Are Our Public Lands on the Chopping Block Again

On workdays, Louis Williams rises with the sun and makes a short drive into Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah. There, guides from his Ancient Wayves River and Hiking Adventures companylead visitors past the monument's soaring cliffs and rock art or rafting down the meandering San Juan River. Williams is Navajo, and his Indigenous team represents various local Tribes, including Zuni and Hopi. They all have their own distinct origin stories, but all trace their rootsback to these lands, which encompass more than 100,000 Native American archaeological and cultural sites, including petroglyphs that date to 7,000 B.C.E..

The beauty of Bears Ears-named for two buttes above a high plateau-animates the Tribes' cultural and spiritual lives. That's a message they strive to impart to their clients, says Williams. "I can literally see Bears Ears when I walk out the door in the morning, and it reminds me of my ancestors. It's a sacred place, a place of healing."

It's also among America's vast public lands that the Trump administration seems intent upon opening for oil and mining, or simply selling off to the highest bidder. This is no abstract threat: A year after President Obama first designated it as a monument, President Trump took steps to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent; President Biden later restored it. Williams now fears that Bears Ears could be reduced once again, decimating this sacred place and striking a blow to Utah's $12.7 billion tourism industry that supports companies like his.

An image of what could happen registers when his tour groups notice the unsightly gravel pits that are remnants of uranium mines that dotted the region. "People look through their binoculars and say, 'My goodness, this place really needs to be protected. We don't want that to happen again,'" Williams says.

Up for sale: National landmarks and cultural heritage

What's at stake, for Bears Ears and other mineral- and fuel-rich public lands, is spelled out clearly in Project 2025, an ultraconservative policy guide created by the Heritage Foundation. Its authors include William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the first Trump administration and called for an immediateboost in coal, oil, and natural gas production on public lands. In a National Review op-edfrom 2016, Pendley even argued that the federal government should sell all of its lands.

Among those whom Trump has tapped to drive these interests forward is former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, his choice for secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Burgum has deep industry ties to Big Oil, which funneled an estimated $75 millionto Trump's 2024 campaign. If confirmed by the Senate, he would oversee nearly 500 million acres of public lands, from wildlife refuges and national parks to coastal waters. Burgum would also manage the federal government's relationship with 574 federally recognized Tribes, including the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and others with deep connections to those lands.

Jeopardizing those relationships would undo recent progress made under the Biden administration. "Tribal Nations put an immense amount of effort into the creation of Bears Ears, utilizing that as a tool to protect historic sacred places," says Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund and an enrolled member of the Native Village of Gambell, on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. (He has been part of the lead counsel representing the Tribes in multiple rounds of litigation to defend Bears Earssince 2017.)

Just a few months ago, in October 2024, the Biden administration announced a new Bears Ears management planthat includes input from five locally based Tribal nations and incorporates their traditional ecological knowledge. Abandoning the plan, considered the first of its kind, "would be the continuation of a historic practice that has excluded Native people from being able to access their traditional homelands, their sacred places, to practice their religious and cultural beliefs," Campbell says.

The Antiquities Act-a law adopted in 1906 to provide protections for "objects of historic or scientific interest" found on federal lands-may be the ultimate target. That was the same policy that Trump's first administration reinterpreted to decrease protections for (and then increase oil and gas drillingin) Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, both in southern Utah. "If you look at Project 2025," Campbell says, "one of their priorities is to have the Antiquities Act overturned."

The first Trump administration's wholesale assault on public lands was largely reversed by the Biden administration. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante were returned to their original size-protections that NRDC has intervened in court to defend. The application of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA (used to review federal actions for their environmental impacts), was restored and updated.

Biden also designated10 new monuments; among them, Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni-the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, where protections were long sought by the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition due to encroaching uranium mining. That landscape now forms part of the largest swath of protected lands in the Lower 48, the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, another part of Biden's public lands conservation legacy. But all those added protections provide fresh targetsfor the incoming Trump administration.

Utah in the crosshairs

With more than 35 million acresof federal lands within its borders, Utah has long been on the forefront of public lands battles.

Advocates like Katie Umekubo, managing director for NRDC's lands division, expect to see a significant push by the BLM for land transfer in western states like this one. Another way of describing it, Umekubo notes, is land disposal. "That's basically transferring public lands to states, private entities, or others to get rid of protections and pave the way for extraction," Umekubo says.

Indeed, the state of Utah is already seeking just this. It recently filed a complaint challenging federal control over most BLM land with the U.S. Supreme Court, and though the Court rejected the complaint, Utah has suggested it may try again in other courts. And other states may follow suit: As of last fall, a dozen of themthrew their support behind Utah's attempt to take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land.

