At first, Sen. John Hickenlooper didn’t think Sen. Mike Lee’s plan to force the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to sell as much as 3 million acres was real. But he saw the Republican Utah senator’s proposal. And then came the outcry.
More than 62,000 emails and 5,000 calls in the first couple weeks, all but a few in vehement opposition to Lee’s plan.
“We only have eight people working the phones. I should be giving those guys medals,” Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, said. “People were fired up. It was like a declaration of war.”
The overwhelming cascade of opposition killed Lee’s plan. It was a rare display of unity by a typically cacophonous and disparate band of recreation and conservation advocates. For years, organizers have labored to harness the passion of that group and turn it into political power. It’s been a task, trying to unite wilderness hikers with motorized users, power boaters with paddlers, hunters with wildlife watchers and preservationists with trail builders.
Now, the challenge is keeping those diverse interests allied in support of public lands.
“We won this fight but the battle goes on,” said Scott Fitzwilliams, who earlier this year resigned from his 15-year post leading the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest as the Forest Service’s workforce and budget were slashed. “If the actual sale is behind us there is still a lot that needs to be done and voiced as far as continuing the stewardship of these lands if we want them around for future generations. The sale of public lands was a nuclear option but there’s real danger in the long-term neglect of these places.”
In Denver on Wednesday a coalition of conservation and outdoor recreation groups will begin a five-stop road show to help keep those passions for public lands inflamed as perils continue. The Keep Parks Public campaign is meant to stir opposition to a 15% reduction in staff at the Forest Service, an 11% reduction in the Interior Department workforce, proposed cuts to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and an expected return to the plan to start selling public lands.
“These threats are not gonna stop,” Fitzwilliams said. “We need to maintain this enthusiasm not just to prevent the sale of public lands, but for the long term investment and stewardship of our 500 million acres of land across the country.”
Public lands road show across four states
The road show launches in Denver and heads to Las Cruces, New Mexico, Tucson, Arizona, and Salt Lake City before ending Aug. 22 in Grand Junction. The events will have local elected officials, public lands advocates and former land managers.
“This is about building on that momentum and that moment of clarity we saw when Sen. Lee tried to sell off America’s public lands. It’s about recognizing that the threat is not gone and it’s coming from a lot of different directions right now,” said Aaron Weiss with the Center for Western Priorities, which is organizing the road show.
The land sale may return but the more immediate threat is a decline in staffing and funding for public lands that could limit public access and agency work to protect ecosystems.
Conservation groups are bracing for the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the size of national monuments. President Donald Trump in his first term reduced the size of the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears and 1.89 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. A May Justice Department opinion supports a president’s ability to use the Antiquities Act to reduce or even remove national monuments created by previous administrations. Since the Antiquities Act became law in 1906, 18 presidents have used it to create 168 national monuments.
The Trump administration’s latest budget plan redirects $387 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which Trump permanently funded at $900 million a year as part of his Great American Outdoors Act in 2020. The shuffling of the royalty payments directed into the LWCF from off-shore energy producer royalty payments to the federal government threatens long-planned conservation and access projects across the country.
The mission behind the road show is to show Westerners how the proposed changes to land management could impact their communities. The hope is that residents “will light up their members of Congress,” Weiss said.
“We know this administration is sensitive and aware of this simmering anger,” Weiss said. “And I think they can see this is not just radical lefty treehuggers. This is all Americans who know that enjoying our public lands and parks is something every American embraces. I mean, this year’s State of the Rockies poll shows 88% of Westerners want to keep national monuments in place. I don’t know if you could ask for an approval rating for apple pie and have it land at 88%.”
On Saturday, the League of Conservation Voters and Colorado U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse launched the new “Protect Our Public Lands” campaign in response to the Trump administration’s plan to increase oil and gas drilling on public lands. The campaign, which kicked off in Boulder with a “solidarity hike” featuring hikers with signs supporting public lands, includes outdoor events this month in Arizona, California, Maine Maryland Michigan and Oregon.
Neguse told the hikers that public lands were a cornerstone of Colorado’s economy and “a cornerstone of our way of life.” He praised residents for fighting the “pernicious and dangerous” proposal to sell millions of acres of public land.
“People stood up and spoke up,” he told the crowd in a video that was emailed to media over the weekend. “And we are going to have to do it again in the months ahead. Our land management agencies are under attack in ways that would have been hard to fathom even a year ago.”
Combined with the mass firings at the Forest Service and Interior Department, there’s a growing concern about how the country plans to manage half a billion acres of public lands that have seen record visitation in recent years. Federal lawmakers — all Democrats on the U.S. House and U.S. Senate natural resource committees — last week introduced a series of bills blocking the reductions of workers in land management agencies.
The loss of institutional knowledge at the Forest Service, BLM and National Park Service “is terrifying,” Fitzwilliams said. The most recent plan by the U.S. Department of Agriculture eliminates nine regional Forest Service offices as part of a massive reorganization.
“Look, there is probably not a greater advocate than me when it comes to reducing overhead and getting money on the ground,” Fitzwilliams said. “But people in the field aren’t going to have anywhere to go for expertise. We are losing consistency and expertise in regional offices. Oh man do I worry about the future. There are long-term effects to all this and how long will it take to fix it? Will the Forest Service be able to attract quality employees in the future?”
“Build some muscle into this network”
There are existing ways for the federal government to sell public lands. Land managers for decades have identified land that could be sold. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 created specific policies around land disposal and allowed sales if it “serve(s) important public objectives, such as community expansion and economic development.”
Map app OnX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership last week unveiled a new map showing 6.1 million acres of the BLM’s 245 million surface acres identified by the agency for potential sale in 17 Western states.
The Convey Act, first proposed in 2023 and signed into law in January, allowed the BLM to transfer about 31 acres of federally managed land to Mesa County for development in Clifton. The 2018 Farm Bill allowed the White River National Forest in 2023 to lease Summit County an 11-acre administrative site for 162 rental units. When Congress failed to renew the Farm Bill last year, county efforts to develop housing at Forest Service administrative sites in Steamboat Springs and El Jebel stalled.
Lee’s proposal did not have protections for affordable housing — like the Summit County deal and proposed projects in Pitkin and Routt counties — “so it would all go at market value,” Fitzwilliams said.
“I do not think any of these communities need more luxury housing. It would never be affordable housing,” Fitzwilliams said. “It would actually hurt the housing situation and continue to drive up prices. I’ve been supportive of using public lands in limited spaces for housing, but it needs to be a collaborative process.”
Hickenlooper said lawmakers from all political persuasions are uniting around public lands.
“This is an opportunity where we have everyone together and it does give a chance to talk about our daunting challenges,” he said, hoping the rallying around public lands can lead to agreements around climate change and the need for rare earth minerals to support a new energy grid that is not anchored in burning fossil fuels.
He wants to “build some muscle into this network” of outdoor recreation and conservation groups. A lot of the power in this group includes 24 states with outdoor recreation offices, all working on a shared goal of economic development, job creation, conservation, access and engagement.
Hickenlooper said a federal office of outdoor recreation “is really close” to being created inside the Department of Commerce. That office will help further strengthen and galvanize public lands advocates.
“We are going to try to keep the network alive,” Hickenlooper said. “There are lots of other people who think we should be selling public lands. That gives us a chance to build some muscle into this network.”