S4E20: You Can Help Save Public Lands from Privatization

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): After we recorded this late into the morning of Tuesday, June 24, there were significant changes made to the budget rider by its author, Mike Lee. So stick to the end of the episode. We do have some good news. It's not over yet, but we'll take whatever good news we can and keep fighting.

0:00:27 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today we are diving into an urgent issue, one that might actually compel you to do something rare these days. Make a phone call. A real live voice on the line call. We're going to talk about a rider buried in what I refuse to call by its official Trump era name. We'll call it what it really is, the Bloated Billionaire Bailout, a dream budget for the ultra wealthy, which would slash public services and social programs to hand out tax breaks to billionaires.

0:01:24 - (Chris Clarke): And among the many things this budget threatens to slash due to a rider introduced by Mike Lee, are public lands. Mike Lee's rider proposes selling off between 2 and 3 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, all of it in the west, including Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

0:01:52 - (Chris Clarke): We need to stop this language from making it into the final bill. And if we do, is the bill okay? No. Slashing food assistance to starving children, cutting arts funding, firing staff of agencies that are protecting our lands and our public health and our food safety. Those are all bad. And I'm not here to weigh one atrocity against another. I'm here to say we must stop this particular thing, and we can also be working to stop the other stuff. But we must stop this rider first.

0:02:29 - (Chris Clarke): Before we get into details. Assuming the world keeps turning until September, I want to take this podcast on the road to El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, September 27, for the 21st annual Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta, held at the El Paso Zoo and Botanical Gardens, 4001 East Paisano Drive. It's a perfect place to promote what we're doing. The show is about bringing desert people together to protect the places we love, from Lancaster, California, to Big Bend National Park in Texas. We share so many of the same struggles and face the same misconceptions by outsiders about what the desert is.

0:03:06 - (Chris Clarke): And the more we stand together, the stronger we are. And we are fundraising with a travel fund to help us get there. So if you go to 90 miles from needles.comelpasso you'll find all the details. We're trying to raise 850 bucks to cover travel and lodging, and we're already almost halfway there. And that's thanks to supporters Davin Widgerow, my friend of about 40 years standing Sandra Dumas, Jacqueline E. Smith, Marcia Geiger, and Peter Ossorio.

0:03:37 - (Chris Clarke): The Chihuahuan Desert gets a lot less coverage in environmental media than other deserts in the US and we'd like to change that. If you're in El Paso or Las Cruces or Juarez, come on out to the fiesta on the 27th of September, 10.30am to 3pm. We're going to do our best to be there with your help, and we hope to see you there too. Back to the rider. Now what the hell is Mike Lee up to? His budget rider would force the sale of at least 2 million acres and possibly more than 3 million acres of forest Service and BLM land across the western US all within five years.

0:04:17 - (Chris Clarke): It gives the Departments of Interior and Agriculture wide discretion over which lands to sell the US Forest Service as part of the Department of Agriculture and this rider sets a blisteringly fast timeline. Nominated parcels must be identified within 30 days and then additional tracts every 60 days until that acreage goal is met. And this will not surprise you, given the general tenor of the Trump administration.

0:04:43 - (Chris Clarke): No hearings, no public input, no comment, period. No tribal consultation, no safeguards to ensure the land goes to state and local governments that might keep it as public land. This is a public lands fire sale, and commercial interests are first in line. Now all this is happening in a context in which Trump's Justice Department laid out legally shaky but precedent setting arguments for revoking national monument protections, and that potentially opens another 13 and a half million acres to privatization.

0:05:16 - (Chris Clarke): There is a map, a really good map created by the Wilderness Society that shows lands considered eligible for disposal from either the BLM or the US Forest Service inventory. And we'll link to that map in the show notes along with KML files for the Google Earth crowd. But it's important to be clear. The map shows 250 million acres, and there's only 2 to 3 million acres currently on the chopping block.

0:05:42 - (Chris Clarke): That's about 0.8 to 1.3% of the total area indicated on the map. The map is alarming, but don't let that map lead you to misunderstand the immediate threat, which is already catastrophic. What's eligible for sale under Lee's rider? Any parcel of public land that doesn't have a conflicting valid existing right. So active mining claims are safe. They won't get sold out. Transmission corridors safe solar and wind facilities with existing rights of way also saved.

