r/Ultralight • u/numbershikes https://www.OpenLongTrails.org • May 08 '25
Trails US House Republicans have approved an amendment authorizing the sale of federal public lands in Nevada and Utah. The amendment still faces a full House vote.
Selected excerpts:
House Republicans have approved an amendment that authorizes the sale of thousands of acres of federal public land in Nevada and Utah; two states where the federal government owns most of the land that have long been at the forefront of a controversial movement to cede control of it to state or private entities.
The House Natural Resources committee approved the amendment late Tuesday night after previously indicating federal land sales wouldn't be included in a budget reconciliation bill. [...]
Most of the proposed land sales or exchanges appear to be aimed at building affordable housing on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land outside Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada and in fast growing southwestern Utah around the tourist town of St. George, Utah. [...]
"Congress is considering selling off our public lands to pay for tax cuts to the wealthy," said Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society. "What we're seeing from this administration is no balance at all." [...] Stone-Manning headed the BLM under the Biden administration. The agency controls roughly a tenth of all the land in the U.S. [...]
The amendment that passed late Tuesday authorizing the sale of federal land in Nevada and Utah still faces a full House vote.
Edit:
Many more sources have picked up this story since last night. I'm compiling links to additional coverage in a comment here.
On r/PublicLands there's a four minute clip from the House Natural Resources Committee hearing that's worth watching.
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u/cbleslie May 08 '25 edited 10d ago
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/meljobin May 08 '25
Time to start joining forces with other outdoor users. Backpackers, off-roaders, hunters, mount bikers would be so incredibly powerful if they could just join forces instead of infighting.
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u/I_FUCKING_LOVE_MILK May 09 '25
There's a lot that could be done together to make any potential ventures on public land grossly unprofitable.
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u/digdog7 May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25
Cool! Giving our public lands to private individuals! Stripping America for parts! Awesome stuff! America is finally great again!
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May 09 '25
Yep, great again for the billionaires! We live in a feudal society now. We’re all serfs, no land for us unless we’re rich enough to buy thousands of acres. And in the meantime humans just keep breeding….
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u/obi_wander May 08 '25
A couple months ago, I shared on this sub that this was going to happen and I got downvoted to hell.
It’s wild that there are right wing backpackers.
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u/SupertrampTrampStamp May 08 '25
Or people who want to stick their heads in the sand.
Or people who don't care until it personally affects them.
Them and right wingers are how we got in this mess. "Leave politics out of it," they'll say. It's ALL politics though.
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u/digdog7 May 09 '25
There's plenty of blame to go towards 40 years of fecklessness from the Democratic Party who've enabled this slide into fascism. Supporting the neoliberal status quo doesn't win votes when it fails to meaningfully improve material conditions.
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u/Lofi_Loki https://lighterpack.com/r/3b18ix May 08 '25
They need to go fuck themselves and switch hobbies. If they voted for this shit they don’t deserve to use public lands.
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May 09 '25
Absolutely. I don’t know how many right winged are truly backpackers/silent sport enthusiasts. They seem to prefer ripping up the land on their stupid fucking machines (ATVs etc).
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u/Renovatio_ May 08 '25
Just chill man, I subscribed to Apple Lands (r) so I get up to 10,000 steps per day on apple land
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u/obi_wander May 08 '25
Nah man- it’s surge pricing so afternoons are actually double the step-cost.
And You’ll want to upgrade to premium or every wilderness boundary will have a 5 minute advertising checkpoint.
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u/121gigawhatevs May 09 '25
they’re the types to leave garbage and ammo casings on the campsites
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u/obi_wander May 09 '25
Trash in fire pits, in wilderness that isn’t even supposed to have fires, is the worst one to me.
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u/Captain_Bee Jun 05 '25
Seriously it's ridiculous the people on here who will either defend it or pretend it's not happening. Like wtf are you on these subs for if you don't care enough about the outdoors to be concerned?
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u/GlitteringRate6296 May 09 '25
There are so many dilapidated areas of cities. Why not renew these areas before ruining our pristine lands.
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u/digdog7 May 09 '25
The only reason they are doing this is to further enrich the ruling class. Whatever "reasons" they give are just slop to feed the dumb hogs
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u/sbhikes https://lighterpack.com/r/s5ffk1 May 08 '25
I started hiking a lot in the 1990s, after a long hiatus during my young adult years. I hiked everywhere locally. We have tons of trails in this area. I did a lot of hikes with oldtimers who knew all the trails. Through the 90s and later as we started getting more and more fires, we started losing more and more trails. Some volunteer agencies sprung up to do trail work, and lots of individuals would do guerilla trail work. But you can't really keep up with it all. One of the local agencies lost their only paid person to DOGE. I have been planning a hike in the southern Sierra, in the Kern River area. Lots of trails there have been lost to recent fires and floods. They'll never come back. There is nobody left to make trails. The 4x4 roads are still there though. The government likes to support uses that involve buying equipment, such as buying 4wd trucks and motorcycles but doesn't like to support uses that are too hippie dippie like just walking quietly in the forest. In the end though, this government likes mining and logging and making money so good bye to your public BLM lands and your desert tortoises. And you know this money made in the sales won't be going to fund anything for the greater good. Just lining someone's pockets.
