Threats to Public Lands
From revved-up oil drilling to a new and destructive search for renewables, there’s a lot at stake on the landscapes we love.
Updated:
Mar 27, 2025Updated:
Mar 27, 2025Table of contents
2024 was the hottest year on record. In fact, the hottest 10 years that we know of all occurred in the last decade. The scientific consensus is clear: This global increase in heat is driven by human-produced greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane, and the effects are acutely visible throughout the country. The climate is changing because of us—and that will mean a lot for public land. In fact, the effects of climate change are already acutely visible all over the country. The impacts of climate change on public land are numerous and nuanced, and we’ll just scratch the surface here.
The first, and maybe most pressing, threat for ecosystems and recreationists alike is decreasing snowpack on our high mountains. One key data source depicting the problem’s severity comes from the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Services, which measures snow throughout the West at nearly 2,000 data collection sites. From 1955 to 2023, snowpack diminished at 81 percent of the sites. Looking ahead, scientists project that snowpack is likely to decrease by 20 to 30 percent by the middle of the century. Even farther out, by 2100, researchers project that snowpack could go down 40 to 60 percent if we remain on our current emissions trajectory.
This decline in snow has tremendous impacts on sports like skiing and ice climbing, which rely heavily on wintery weather. A recent report estimates that climate change could shorten regional ski seasons by 14 to 33 days by the 2050s. The report also estimated that between 2000 and 2019, drought and warmer weather have already caused ski areas to lose about $5 billion—a loss that’s expected to grow drastically in the years to come.
The impacts of shorter, milder winters extend far beyond recreation. Snowpack provides about 60 percent of the planet’s fresh water, mitigates drought, is critical for agriculture, replenishes groundwater stores, and impacts the severity of wildfire seasons (we break this down in more detail below). Less snow also has enormous impacts on ecosystems and wildlife. Species like Canada lynx and wolverines depend on winter snowpack, and they face compounding threats as snow decreases while winter recreation like backcountry skiing and snowmobiling goes up. Warming temperatures also drive other species, like the American pika, to higher and higher elevations with the right, cold, snowy ecosystems. Some wildlife biologists worry they’ll run out of suitable habitat altogether.
The expansion of bark beetle infestations is another stark example of a climate impact on public lands. Since the mid-1990s, bark beetles have decimated more than 40 million acres of forest across the West. The outbreak was heightened, in part, by higher temperatures, which have allowed beetles to both travel farther—including across previously inaccessible high mountain passes—and breed more often in a single year. According to a report published by the Yale School of the Environment in 2017, 85,000 square-miles of forest across the West has been ravaged by bark beetles since 2000.
Climate change can also make extreme weather events more common. These can be uniquely devastating for those who frequent public land. Take, for instance, flooding. In June 2022, in the Yellowstone region, there was still a great deal of snow piled up in the mountains when an “atmospheric river” came through the region. Normally, this weather event would have meant more snow, but it was too warm. The sky opened up a fury of rain atop the Beartooth Mountains and Absaroka Range. Because the soil was supersaturated and couldn’t absorb more moisture, the water went into the streams and creeks that fed into the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, taking with it melted snowpack. The 1-in-500-year flood that ensued led to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for the area and infrastructure damage that cost over a billion to repair. Climate scientists project that extreme weather events like this will become more common as the climate warms.
Public lands are a unique zone to discuss when it comes to climate change. While vulnerable to many climate impacts, they also often play host to the cause: Nearly a quarter of the oil and gas produced in the U.S. comes from federal land and water. Activists and organizations have pushed for years to end oil and gas drilling on public land, which could make a measurable dent in emissions. That said, this is a tall order politically. President Biden instituted a temporary and relatively short-lived pause on new oil and gas leasing on federal land. Donald Trump’s campaign website promised to “free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development.” Based on the president’s rhetoric so far, it looks like oil and gas drilling on public land will, if anything, increase. (For more on this topic, see our article on Multiple Use on Public Lands.)
We’ll continue to cover what changes in management and administration mean for the places we get outside. It’s also important to remember that you can get involved and advocate for change; there’s no shortage of organizations pushing for meaningful climate action. Major players include 350, the Sierra Club, and The Nature Conservancy. Litigators like Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council fight climate battles in court. And, importantly, local organizations are likely your neck of the woods fighting for change, too. For recreationists who value public lands, we also recommend digging into Protect Our Winters, an athlete-led group dedicated to enacting meaningful climate policy at local, regional, and national levels.
Wildfire is part of reality in the arid West—most residents have dealt with summer smoke or scorched trails. Far too many have had to evacuate their homes. Last year alone, wildfires burned an area of the country more than 30 times larger than Rocky Mountain National Park. But it’s important to note that wildfires are two things at once. First, they are a natural, necessary phenomena—forests across the country evolved with fire. Periodic fire rejuvenates soil, creates habitat for wildlife, and thins out otherwise dense stands of vegetation. Our land needs fire.
