Outdoor Insights: More federal shenanigans when it comes to public lands

Tired of reading about scams emerging in Washington D.C. to steal the public lands legacy that we hold dear? Me, too. Nonetheless, there are a couple of big topics that demand the sporting public’s attention.

First, citizens have until Monday, Nov. 11, to comment on a Department of the Interior plan to eliminate the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule of 2024, which made conservation an official use of public lands, putting outdoor recreation on the same level as Bureau of Land Management’s other uses, like grazing, mining, drilling, whatever.

Interior’s official rationale for repealing the language and making conservation a second-class consideration is that it believes the rule is unnecessary and violates statutory direction. Read the rollback proposal for yourself at www.federalregister.gov, then search “Rescission of Conservation and Landscape Health Rule.” Again, comment by Tuesday, Nov. 11.

Then we’ve got a new bill from U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. Readers might recall that Lee tucked tail earlier this summer when the nation’s sportsmen successfully demanded that Congress remove his 3-million-acres public-lands-liquidating language from the massive reconciliation bill. Well, several media outlets reported last week that he’s back with Senate File 2967, the so-called Border Lands Conservation Act.

Like a lot of legislation, this bill does the opposite of its grandiose title, because it wouldn’t conserve anything. What it would do is allow the Department of Homeland Security to enter into cooperative agreements with the Agriculture and Interior secretaries to carte blanche build roads or install other “tactical infrastructure” on any federal lands that lie within a 100-mile radius from the U.S. border.

Any avid outdoors user in this country knows, a 100-mile buffer along the nation’s entire Canadian border encompasses vast swaths of wilderness. In the Lower 48, there’s at least 3.3 million acres that could be affected, including more than 800,000 acres of the Boundary Waters here in Minnesota, and when you include Alaska, the total tops 10 million acres pretty fast.

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Lee’s press release on the bill plays on immigration fears and is chock full of red herrings proclaiming that illegal border activity on or near federal lands is leaving trash, human waste, abandoned vehicles, and illegal roads and trails, and increasing wildfire risk. Anyone paying attention knows this is an attempt from Lee to leverage the public’s concerns about border security into more direct control over management of wild places.

Regarding the bill, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum told the Star Tribune last week: “It would allow the Department of Homeland Security blanket permission to bulldoze, destroy and fence off our public lands so they become inaccessible to visitors.” Jeremy Romero of the National Wildlife Federation told Steve Rinella last week on the Meateater podcast that a big component of the bill would amend the 1964 Wilderness Act to allow for road development and mechanized travel in the name of border security. Per Romero, the language potentially applies to all wilderness areas across the nation even outside the 100-mile so-called buffer.

Most news stories and commentators are nuancing the homeland security aspects of the bill, but I’m not buying it. This is nothing more than an end-run from Lee and his cronies to overwrite existing land protections after their public-lands fire sale language failed last summer.

Outdoor News hasn’t covered this ridiculous bill closely, mostly because I think it has little chance of passage, even in this Congress. Though U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber has voiced his support for Lee’s bill, only one U.S. senator from an actual border state, Ted Cruz in Texas, has signed on as a co-sponsor, and there have been no hearings on it yet. Still, the BLCA demands scrutiny from sportsmen as 2025 winds down.