0:06:16 - (Chris Clarke): There are a couple of things that don't protect the land from being considered eligible for disposal or sale. One of those is grazing permits. Sorry Clive and Bundy, you might find out at some point soon that you're illegally grazing your trespass cattle on private land instead of public land. Also, Wilderness Study Area status. There are a lot of Wilderness Study areas classes eligible for disposal and this means places managed as wilderness, often for decades.

0:06:48 - (Chris Clarke): Wilderness study areas under the BLM are managed as wilderness now, thankfully, there's pushback, including from some Republicans. Republican Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch of Idaho, as well as Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy of Montana have said that they can't vote for the bill with this rider in it, and in fact that opposition from Daines and Sheehy is likely why Montana was excluded from the list of states subject to this.

0:07:20 - (Chris Clarke): The Republican majority in the Senate is pretty slim. They can afford to lose three votes, and right now Lee has lost four. And so he's scrambling. In a recent podcast interview with Glenn Beck, Lee said that he was considering editing his rider to limit sales of Forest Service land to within 2 miles of a population center and BLM land within 5 miles of a population center. And that raises a couple of questions.

0:07:49 - (Chris Clarke): What counts as a population center? What is a population center? Phoenix? Yeah, for sure. Ridgecrest? Yes. How about LaSalle, Utah, population 339? How about my old home of Nipton, California, population 17? If you define population center as anywhere where there's a small group of people, what about those small communities that rely on nearby public lands for recreation or water supply? The headwaters of a lot of streams are in protected land in BLM and Forest Service land.

0:08:26 - (Chris Clarke): Privatizing those, as the Utah Rivers Council points out, poses a risk of water contamination throughout the west for cultural survival. A lot of these small population centers are largely native in demographic makeup, and they have a stake in how the land around them is preserved. And Lee hasn't addressed this. And frankly, even if he did, we have seen how definitions can shift in legislation like this.

0:08:54 - (Chris Clarke): Any verbal promises he makes mean nothing once the bill gets to the floor. Here's a thing too. We already have mechanisms to transfer public lands into private hands when it's appropriate. We can argue over whether it ever is appropriate, but we can already do it. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act FLPMA of 1976 allows BLM to sell off small, isolated parcels, especially those surrounded by private land or with low conservation value, in exchange for cash or for more ecologically valuable lands elsewhere.

0:09:26 - (Chris Clarke): In other words, Mike Lee's rider isn't necessary. It's not legally necessary. It's not practically necessary. This is political theater. But if it passes, it becomes dangerous reality. Now, even if Lee's rider is revised to focus on lands near towns, sorry population centers, these areas still matter. Some of them, as I mentioned, provide cultural continuity for tribal communities. Some are conservation hotspots.

0:09:59 - (Chris Clarke): Some are just the last convenient places where people like me and maybe like you go to breathe freely, to hike, to run, dogs, to touch the land. And that last bit is key. Here's a segment from a Senate committee hearing in which Lee grilled then BLM head Tracy Stone manning about the BLM's turn toward conservation as a core value during the Biden administration. His comments are telling the Conservation and.

0:10:30 - (Mike Lee): Landscape Health rule that you recently finalized elevates non use either on par with or arguably above most multiple use. Now, according to FLPMA, BLM is required to manage for multiple use and for sustained yield, with multiple use referring to things like grazing, timber harvesting, energy, mining and recreation. Can you cite a provision of FLPMA that allows for you to depart from that standard and to prioritize non use instead of multiple use and sustained yield?

0:11:08 - (Mike Lee): What provision of FLPMA allows you to do that?

0:11:11 - (Tracey Stone-Manning): Title one, section 103 is where the multiple use definition occurs in FLPMA. And it is very explicitly clear that managing for fish and wildlife habitat, managing for natural and scenic values, those are direct words from FLPMA is our responsibility.

