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What Was Learned From the Latest Fight Over Public Lands?

The attempt to sell millions of acres of Forest Service land united Republicans and Democrats. Advocates took valuable lessons from the battle.

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The Keep Parks Public event in Grand Junction, Colorado (Photo: Center for Western Priorities)

It’s 6:15 P.M. on a Thursday in late August, and there’s a short line to get into Fisher Brewing in Salt Lake City, Utah. The beer hall sits within walking distance of at least 20 or so nonprofit organizations.

Strolling from the bar to a seating area I pass Millennial hippies, bored looking Gen Zs, clean-shaven sales bros, a woman in pink kitten heels, and a group of academic looking Boomers. The hodgepodge has come for the The Center for Western Priorities’s (CPW) “Keep Parks Public” campaign, a multi-state speaking tour focused on the preservation of public lands. Utah is the group’s fourth state after Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.

In each location, the group has brought together various agencies, elected officials, and the public to talk about the ongoing battle to protect the country’s—and particularly the West’s—public lands. CPW staffers are also recording episodes of as they travel.

The CWP’s idea for the events came out of the recent political fight to stop the federal government from selling millions of acres of public lands. The sale was initially proposed by Utah Republican Mike Lee, and it was soundly defeated in July.

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People take their seats as the panel discussion begins. Away from the crowd, I see a middle-aged man sipping his beer. I ask why he came to the event. “For me, public land is medicine,” Russell Daniels, a Salt Lake City photographer tells me. “We can’t replace it once it’s gone. The public wants to keep these lands public.”

The Mike Lee Effect

Mike Lee’s name is repeated again and again as the evening unfolds. “Mike Lee gave us the best gift he could have given us, which is that he made this issue so high profile,” Kate Groetzinger, CWP communications manager and host of the podcast, says.

I look around the room and see proof of Groetzinger’s opinion. All 150 seats for the Salt Lake City event were reserved prior to the event, and as the panel begins to speak, it is standing room only.

In June 2025, Lee made headlines for his added provision to President Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that called for auctioning off as much as 3 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property across 11 western states.

Nonprofits like the CWP rallied against the proposal, but so did conservative lawmakers and right-leaning online communities.

The opposition was amplified in places as unexpected as , and opponents rallied under the tagline “Not One Acre.” Hunter Nation, a non-profit group for hunters, posted its opposition to the sale of any public lands on social media.

Eighty-five Wyoming businesses signed a letter to their senators telling them that the state’s outdoor recreation, tourism, and culture “is under threat by a concerted movement to transfer or sell federal public lands.”

Ultimately, five House Republicans (Mike Simpson of Idaho, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Cliff Bentz of Oregon, David Valadao of California, and Ryan Zinke of Montana) and four Republican senators (Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy of Montana, and Jim Risch and Mike Crapo of Idaho) said they did not support the plan.

On June 28, Lee from the megabill. Lee’s defeat represented a watershed moment for the groups fighting for public lands.

“Everyone knows about it now,” Groetzinger says. “There’s this growing awareness that public lands are under attack. And I think that just doesn’t sit well with people.”

Lessons Learned from Defeating Lee

In the month after Lee’s defeat, conservation groups and lawmakers have considered a similar question: What can defenders of public land learn from the bipartisan alliance?

“We learned that the people who populate Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana are the same type of people who populate Colorado and New Mexico,” John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s Democratic senator, told�����ܳٲ��������on a phone call. “We have the same bias. We want to protect our public lands for our descendants. And that is a pretty powerful political force.”

Hickenlooper and his staff watched as online opposition built toward Lee’s proposal in May and June, and noticed that some of the loudest voices came from right-leaning groups. Hunters, anglers, and even farmers and ranchers said that the public land sale was a bad idea. On social media, the Democratic senator and his staff amplified these voices.

“We would repost some social media from others and often times it was from conservative groups,” Hickenlooper said. “I was enthusiastic, because it showed that social media could bring together discordant groups of people around a common goal.”

