres,” which certainly sounds like a lot, until it sinks in that the federal government owns most of the Western states and, in total, controls 640 million acres of land that cannot be developed.
“Once these public lands are sold, they’re gone forever and that’s something most Americans should care about,” said Tristan Henry with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The group is one of many environmental organizations raising alarms.
The measure is tucked into a sprawling budget bill aimed at making Trump-era tax cuts permanent. It would require the federal government to sell up to 3 million acres of public land across 11 western states over the next five years, including large swaths near Mount Rainier and throughout the Cascade Mountain Range.
Supporters argue the land should be under local control. State Rep. Phil Fortunato (R–Auburn) said the bill gives priority to states, tribes, and local governments to purchase the land before it ever hits the open market.
Much of the problem with Lee’s proposal–intended to ease a massive housing crunch–can be attributed to people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Even in places where no normal people can afford a home, they rebel at the idea that an inch of land might be sold. It’s insane.
Liberal environmentalists responded to Mr. Lee’s sell-off proposal with well-practiced outrage, but so did many conservative hunters and Western Republicans. Populist Trump supporters criticized selling public lands as a move that would pawn off America’s greatness with no guarantees that the land sales would actually result in affordable homes, instead of more mansions for the wealthy.
In response to the pushback, Mr. Lee said on Monday night that he would take all national forests off the auction block and limit the sale of other federal lands to parcels within five miles of population centers.
Even as he vowed to push ahead, it was unclear whether conservative voters and Western Republican senators who opposed the idea would get on board with Mr. Lee’s scaled-back proposal.
“They’re really going to have to rework the provisions,” said Aiden Buzzetti, a Trump supporter and the president of the Bull Moose Project, a Theodore Roosevelt-inspired group that spent the past week posting social-media images of the American West that declared, “Our heritage is not for sale.”
“Just because there’s space doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it, sell it and develop it,” Mr. Buzzetti said.
It’s all based on magical thinking, NIMBYism, and having no sense of perspective. People who complain that they can’t afford to live somewhere will simultaneously protest any attempt to build housing.
They speak of “paving over paradise” as if reducing the vast amounts of undeveloped land by 0.25 to 0.5% would turn America into an industrial hellscape envisioned in the execrable 1970s environmentalist movie Silent Running, where the only nature left was hurled into space to preserve samples. Until human beings finally decided that preserving the last bits of forest and wildlife was not worth the bother.
Democrats have vowed to continue opposing any large-scale land sale, pointing out even under Mr. Lee’s new terms, desert riverbanks and hiking and biking areas in Nevada, western Colorado and the desert playground of Moab, Utah, could end up for sale.
Alex Williams, 19, a ski-resort waiter who sleeps on the couch of his mother’s apartment, said he felt alienated by the entire debate over whether to protect or develop the West’s open spaces. Sold off, he said, they would go to the rich. Preserved, a home would remain out of reach.
“I’m poor,” he said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
If people with the attitudes of contemporary Americans had come to settle North America–assuming it were completely unpopulated–and arrived on its shores today, what would they do?
I grew up in the West. I love the wide open spaces. But I am pretty sure that somewhere, among those 640 million acres of public lands, a few acres could be set aside for housing without it despoiling nature.
Apparently not. Mother Gaia, in her infinite wisdom, created human beings, but was determined to ensure that we had no place to live, farm, ranch, or drive.
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