0:11:32 - (Mike Lee): Look, I understand that and as part of the sort of the recreation portfolio, and I don't think there's anything in there though, that authorizes you to do exactly what you're doing here, which really is for deliberate long term non use. This is a frustration that I have. And it's not just me that has it. I hear every day, all the time from constituents, from local officials who are increasingly frustrated at the direction that BLM has taken under your lead. Now keep in mind, the federal government owns 67% of the land in my state and the biggest share of that is Bureau of Land Management.

0:12:17 - (Mike Lee): And so we live as subjects subjects to the Bureau of Land Management. And increasingly BLM, under your leadership, seems to have taken an approach that manages these lands like a museum. It's a you can look but you cannot touch sort of approach. These are in people's backyards you can hardly throw a rock in any direction in Utah and not hit federal land. Now, that portion of the land in my state, the portion of the 67% of the land in my state owned by the federal government, your portion of it amounts to 22 million acres in Utah.

0:13:00 - (Mike Lee): That's 7 million acres more than all of the land, not just the federal land, but all the land in the state of West Virginia. And month after month, a sweeping new policy or management plan seems to be imposed by your agency, harming Utahns who rely on the land for their livelihood, who rely on the land for all sorts of things. Now, the agency has strayed pretty far from its. Its statutory mandate to manage this land for multiple use and sustained yield. The Conservation rule is a pretty blatant example of this museum approach of you can look, but you can't touch one that's taken over the BLM, and I don't think it can be fairly reconciled with FLPMA.

0:13:43 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, so let's unpack that. Museums are places where you go in, you look, you keep your hands in your pockets or folded behind your back. There are some museums that are not like this, but we all understand what Lee's referring to here. It's like the Louvre or the Met or the Smithsonian. You know, you do not walk up to the Mona Lisa and scratch her nose. That's the image he's trying to set. But my issue with that image is that with very few exceptions, I have never treated public lands as a museum.

0:14:17 - (Chris Clarke): Sure, we've got to keep our hands off the petroglyphs and refrain from picking flowers, especially if the flower species is endangered. That's true on private land, too, by the way. But overall, if a piece of land is designated for conservation and closed to extractive industry, I tend to go out there and touch stuff and pick up rocks and look underneath them and then put the rocks back where they were.

0:14:39 - (Chris Clarke): People fish and hunt on public lands that are managed for conservation. People climb and drill anchors on public lands that are managed for conservation. People even take off highway vehicles on open routes on public lands that are managed for conservation. All that seems to qualify as touching the land to me. But what Mike Lee means by don't touch is he wants to be able to radically alter what's there. And we don't need to use museums as a metaphor for that.

0:15:09 - (Chris Clarke): What would happen, for instance, if you took a cow and a calf into a grocery store and let them wander around and eat whatever they wanted, and then you tried to give the supermarket a dollar and A half a month. What would happen if you took a motocross arena or a BMX dirt bike park and decided to strip mine it? People would get pissed off. Right, Lee? Lee is being disingenuous. In other words, I touch the land all the time. I hike, I watch wildlife. I collect native plant seeds to grow at home, following BLM rules for gathering plant material, which are pretty easy to follow.

0:15:43 - (Chris Clarke): Now, we regularly take our dogs to a little 350-acre parcel of BLM land near our home. And this piece of land could be eligible for sale under this rider. If that land gets privatized, we lose our access. Then we can't touch that land. Mike Lee doesn't consider non consumptive use as a real use of public lands. If it doesn't turn a profit, it doesn't count in his worldview. For many of us, though, these public lands are priceless, not because of the money they generate, although there's a whole episode we could do on what tourism from public lands brings into small communities in the Southwest, but because of what the lands give us.

0:16:26 - (Chris Clarke): Peace, sense of connection and continuity and a shared home. And we come to depend on these public lands and to revere them and to get pretty furious when people threaten. Here's a salient example. This week, a lot of our friends in Tucson. Hello Tucson. Are extremely concerned about this rider's effect on Sabino Canyon, which is a beautiful and slightly developed cleft in the Catalina Mountains right on the north edge of town.

0:17:01 - (Chris Clarke): Sabino Canyon is part of the Coronado National Forest, and it was developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built a four-and-a-half-mile road into the canyon. That road has nine bridges crossing Sabino Creek. They intended to continue the road to the top of Mount Lemmon, but the terrain at the canyon head was just too steep, even for the Civilian Conservation Corps, which has built roads up some crazily steep inclines.