Hickenlooper said the outpouring of opposition also showed that voters didn’t trust Lee’s justification. Lee framed the public land sale as a way to combat the housing crisis gripping cities and towns across the west. Hickenlooper said his office received hundreds of letters from local elected officials across Colorado saying that the idea would not solve their problems.

“We got 62,000 emails and letters from 50 county commissioners, mayors, and elected officials—about a third of them Republicans—all of them opposed to this. These are people whose positions are dependent on them getting more housing,” he said. “They brought up that there are already processes in place to build on this type of land.”

“People could tell this was a bait-and-switch,” he said.

At the Utah event, Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Wilderness Alliance, tells me that the biggest lesson was that the fight grew from a regional one to a national one.

“It wasn’t because he listened to constituents here in Utah,” Braden says. “It was because there was a nationwide response. People in all 50 states called their senators. That’s what matters.”

Not All Public Lands Battles Are United

Not all public land fights are as unified as the battle against Lee. In June, the Trump Administration rescinded the so-called Roadless Rule, a prohibition of road construction and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres of roadless Forest Service territory.

In a statement issued by the Western Caucus, House Representative��Zinke called the move “a victory for Montana, public lands, and forest management everywhere.” Zinke said that the roadless rule—which the CPW supports—was an impediment to wildfire management.

While speaking on the podcast, Doug Tolman with the group Save Our Canyons, says the wildfire argument is misinformation. “I’m afraid of a ski reserve development in pristine, forested land,” he says. “I’m afraid of increased logging and mining in areas that are not currently used for that and roads being built to access private parcels of land to build luxury developments.”

Tolman says he is worried, but hopeful that eventually, people outside the traditional conservation community will get involved.

“I have seen a few attempts to get hunting and angling communities engaged, but it is not nearly as strong as the public land sell-offs at the moment,” he says. “I am curious though, if those communities might step in with a heavier hand once the comment periods open and all the press releases are out in the coming weeks.”

The Fight Continues

Groetzinger says that, after the Lee fight, people are paying more attention to public land issues. “Now people who didn’t even know what BLM lands were six months ago are on alert. Next time, they’ll be ready,” she says.

Groetzinger and others expect future fights to erupt around a long list of public land issues. Continued budget and staffing cuts��to the National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service are expected.

Throughout the spring, both agencies underwent major staffing cuts. Erika Pollard of the National Parks Conservation Association tells the attendees that that the NPS��has lost more than 5,000 employees since January, with the threat of another thousand cuts looming. Behind-the-scenes specialists—those who safeguard water quality, air quality, and long-term planning—are the ones who risk being cut.

“For people going to the parks right now, it might look like everything is fine, but we know it’s not,” Pollard says. “The administration is basically forcing the parks to keep their visitor services open uninterrupted. We are really seeing an all-out assault on our national parks and our national park system like we’ve never seen before.”

There are setbacks to Biden administration-era plans to establish a historic resource management plan for sacred tribal lands like Bears Ears National Monument. Another podcast guest, Davina Smith, of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, says that while it’s moving forward, she’s devastated by the dismissal of staffers she’s worked with to make the plan a reality for two years.

“These efforts at cutting the budget, cutting the workers, and ruining morale are a cynical attempt to make public lands management in America fail,” Scott Braden, the executive director of the Southern Wilderness Alliance tells the crowd. “And that becomes the justification for those who want to seize and sell off public lands.”

Decades-long conservation laws are also at risk. After about an hour of discussing various setbacks in protecting Utah’s public lands, an audience member has a question. She jokes that she’s never learned so many acronyms in one night before. Then she pauses, and with a voice of sincerity asks: “So, what do we do?”

The answer is unsatisfying, if simple: get involved, stay involved, and make your voice heard. “It really is going to take all of our voices, all of the different pieces of our public lands puzzle and the people who love these places to really make some change,” Pollard says.

�����ԹϺ��� articles editor Frederick Dreier contributed to this report.