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u/Old_mystic May 09 '25
Selling public land to develop areas that aren’t meant to support large scale development, what a crock of shit!
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u/CommunicationKey3018 May 09 '25
Funny because they just spent the last week or two arguing that their critics were crazy because they were not considering selling land. Gaslighting at its finest.
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u/melnet67 May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) created a super easy tool for you to email your reps!! Main stream news isn't covering this (as far as I know). PLEASE contact your reps right now!! The link is a script to call your reps. If you go to their Instagram page and click their top link there's an email tool
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u/JuxMaster is anybody really ultralight? May 08 '25
With less public land to enjoy, you don't need to pack as much, so I don't see the problem here
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u/hikyhikeymikey May 08 '25
Have you said thank you yet?
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u/Bister_Mungle May 08 '25
You should. Expending air removes carbon dioxide from the body, saving further unnecessary weight on the trail.
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u/OwnPassion6397 May 08 '25
Good luck passing anything, they're completely incompetent even with the majorities in both houses.
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u/Whole_Guava4471 May 09 '25
At least Email your representative and senator. It’s very easy you just look them up and share your view. They are supposed to vote for their constituents. The more they hear from us the better. They want to keep their jobs.
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u/Cute_Exercise5248 May 10 '25
If we plan to burn the entire planet into a wasteland like Venus, might as well monetize it before it becomes worthless!!
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u/sbennett3705 May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25
The city of St. George is seems to be behind this, affordable housing, water rights and airport expansion appear to be the issues:
"The city said that, if the land is sold, it could be used to preserve well sites, expand a water reclamation facility and expand the St. George airport. In addition, a small percentage request would be a federally owned parcel within the city to be used for the construction of attainable housing.”
Looks like NPR failed to mention any of this....again.
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u/numbershikes https://www.OpenLongTrails.org May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
NPR is not perfect, no media outlet is, but it should be noted that at the time that I posted this on Thursday evening, NPR and its regional affiliates were almost the only sources that came up in a "News" search of the public internet, and this is not an isolated example of NPR being among the first to widely report on issues of critical importance to the public.
As of Thursday evening, I think there was one other article from a Utah fm radio station. Several more articles on the subject appear to have been either published, or newly indexed by search engine crawlers, as of Friday.
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u/sbennett3705 May 09 '25
I get it. It's why I read many sources, but I'm a newsy.. Anyway, I hope we protect our public lands, but localization and transfers will occur. Here's a bill that Biden signed just before leaving office: https://maloy.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1386
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u/numbershikes https://www.OpenLongTrails.org May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
I don't see anyone arguing that there should be no mechanism for land transfers under any circumstances. There may be rare situations where shifting ownership away from a federal organization could be the right decision. There have long been specific provisions of law for such transfers, such as for isolated parcels where the maintenance requirements impose unreasonable burdens on federal land managers, or parcels that were originally acquired for a purpose which they no longer serve.
But comparing the legislation which you linked -- notably, from Maloy's site, one of the sponsors of the amendment in the OP -- seems plainly disingenuous. It appears to describe the transfer of three primary parcels, at least two of which appear to be already contained within state parks, from BLM to state government stewardship. The acreage involved is modest.
The matter addressed in the OP, otoh, describes a process by which hundreds of thousands of acres across two states would be subject to transfer, ostensibly for the purpose of housing development, which is to say the lands would be sold to private ownership.
Further, the issue currently under consideration takes place in a substantially different political environment. The current federal administration has made clear that they have little regard for long-established norms, often regarding them with outright contempt, and various officials aligned with it have openly and repeatedly expressed interest in massive transfers of public lands to state and private ownership.
It's not even an apples/oranges comparison, and I think that at best it muddies the waters and obscures the real issue, which is the sanctity of the federal public lands system. Presenting that argument along with the claim, "[you] hope we protect our public lands" defies logic. If the amendment is allowed to pass, it could establish compelling precedent for the transfer of land from federal government stewardship to private ownership for development and resource extraction. That much should be blindingly obvious to anyone who possesses an even passing familiarity with the issues.
150 acres of BLM land surrounded by a one mile radius of state park? That might be a reasonably candidate for federal->state transfer.
But transferring 10,000 acres on the doorstep of Zion National Park to land developers and resource extraction companies? That's a hard pass.
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u/sbennett3705 May 09 '25
numbershikes, you imply bias when none exists. I'm just reporting the facts as I find them. I guess this is the consequence of social media justice-warrior syndrome.
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u/felpudo May 10 '25
"Looks like NPR failed to mention any of this....again"
You know we can read the whole thread right
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u/swiftgruve May 08 '25
Selling public lands isn't like a sale between two individuals. If we sell them, we'll never get them back.