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A new map from The Wilderness Society shows which national public lands could become eligible for sale if a proposal by Senator Mike Lee of Utah remains in the reconciliation package.
Initially, Lee's bill text identified around 120 million acres eligible for sale. But a recent update to the text more than doubled the amount of land eligible for sale, bringing the total acreage to over 250 million.
Across the West, residents are reacting to seeing some of their favorite spots identified for sale on the map. These include iconic landscapes like the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, Sabino Canyon and Mount Lemmon in Arizona, the Uinta Mountains in Utah, Lake Tahoe and Big Sur in California, Mount Hood in Oregon, and the Animas Mountains in Colorado, to name just a few.
“People could have their favorite hiking open space or outdoor areas sold off right out from under their community. It’s a drastic change in what we could see on the ground across the West,” said Michael Carroll, Bureau of Land Management campaign director for The Wilderness Society.
7,500 employees have left Interior
Nearly 11 percent of the Interior department's staff has left the agency since Trump took office, according to E&E News. That's a reduction of nearly 7,500 employees who took buyout offers or early retirement in the past five months. These losses are spread across the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and Bureau of Reclamation. Additional cuts at Interior and other agencies are widely anticipated but are on hold due to a federal court injunction.
Happy Juneteenth!
Look West will take tomorrow off to celebrate Juneteenth. National parks and public lands will be fee-free tomorrow to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
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Washington is trying to tell Colorado what land is for sale... This is a top-down tyrannical execution of authority that strips Colorado and our local communities of our ties to some of our most sacred landscapes.”
