Public Land Management’s Future Place: Envisioning a Paradigm Shift

Sam Kalen

The recent sesquicentennial of Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first and prototypical national park, marked an opportune moment for examining the management of the nation’s public lands. Public lands are confronting a myriad of challenges, whether from climate change and the efficacy of using the nation’s lands for fossil fuel development or renewable resources, or from how best to manage them for recreational use and preserve their pristine character and habitat for wildlife and other resources. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is promoting its 30/30 campaign while exploring targeted changes to oil, gas, and coal development on public lands. Calls for reforming pointed areas of public land management seem endless and escalating. Most critics today focus attention on fixing some identifiable failure of public land management planning. Planning, after all, operates as the engine driving the modern administration of public lands. Some public land aficionados champion planning reform by accentuating the urgency of folding into the decision-making process Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples, whose land may have been wrested from them to create the public land. Others lament how our planning processes, while moving toward landscape-level planning, have yet to move forward enough in response to modern ecological principles and challenges. Still others float specific reform proposals, often promoting a fix for a single type of public land.

I suggest these critics, while raising legitimate concerns, are ignoring a much larger problem, not yet captured by today’s commentary. Our public land laws remain tethered to an antiquated past. This Article reviews how public land planning has become dominant, and that in turn has allowed public land managers too much discretion to allow uses that may be inimical to the sustainability of identifiable landscapes. In sum, we have lost an enforceable vision for guiding planning decisions on the use of public lands, whether they are Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, or Bureau of Land Management administered lands. I review how this occurred and offer a novel path forward, suggesting a paradigm shift. That shift would elevate the importance of encoding an enforceable vision for our public lands capable of circumscribing potentially problematic decisions, while also crafting a new management paradigm that respects the importance of place.