06-07-2025
Americans Fought Off This Awful Idea in Trump's Bill
It's easy to become smug and believe the great outdoors exists only west of the 100th meridian.
As a child growing up in Salt Lake City, I was half a day's drive from America's Red Rock Wilderness and Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches national parks. We camped in Utah's national forests — from the Wasatch Mountains to the Uintas.
But my Western land bias was shattered this spring, when I made a pilgrimage to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Known by some as the 'People's Wilderness,' these 1.1 million acres of lakes framed by boreal forests and wetlands is a liquid landscape unlike any other, wild with wolves, lynx, loons, moose and an astonishing variety of warblers.
To a desert dweller, the Boundary Waters are dizzying and blinding with a brilliance of light that I have not encountered elsewhere. When it rains, water bodies appear as a book's marbled end sheets with swirls of gunmetal gray, indigo and silver.
With Becky Rom, the 76-year-old founder of Save the Boundary Waters, an environmental advocacy group, as my guide, the wild bounty offered solace to my weary soul in these wrought times. The locals' love of these lands inspired me in a way I hadn't been since my days as a young activist in the American West. What I knew then and feel more deeply now is that open lands inspire open minds. This is the open space of democracy.
America's public lands are safe — for now. A provision proposed by Senator Mike Lee of Utah in the Republicans' budget reconciliation bill that would have required the Bureau of Land Management to sell as much as 1.225 million acres of public lands is dead. It died when Mr. Lee raised a white flag in defeat. It died because, in addition to Democrats, four Republican senators from Montana and Idaho refused to vote for it. It died because five Republican House representatives from Western states said it was a 'poison pill.' And it died because over 100 conservation groups and public lands advocates, as well as hunters, anglers, ranchers, recreationists and right-wing influencers said no.
Mr. Lee claimed in each of his many revisions of the proposal that disposing of our public lands was a way to address the housing crisis. But that was a ruse; housing experts have said it wouldn't have made a dent in the problem. What the senator wanted was to establish a precedent — to normalize selling off our public lands to generate cash to pay for tax cuts. Open that door, and the open space of democracy closes. That is what conservation groups, such as Save the Boundary Waters and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, understand and have been fighting for decades.
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