Learn More: Bears Ears

"The idea of viewing federal public lands as open to extractive interests hearkens back to a much older history in the United States, when we were viewed as a continent of boundless resources that could be never exhausted," says Michael Pappas, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

For more than a century, the federal government doled out land to new states, homesteaders, and industries ranging from agriculture to mining to railroads. It wasn't until the adoption of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976that the government placed a priority on protecting important natural, cultural, and historical places for people.

In the 1970s, the country saw more unrest from the"sagebrush rebels" of the West, led by ranchers in Nevada who objected to new federal requirements on livestock on public lands. (The requirements came partly out of a decision in a 1974 court case argued by NRDC, which called for the BLM to begin preparing in-depth impact statements detailing the environmental effects of proposed livestock grazing areas on public lands.) Congress subsequently enacted legislation intended to guide management of public lands, including those used for grazing.

Carrying out Project 2025 would return the country to this earlier ethos. It encourages offering those lands to private developers, says Melinda Taylor, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and cofounder of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business. "It could be really unfortunate if we end up selling a bunch of public land at rock-bottom prices."

Alaska on edge

About a third of all federal land sits in Alaska. Among the most majestic wild spaces is the Tongass National Forest, the world's largest intact temperate rainforest. At nearly 17 million acres, stretching for 500 miles north to south, it comprises nearly 80 percent of southeastern Alaska. The forest's 500-year-old cedars provide shelter for 400 animal species, from bears and wolves to bald eagles. Tongass waterways are home to enormous populations of salmon, a key food source for Indigenous Peoples and the driver for a $986 million annual fishing industrythat supports more than 7,000 jobs across the region.

Learn More: Tongass & Arctic Refuge

Nevertheless, the Tongass is at risk from increased commercial old-growth logging. The first Trump administration eliminated the Roadless Rule that protects much of the forest from road construction and potential logging. That rule was reinstatedby President Biden. But on day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order directing his Agriculture Department to once again undo those protections.

"The Roadless Rule is incredibly important for ensuring the ongoing ecological integrity of the Tongass," says NRDC senior attorney Garett Rose, who was part of the legal team that took the Forest Service to courtwhen it ended protections for the forest in 2020. "This forest provides critical habitat and is key for the fight against climate change. It's the leading carbon sink in the Forest Service system."

Rose also points out the landscape's cultural significance for the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian Tribes of southeastern Alaska. At stake are "traditional cultural uses, hunting, gathering, foods, and medicine," he says. "They are the leaders in conserving this place."

Despite the clear benefits of protecting the Tongass, the state of Alaska has repeatedly sought to nix the Roadless Rule there. But these opponents of protections "keep getting knocked back on their heels" in court, Rose says. "It's a testament to how well constructed the original rule was and the public support for the rule."

Now, the fight continues. "We've been defending the rule since the beginning," he says, "and we're going to do everything we can to keep defending it."

A similar tug-of-war is taking place at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 19-million-acre preserve in northeastern Alaska that's rich with polar bear, caribou-and oil. In 2017, Congress opened the refuge to oil and gas development. And in 2021, the Trump administration finalized plans to make part of the lands available for oil and gas drilling, ending decades of protection. But the result was underwhelming; the sale attracted limited interest. The most recent lease sale, which concluded the first week of January, was even worse: Not a single companysubmitted a bid.

The results suggest that "drill, baby, drill" may work better as a campaign slogan than as policy. The United States is already producing record amounts of oil, and the petroleum industry doesn't want to reduce profits by increasing production, says Taylor. Industry people "will tell you, off-the-record, that they don't intend to devote a lot of resources to trying to get permits to do additional drilling on federal lands, because they've promised their investors and their shareholders that they will be profitable."

Still, the Trump administration has already moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refugeas well as the National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska's North Slope (a portion of which was protected last spring) once again. As Bobby McEnaney, land conservation director for NRDC, notes, the fate of Indigenous Peoples hangs in the balance. "There's a way of life up there for certain villages that depend on subsistence hunting and fishing, and that way of life is fundamentally being jeopardized," he says. "They're already under tremendous stress from climate change, and that's accelerated by drilling and fragmenting the landscape."

Nonetheless, just as McEnaney expects the next Trump administration will again test the limits of the law, he also knows that Indigenous communities and NRDC will keep pushing back. Trump's officials "keep thinking that they can open up the refuge to more drilling," he says. "But we'll continue-as a community and as NRDC-to make sure that safeguards are in place."

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