John Mitchell, National Geographic's environmental editor, said Friday that he is not a happy public land shareholder because the lands are continually exploited for uses such as mining, oil drilling and grazing.
Mitchell, who spoke to a packed room during the UNM Geography Department's lecture series on "Visions for the American West," delivered a speech titled "These Lands are Our Lands: Problems on the Public Estate."
He defined "public lands" as those containing national parks, forests, wildlife refuses and a large chunk of federal land under the Bureau of Land Management that does not include American Indian reservations or military bases.
Mitchell said 630 million acres of land make up the "public estate."
"More than half of that is in Alaska and 630 million is only a fraction of what Uncle Sam owns," Mitchell said.
He said that the public estate has been cheated, overused and misused for practices such as mining and cattle grazing - dating all the way back to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Homestead Act of 1862 when the U.S. government began expanding into the country's western territory.
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"In 1900, the Homestead Act claimed 80 million acres and even more was handed over to the railroads," Mitchell said.
He said the government sees the parks and refuges as a place for potential timber harvest and oil drilling. Mitchell defined a refuge as a place where wildlife is protected and safe, but mining, logging, trapping, military maneuvering and water runoff for commercial use has destroyed many wildlife refuges.
Mitchell did, however, applaud the U.S. Senate for killing a bill that would allow oil drilling in the Artic Refuge in Alaska.
"It will be back," he said. "It always comes back, but for now the refuge is safe."
Mitchell said that last May, Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force published a 144-page report that strongly encouraged drilling in the arctic. He added that the $136,000 spent to publish the report came from the administration's energy conservation budget.
He said many problems also exist within the National Parks and National Wildlife Preservation Systems, including mining, massive trail damage from overuse and other "so-called improvements."
"Everyone loves the national parks," Mitchell said. "Soon the media will headline its annual story that the parks are getting loved to death."
He added that the National Parks System Advisory Board has come out with a new recommended policy titled "Rethinking the National Parks for the 21st Century," but it mainly focuses on how to make the parks more "people friendly."
Mitchell said that few people have focused on what is actually ailing the system or how it might be remedied and less attention is paid to the resources the system is obliged to protect for the future.
He cited the underground concession center in Carlsbad Caverns as an example, and said that in 1993 the park service tried to close and remove the privately owned center because it was near a bat flyaway. Mitchell said that if the lights were on in the concession center at night, then the bats wouldn't leave the cave - and were thus unable to find food.
"What's more important, bats or people," Mitchell said. "I don't know about bats, but I know people need their burritos."
He said another problem is forest roads, which interfere with water quality and wildlife. He added that 386,000 miles of U.S. forest roads exist, which is four times the length of the Interstate Highway system. The battle to keep roads out of the forests, something Mitchell calls the "war in the woods," which has led to Roadless Area Conservation acts and a "roadless rule."
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is a Clinton-era roadless protection rule for national forests, but speculation by the Bush administration has opened the possibility for future decisions that could open the nation's last unbroken forest tracts to logging and mining.
"The Bush administration does not like the roadless rule," he said.
Grazing, which was a tradition in the west for a long time, also has degraded the public estate, Mitchell added.
He said ranchers with private land end up having to lease agreements to let their cattle graze on public lands, which has led to native animals such as coyotes being killed and plant life being depleted.
While highlighting the problems, Mitchell urged protection of public lands that face a precarious future.
