Public Lands Under Attack: Why the Conservation Community Must Adapt

By: Andy Kerr

June 20, 2025

The public lands (and the entire conservation) community is fundamentally mis-organized to address today’s torrent of existential threats to the nation’s public lands.

The cause of public lands is just. According to polls, more Americans love public lands than love their mother. Nonetheless, the public lands of the United States are under existential threat. These threats are numerous and widespread, from both without and within. Inadvertently, the public lands are even threatened by the conservation community, because the way this community is generally organized cripples our effectiveness.

We are not going back to the good old days. First, those days were not that good. Second, our problems will not go away if the Democrats again take control of the White House, Senate, and/or House of Representatives. The present excesses of President Trump regarding public lands are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The public lands community’s effectiveness problems, while exacerbated by the Trump administration, are not caused by the Trump administration.

I am reminded of the misquotation of Chairman Mao by Senator John McCain (R-AZ): “It’s darkest before it’s totally black.”

The Actors Against Public Lands

Let’s briefly run down the list of actors who are acting against public lands.

1. The Administration

The public lands are under threat by this second Trump administration, which is undermining national monuments (including possibly my beloved Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument) and amping up mining, drilling, grazing, logging, and roading on public lands nearly everywhere, while at the same time gutting agency budgets. (I must insert here that the Biden administration was a huge disappointment when it came to public lands, but that is another Public Lands Blog post.)

2. The US Supreme Court

The public lands are also under attack by the US Supreme Court, which recently ruled unanimously in a case involving a new railroad in Utah that would facilitate more burning of federal fossil fuels, that the National Environmental Policy Act—better known as NEPA—no longer means what it used to mean in terms of environmental review. An attorney friend of mine observed that every one of the twelve times the US Supreme Court has taken a NEPA case, the environment has lost.

3. The US Congress

The public lands are under attack in the US Congress. The House of Representatives almost included in the budget bill that it passed a provision that would have sold off more than 450,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management holdings in Utah and Nevada. The Senate version may nonetheless require the sale of public lands and boosting logging levels on public lands to ever more obscene levels.

4. The Republican Party

The public lands are under active attack by the Republican Party, a stronghold of corporate greedheads who love the multitude of subsidies that facilitate the exploitation of public lands.

5. The Democratic Party

The public lands are under passive attack by the Democratic Party, a stronghold of weak-kneed wimps who would rather lose than win for the wrong reason.

(On the whole, Republicans instinctively go for the jugular vein, while Democrats, on the whole, consciously go for a capillary.)

6. Conservatives

The public lands are under attack by conservatives, who are hollowing out the ranks of the federal public land agencies in the name of smaller government.

7. Libertarians

The public lands are under attack by libertarians, who hate government and therefore government lands.

8. Progressives

The public lands are under attack by progressives, who are enamored with an “abundance agenda” that calls for building ever more stuff in ever more places for ever more people at the expense of nature and the people here now and not for redistributing some of the majority of stuff held by a minority of people.

9. Land-Backers

A small contingent of ultra-liberals favors returning the nation’s public lands to the Native American tribes they were taken from. Land-backer generosity does not extend to returning private lands—especially any private land owned, or to be inherited, by a land-backer.

A Champion of Public Lands: Ryan Keith Zinke

Things have gotten so bad in the House of Representatives that the public lands conservation community had to rely on a single Republican member of Congress, Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), to draw a line in the sand. “This was my San Juan Hill; I do not support the widespread sale or transfer of public lands. Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land. Public access, sportsmanship, grazing, tourism . . . our entire Montanan way of life is connected to our public lands. I don’t yield to pressure; I only yield to higher principle.” Zinke’s mention of San Juan Hill refers to his hero Theodore Roosevelt’s fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American War with his fellow Rough Riders, where TR “narrowly avoided bullets” and later said “it was the greatest day of my life.”

Zinke was able to strip the provision to sell more than 450,000 acres of BLM public lands in Nevada and Utah out of the House budget bill because the Republican speaker only had to lose three of his Republican votes to fail to push the bill through on a straight party line vote. Yes, this is the same Ryan Zinke who, while serving in the first Trump administration as Trump’s first secretary of the interior (and who left under an ethics cloud that wouldn’t make the news today), presided over the shrinking and weakening of several national monuments, and otherwise was an appalling interior secretary.

Ryan Zinke won’t sell off public lands, but he has sold and will sell out public lands to industrial interests. Oh well, one must take allies where and how one can find them.

It’s All About Congress

There is no entity more important to the conservation of public lands than Congress.

Congress confirms judges and high administration officials. Congress makes the laws. Congress determines if courts can enforce laws. Congress funds the government. Congress ratifies treaties, and much more.

In terms of public lands, the property clause of the US Constitution vests all power over public lands in Congress. Any power the president, secretary of the interior, or secretary of agriculture has over public lands is due to Congress expressly delegating that power in statute. When it comes to the public lands, neither the executive branch nor the judicial branch has any inherent or implied power.