0:17:28 - (Chris Clarke): Cul de sac or not, the canyon became a popular tourist destination and in 1978, it was closed to private vehicles with a shuttle available to take visitors to the end of the road. And those shuttles are now electric, which is pretty cool. All of Sabino Canyon is shown as eligible for sale in the Wilderness Society's map. And that won't change if Lee adjusts his language to rule out remote lands as he promised.

0:17:54 - (Chris Clarke): It would be hard to find anyone to claim Tucson isn't a population center. Sabino Canyon is an urban wildland park. Now Mike Lee is talking about releasing these public lands in order to boost affordable housing. And yes, Tucson can use a lot more affordable housing. As of 2024, the city had a deficit of nearly 5,000 homes, which is significant for a city with just over half a million residents. Tucson would need to build around 2,300 housing units a year just to stay in the same place statistically as its population grows. And in 2023, the city built just 1300 new housing units, a thousand fewer than they needed. Tucson's housing affordability problem is significant, and it's not getting better all that quickly.

0:18:44 - (Chris Clarke): And privatizing Sabino Canyon would do nothing to remedy the housing problem in Tucson. A typical acre of undeveloped land near the canyon's mouth sells for around 200k, according to an authoritative and exhaustive survey of Zillow listings I just did. Those lots are more or less in the flatlands, but they're close to Sabino Canyon. In the unlikely event that Sabino Canyon sold for the same price per acre, you'd have to lay down more than $300 million to buy the place, at least as indicated on the Wilderness Society's map.

0:19:16 - (Chris Clarke): But given the canyon scenery, you'd probably have to multiply that by a factor of two or three or five. And given that Lee's rider language contains no assurances that housing would be anything like affordable if it's built on any of the public lands that he's targeting. It's far more likely that housing built in Sabino Canyon would be extremely expensive, not only because it would be targeted at the mega mansion end of the spectrum, but also because of engineering difficulties with building on steep slopes.

0:19:47 - (Chris Clarke): This would not be affordable housing, and you can reach similar conclusions about vulnerable public lands near Las Vegas, or near Las Cruces and El Paso, or near Santa Fe and Taos, or near dozens of other desert communities. Dress it up in housing rhetoric as they might, this rider would hand over our public lands to corporate billionaires in the name of cutting the taxes for those same corporate billionaires.

0:20:14 - (Chris Clarke): We've got to stop this rider from moving forward. Call your senators now. You can reach them via the capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 or go to senate.gov and search. It's pretty easy. Call whether your senator is a MAGA stooge or a dependable defender of public lands. The entire Senate needs to hear from us. And remember, be firm but polite when you call. You will be talking to a staffer who is likely in her early 20s and who almost certainly had nothing to do with creating this dire threat to our common heritage.

0:20:50 - (Chris Clarke): Do it now. 202-224-3121. And while you make that call, because you're going to be on hold for a little bit, Fred Bell has brought us some hot corvid action to listen to a common raven and a mob of pinyon jays having conversations at a Spring and Basin and Range National Monument in southern Nevada, one of the national monuments that may be threatened by the recent Justice Department opinion. And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles. Thanks to all of you who are working to oppose this devastating rider by Mike Lee.

0:22:50 - (Chris Clarke): That guy has got to find another job. You know, he actually came out in favor of term limits for senators. Two terms and then you're out. He's in his third term now. He claims it's not hypocritical of him. Thanks as well again to Davin Widgerow, the wonderful Sandra Dumas, Jacqueline E. Smith, Marcia Geiger and Peter Osorio for making my mission to El paso and the 21st annual Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta seem actually doable.

0:23:22 - (Chris Clarke): Go to 90milesfromneedles.com/elpaso to help us make up the difference. The Chihuahuan Desert and El Paso in particular are underserved by environmental media, despite the work of many fine and committed local environmentalists who've been doing this for years. You can help us help them get the recognition they deserve by going to 90milesfromneedles.com/elpaso and giving us a little bit of gasoline money.

