Picture this: America’s forests, rivers, and deserts—our beloved public lands—managed for the future and for all of us. Managed to deliver clean air and clean water, recreation access, wildlife habitat, timber, minerals, and energy security. Picture national parks that leave visitors with a deep sense of wellbeing. Picture your grandkids experiencing the same freedom to camp, hike, hunt, and fish that you have today.
Why isn’t this a given? Why, when the vast majority of Americans value these lands and support their protection, do they remain a political battleground? How is it that some elected leaders speak of public lands as if their worth lies only in what they could fetch at auction?
Part of the answer is that the scaffolding beneath public-lands management was built for a different time. Many of the laws guiding these lands are fifty to 150 years old. Environmental science and public expectations have evolved dramatically since then, but the system has not kept up.
The management structure itself is a tangle. Interior manages parks, refuges, and BLM lands. The Forest Service sits in Agriculture. Marine sanctuaries fall under Commerce. Energy authority is split across agencies. This fragmentation leaves land managers trying to solve twenty-first century problems with twentieth- and even nineteenth-century machinery.
I’ve seen the consequences. Early in my career, an aging dam needed removal, but three federal departments shared responsibility. Each waited for the others to act. The public didn’t care who owned which piece of the problem—they just wanted the river restored. That kind of gridlock still plagues decisions across the West.
“Gridlock still plagues decisions across the West.”
During my four years leading the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), I met career staff deeply committed to public service. But they were consistently stymied by outdated policies, limited funding, and siloed structures. Environmental analysis became less about crafting the best solutions and more about producing documents that could survive inevitable lawsuits. Too often, staff spent more time behind a computer than out on the ground.
Meanwhile, demand for outdoor recreation has exploded. Half a billion visits occur on public lands every year, yet agencies (especially the Forest Service and BLM) lack the budgets and personnel to keep up. When I ran the BLM, its recreation budget for 245 million acres was smaller than the State of Idaho’s.
Layer climate change on top of all this—megafires, water scarcity, shifting wildlife corridors—and the mismatch between current laws and present realities becomes even sharper.
Now the situation has reached a breaking point. Severe budget cuts, mass layoffs, and the sidelining of core conservation functions have destabilized the very institutions charged with stewarding our shared lands. A forester recently told me what’s happening resembles a megafire: fast, hot, and devastating.
The metaphor fits. As the flames advance, we must protect what we cherish: preventing the sale of public lands, keeping recreation areas open, preserving our conservation ethic. But even with triage, we will lose much: protections rolled back, habitat leased for industrial development, and decades of expertise swept away as staff depart.
Yet anyone who has walked through a burn scar knows something else: after a megafire, there is a moment of possibility. When the old canopy falls, light reaches places it hasn’t touched in decades. Seeds long buried can finally germinate.
We are entering such a moment now.
When the smoke clears, much of the architecture underpinning public-lands management will be in ruins. But in that clearing lies a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and rebuild and design a system that is more nimble, coherent, and capable of meeting the challenges ahead.
We should pursue a future that delivers more: more parks and protected places, more clean water, more resilient forests and rivers, more abundant wildlife, more collaboration with tribal nations, more access for everyone.
Strength in our democracy comes from opening the table, inviting debate, and encouraging bold ideas. That is exactly what our public lands need now. Reimagining their future will take humility, science, and sweat. It will take all of us, working in common purpose.
That is how we can rise and grow from the ashes.