As with many matters in addition to public lands, the legislative branch as currently constituted has delegated too much power to the executive branch.

It’s All About Elections

Whether it is who becomes president, who controls Congress, who is elected a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, or who is confirmed to the Supreme Court, elections matter. While the conservation community whines about and suffers from election results, it has done precious little to affect those election results. Occasionally, it has significantly engaged in elections. Let me tell you a story.

In 2006, Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA) was seeking re-election. As chair of the Committee on Resources of the House of Representatives, to the conservation community Pombo was the devil incarnate. Pombo’s attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act was one step too far for Defenders of Wildlife, a rather staid national conservation organization whose chosen tax status prevented it from engaging in elections at all and from doing any more than limited lobbying. Defenders of Wildlife created a parallel organization—Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund—that could engage in elections.

The action fund raised more than $1 million (a very small part of it from me) and was instrumental in defeating Rep. Pombo (the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters also played significant roles). It was the best $1 million Defenders of Wildlife ever spent defending wildlife. It had a salutary effect on other endangered species-haters in the next Congress. However, Defenders amped down its political arm (it still exists today, but you wouldn’t know it) and disengaged from the political process, and Defenders went back to engaging in the administrative process.

It’s All About How the Public Lands Community Is Organized

While the public lands are increasingly under threat, the public lands community is fundamentally misorganized to address this threat. Unless this misorganization is corrected, the conservation community will not get out of the hole we are in. The first rule of holes when one is in one is to stop digging. In this case, that means choosing a different IRS status that allows conservation organizations to conduct lobbying and influence campaigns that might have a prayer of changing the balance of power among our elected officials.

In the United States, a nonprofit organization has two basic choices under the rules of the Internal Revenue Service. It can operate as either a charitable organization or a social welfare organization. Both charitable and social welfare organizations are nonprofits that don’t have to pay taxes on their income. However, donations to social welfare organizations are not tax-deductible to the giver, while donations to charitable organizations are tax-deductible.

In exchange for the privilege of its donors being able to deduct their contributions from their taxes, the charitable organization waives its First Amendment rights. A charitable organization can do only limited lobbying of Congress and cannot engage in elections in any way. Ironically, most individual donors to charitable organizations don’t itemize their deductions but take the standard deduction. Ninety percent of federal taxpayers do not itemize.

Social welfare organizations are able to run campaigns that target elected officials and can have affiliated political action committees. In general, social welfare organizations cannot accept foundation grants, but that’s easily remedied by having interrelated charitable and social welfare entities. Superficially, it’s a matter of bookkeeping; fundamentally it is a matter of fighting to win versus fighting for show.

The National Organization of Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Rifle Association are social welfare—not charitable—organizations. Among national environmental organizations, only the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters have elected social welfare—rather than charitable—as their primary tax status. I said “primary” because all of these social welfare organizations are connected to one or more charitable entities. One need not choose.

Several national conservation organizations, while primarily organized as charitable entities, also maintain a social welfare adjunct. Mostly the action part of these charitable action duos are mere add-ons or afterthoughts that are a very small fraction of the mothership charitable organization, only dusted off for the brief periods of elections.

See Public Lands Blog post “The Public Lands Conservation Movement: Mis-organized for Job #1.”

What Can I Do?

Give as before. Continue, if not increase, your support for small placed-based charitable conservation organizations like [fill in your own favorite here], the original and best advocate for [fill in your own favorite here].

Give differently. As for those larger regional and national conservation organizations that you support, give your money to their social welfare—rather than charitable—arm. The social welfare entity often has “action” or the like in the title that sounds nearly like its charitable sibling. If they don’t have a social welfare arm, send your money to some organization with a social welfare arm.

(Many entities couldn’t tell you whether they are operating as a charitable or social welfare organization. However, they will know if they are organized under Section 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Shorthand: “(c)(3)” = charitable; “(c)(4)” = social welfare.)

Engage in elections. Engage by giving money to conservation political action committees or to candidates with strong environmental positions. Engage by volunteering on campaigns.

Practice your tree sitting. The lawlessness and zealousness of the current administration are unprecedented. We can hope those god-awful timber sales, fossil fuel leases, and open pit mines can be stopped in court. But perhaps not. These are the times that try human souls.

As that great environmentalist Winston Churchill told us: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The public lands conservation community is in for a rough ride. However, our cause to save nature for this and future generations is just. We must only awaken and activate that very large silent majority of people who agree with us.

We can do it. We must do it. So, let’s do it.

Bottom Line: Change can be hard, but failing to adapt can be disastrous.

(The above is adapted from a talk given at the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration for the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon and California on June 8, 2025. This was originally published on Andy Kerr’s Public Lands Blog.)