0:23:49 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks as well to Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy; Martín Mancha, our logo artist; and our nature recordist, Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. Look for us next week with the next episode and I will see you at the next watering hole, assuming Mike Lee hasn't sold it off to Nestle at that point. Bye now. Okay, so I promised you an update at the end and here it is. It is right now, 11 o' clock on June 24, 2025. I was up late until around 12:30 this morning putting what I thought were the finishing touches on this episode, getting it ready to publish automatically. At 10 o' clock this morning, I wake up.

0:24:33 - (Chris Clarke): I check my email. There is a new issue of the Land Desk by Jonathan Thompson. A wonderful Substack look in the show notes for a link and I see that stuff has changed and I run to the computer and I postpone publication so I can record this. There is some good news here, but we're not done. Jonathan puts it this way: “Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump sycophant has slightly backed off on his proposal to sell off public lands, but only slightly.” end quote.

0:25:05 - (Chris Clarke): Lee posted following On Twitter at 5:42am: “Housing prices are crushing families and keeping young Americans from living where they grew up. We need to change that. Thanks to you, the American people. Here's what I plan to do. 1. Remove all forest Service land. We are not selling off our forests. 2. Significantly reduce the amount of BLM land in the bill. Only land within 5 miles of population centers is eligible.

0:25:35 - (Chris Clarke): 3. Establish Freedom Zones to ensure those lands benefit American families and four Protect our farmers, ranchers and recreational users. They come first. Yes, the Byrd rule limits what can go in the reconciliation bill, but I'm doing everything I can to support President Trump and move this forward. Stay tuned. We're just getting started.” End quote. So it's clear that pressure is being felt. That little thanks to you, the American people. Here's what I plan to do in the tweet is a marvelous little bit of passive aggression. It's also clear that despite some of the takes going around in social media saying that we have won, this isn't over.

0:26:14 - (Chris Clarke): I understand why people are saying we've won, but we haven't. The bird rule thing is really important. The Senate parliamentarian decides what can and what cannot go into a budget reconciliation bill. If stuff is too far astray from being a strictly budget matter that needs to go through the Senate in a separate bill. And that's not good for Lee's rider because reconciliation bills get decided on a simple majority vote in the Senate, which he apparently can't even pass.

0:26:42 - (Chris Clarke): Other bills have to go through the 60-vote majority rule. So in normal times we would say this budget rider is done for, stick a fork in it, et cetera. But given that the MAGA crowd has decided they only need to pay attention to the rules they like, it's uncertain what's actually going to happen. As for the Freedom Zones thing, nobody's really sure precisely what that would entail, almost certainly including Mike Lee.

0:27:08 - (Chris Clarke): Here's an important bit of info. Most of the BLM lands that have been dropped from consideration, according to Mike Lee's description, were likely never going to be sold anyway. They are much too remote from where people live and work and do business. Limiting sale of BLM lands to within 5 miles of population centers basically doesn't affect the outcome much at all. By taking national forests out of consideration and trimming off the remotest BLM lands that's still somewhere between 1.25 and 1.9 million acres, and I can't put the threat any better than Jonathan Thompson puts it.

0:27:45 - (Chris Clarke): He says that's still a crap ton of public lands that will be privatized, cluttered up with houses and roads and cul de sacs and power lines and so forth, and to which the public will lose access. If this goes forward, you can plan on houses popping up on some of your favorite hiking trails, running or biking areas. End quote. Jonathan is wise and we endorse his take. There is one big piece of good news, and then we'll leave you to make those phone calls to the Senate.

0:28:12 - (Chris Clarke): Today's developments notwithstanding, it's really important that your senators hear from you. This isn't over, but the good news is this. We spent some time in this episode talking about Sabino Canyon in Tucson. Sabino Canyon is U.S. Forest Service land. It's no longer part of Mike Lee's budget rider's inventory of public lands to be sold off. That is good news. Feel free to celebrate. And as a side note, if we do get to take the podcast to El Paso in late September, Sabino Canyon and its wonderful hiking is pretty much directly on the way there from Joshua Tree.

0:28:44 - (Chris Clarke): So anyone that's up for a celebratory hike in Sabino Canyon Somewhere around the 25th of September, let me know. And with that, call your senators. Do it now.

0:29:00 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.