With President Trump and his administration, the public must again fight to keep its public lands from being privatized and dedicated to resource exploitation, particularly energy development. A useful tool for public lands advocates, activists, and plain old citizens of our great country is the recently published “In Defense of Public Lands, The Case Against Privatization and Transfer”, by Steven Davis. Davis is a professor of political science and environmental studies at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin.
The names of the chapters of this book sound familiar: Public Land and Its Discontents; Every Man for Himself: The Case for Privatization; Getting Serious About Ecology: The Biological Case for Public Lands; The Valuation of the Invaluable: The Economic Case for Public Lands; The Fundamental Democracy of the Commons: The Political Case for Public Lands, Part 1; A Closer Look at Government: The Political Case for Public Lands, Part 2; and The Future of Public Land: Looking Forward in a Time of Peril.
Davis gives a great history of how about one-third of the United States wound up as federal public lands; our national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges, and national conservation lands. In many cases, this was because these lands were considered unwanted, worthless, and undesirable even during a time of corrupt public land domain give away programs. States, companies, and individuals did not want these lands for any price. Now we understand how important and valuable they are and how they enrich the souls, minds, and hearts of all citizens and not just the pocket-books of privatizers, the wealthy, and the powerful.
Davis unmasks the unrealistic and unreasonable agenda of the privatizers, particularly those who hew close to a type of economics that hates government and believes only the market (buying and selling based upon human desires) must distribute land and dollar-based values in what is termed the only effective, efficient, and economic way.
Privatizers, like Terry Anderson, Donald Leal, Robert Nelson, Matthew Kahn, Richard Stroup, John Baden, Delworth Gardner, Randal O’Toole, Sally Fairfax, and Dale Oesterle, believe that self-interest (selfishness and greed in my book) as the only way to determine the true worth of a natural resource. Altruism is disbelieved as a motivational force with these libertarian-like economists and public lands privatizers.
What is most distressing is learning how their radical views have been inserted into mainstream thinking by repetition of anecdotes and outright lies about how ecology and government works. According to Davis, the fatal flaw in their argument is that they say that government cannot ecologically manage land without doing so destructively and that private lands are ecologically healthier but at the same time reject “all reasonable, scientifically defensible indicators of healthy land and ecosystems as subjective value preferences or culturally determined desires or states rather than objective measures rooted in biological science.” In other words, the economic privatizers reject science for their own unscientific preferences which are not based upon any biological or ecological reality.
In summary, Davis says, “… by any measure, for any one of a number of reasons, privatizing public land is a spectacularly bad and harmful policy that will enrich the few at the expense of the many.” I highly recommend buying a copy of this book and reading it. The natural and historic heritage and legacy of federal public lands (and those of states and local governments) are at stake. Read and use this book to fight for what we all love, enjoy, and dream about: our national parks, preserves, forests, wildlife refuges, conservation lands, monuments, and recreation areas. Do it today!
By Brandt Mannchen