However, the other reality of wildfire is impossible to ignore. The scale and intensity of fires has been staggering, damaging more homes and infrastructure than at any other time in history. We’ve seen increases in “megafires,” which burn over 100,000 acres, and “gigafires,” which overtake more thana million. Smoke from western wildfires has traveled across the country to blanket New York City. Some of these fires are so large they can produce their own weather systems and can burn so hot that they scorch the soil, making it impossible for vegetation to grow back for years after the event. Due to climate change, some fires also usher in a new ecosystem entirely; a ponderosa pine forest, for example, might be replaced by a sea of sagebrush after a fire. Data suggests that fire season has gotten longer by about two months since the 1970s in parts of the West. It seems distinct “fire seasons” are a thing of the past—these days, we often have a fire year.
There are three main drivers of our wildfire problem, all related to human influence. First, we’re building more and more in wildfire-prone areas. In fact, the so-called “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI, is the country’s fastest growing type of land use. Tens of millions of people live in areas prone to fire. Second, we collectively got too good at putting out fire. After a particularly severe wildfire in 1910, the Forest Service took on a zero-tolerance policy for wildfire. So, a stock of kindling that would have periodically been cleared by natural fires built up. Ponderosa pine forests in parts of the West, for example, historically experienced natural fires roughly every 10 to 30 years. Many of those very same forests haven’t burned in a century. Finally, climate change is a key contributor. Drought, low snowpack, and changes in the so-called “vapor pressure deficit”—or the rate at which moisture gets sponged out of the air—create an environment that makes our landscapes more prone to larger, longer-lasting, and more severe wildfires.
One of the main tools to fight our wildfire problem might be counterintuitive: Scientists and fire managers say we need more fire, not less. However, we need the right kind of fire in the right ecosystems at the right time of year. Our more than one century-old full-suppression policy towards wildfire contributed to the mess we’re in in the first place. With no natural fires to thin things out, forests became overstocked with young, small trees and other vegetation that can burn. To combat this, land managers can let fires burn in remote locales, far from homes and property (which, to be fair, is a hard area to come by). Even those fires, however, can run the risk of blowing up and getting out of control if weather conditions are wrong.
An even more promising solution involves upping the pace and scale of the country’s prescribed fire program. Prescribed fires are carefully planned burns intentionally set by professionals. These fires scorch a plot of land at a low intensity—much like natural fire—but require lots of planning, resources, and monitoring. In most cases, the forest has to be thinned out by crews before burning to keep the fire from escaping. While the vast majority of prescribed burns go according to plan, a tiny number run amok, threatening communities and ecosystems. In 2022, for example, two escaped prescribed burns converged in New Mexico to create the largest conflagration in the state’s history. The Forest Service put a months-long moratorium on prescribed burns in the wake of the accident and established new requirements that made the practice more difficult to achieve on the ground. However, studies consistently show that areas that have been thinned and burned fare much better when a fire comes through.
To make our landscape more resilient, we need to invest in more prescribed fires and do so in areas strategically close to communities, water supplies, and other human infrastructure. As homeowners, we can also get better at making our communities more wildfire resistant. Studies show that basic “home hardening” efforts, including endeavors like removing leaves and pine needles from gutters, sealing off soffits and other openings with fine mesh, and landscaping to remove flammable vegetation and mulch and properly space out vegetation, can go a long ways to prevent the spread of wildfire. Bigger-ticket items, like removing wood roofs, can make an enormous difference, too.
All over the arid West, community organizations exist to help homeowners learn more about “firewise” communities. However, there are few resources for renters and far too few resources to help lower-income property owners take the necessary steps to make their property more resilient. Investing in these efforts could greatly increase community safety and enable fire managers to use more prescribed fires on the landscape.
There’s a relatively hidden threat all over our public lands. Often, spotting it requires a carefully trained eye. Invasive species have taken root throughout our public lands and waters. Spread by the tires of cars, our shoes and pant legs, and the paws of pets and grazing animals, invasives are thriving at the expense of native ecosystems on public land. There are about 100 invasive species in Grand Canyon National Park, another 127 in Glacier, Yellowstone is home to about 225, the Great Smoky Mountains has 380, and Yosemite 275. Palm trees slurp up valuable water in Death Valley, and tamarisk shoots its brackish roots deep into soils around Arches and Canyonlands. As of 2016, more than 1,500 invasive species occupy about 1.4 million acres of land managed by the National Park Service alone.
Invasive species flourishing on federal land includes: houndstongue, Russian olive, salt cedar, cheatgrass, bullfrogs, emerald ash borer, knapweed, zebra and quagga mussels, leafy spurge, yellow toadflax, and kudzu. Even tumbleweed—an iconic plant of the West—is actually invasive; Otherwise known as Russian thistle, tumbleweed likely showed up in the U.S. in the 1870s, hidden in a shipment of flaxseed from Russia. Invasive species can take over habitat, deplete groundwater, push out native species, decrease forage for native wildlife, increase wildfire risk, and more.
Agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and BLM are instituting various measures to reduce the spread of dangerous invasives and non-natives. Those efforts include educating the public, hiring crews to manually pull and spray unwanted species, and planting native species to restore ecosystems. Land managers have gotten creative with solutions, too. Beetles from Asia can combat the spread of tamarisk. Weevils from Europe can help eliminate houndstongue. So, in some cases, non-native species are even used to root out the worst invasives.
Lasting impact takes individual action, too. Invasive species are spread by livestock and wildlife, but also by us. Checking shoelaces and pants after hikes for hangers-on can help stem their spread. If you do find mysterious seeds or other plant matter attached to your clothes, remove it and throw it in a trash can (keep it in a pocket for later if necessary), rather than tossing it back out on the trail. Cars and boats can spread invasives, too. Zebra and quagga mussels are an especially huge threat in waterways all over the country. Always inspect your boat and stop at checkpoints, which are becoming increasingly common in states across the West, where the mussels haven’t taken hold as much as on the other side of the country.
Some call it the “Instagram Effect,” and there’s no denying it: Our public lands are busier and more crowded than ever. The data bears this out: According to the Outdoor Industry Association, the number of people who recreate outside continues to reach record highs year after year. While the pandemic put a bit of a damper on things like national park visitation, the overall trajectory of recreation on public land points in one direction: up, up, up.
More people making a connection with the outdoor world reaps undeniable benefits for mental and physical health, and it creates a broader recognition of the importance of conserving natural spaces. However, the negative impacts of increased use are hard to ignore. From a user experience, once-secret crags are bustling and once-quiet trails are swarmed. With that use comes overflowing and unhygienic outhouse toilets, dog poop bags littering trails, and even human poop filtering into alpine lakes. We have, in short, a real poop problem on public land.
The ecosystem impacts of more people on our federal lands go far beyond the environmental cost of human waste. Studies show that the mere presence of human voices on a trail displaces wildlife. Even reasonably quiet activities like mountain biking and backcountry skiing take a toll. Biking likely contributed to the massive decline of a once thriving elk herd in the Vail, Colorado, area. In the Tetons, one study found the range’s only herd of bighorns was prone to avoid areas used for winter recreation like backcountry skiing, even when use was low.
How can we get outside without loving nature to death? First, know the proper ways to deal with your own waste and leave no trace. Increasingly, it’s best to pack out your own poop rather than bury it in the woods. Land managers are also instituting permit systems to limit overall human numbers in particularly popular areas. Finally, land acquisitions and the preservation of more private land for public recreation could help more evenly distribute the impact of the rising number of recreationists outside.
Public land doesn’t always stay public. For decades, there have been arguments over who should control it, and in some states there’s a long legacy of selling it off. When land gets sold off, privatization can lead to development on public land in the form of subdivisions, or to increases in possibly damaging extractive industries, like oil and gas drilling and mining.
The way public land can reach private hands is complicated, but here’s one clear and current example. In 2024, the state of Utah sued the federal government over whether the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) can hold onto 18.5 million acres of so-called “unappropriated land” within the state’s borders. “Unappropriated” refers to areas that aren’t officially designated as “wilderness,” “national forest,” and the like. Utah proponents of the lawsuits argue for state control of the land, and a court decision in their favor could lead to, more or less, selling off the land to the highest bidder. Critics of the lawsuit argue that more local control over public land usually equates to more destructive land uses such as drilling, logging, and mining. Organizations like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers argue that transferring public land to states “is the pathway to streamlined privatization.” Twelve other Western states filed briefs that siding with Utah—but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in January 2025. That threat is, for now at least, on pause.
However, a new political push for developing tracts of public land for housing is already under way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum is championing selling, transferring, or leasing “underutilized” public land as a way to tackle the affordable housing crisis. In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, the Secretary said the administration would pursue expedited, streamlined environmental reviews to make it happen. Public land advocates argue that this call, which is also coming from states like Utah, won’t make much of a difference in solving our housing woes and that it’s little more than a ploy to cover up the disposal of federal land.
Sometimes, rather than happening on public land itself, it’s the development nearby which leads to a destructive ripple effect. A great deal of public land is surrounded by private property, much of it agricultural open space. When this land gets developed, it can change the views and aesthetics of areas recreationists treasure. Even more significantly, development can sever wildlife migration and movement. The wildlife that thrives on public lands, including elk, bears, moose, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, and even tortoises and salamanders, depends on large, intact landscapes to survive. And those landscapes are at risk. According to the Land Trust Alliance, the U.S. is losing a swathe of open land equivalent to the size of Grand Canyon National Park yearly.
Fortunately, as political battles come and go over the future of public lands, organizations are on the ground figuring out how to preserve and expand what we have. Groups like the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the Center for Large Landscape Conservation are working to make our fragmented ecosystems whole by conserving public and private land alike. Land trusts across the country also focus on conservation easements that can preserve open space for future generations by prohibiting future development. Those organizations have protected more than 60 million acres of land, with ambitions of tens of millions more.
There are more than 375,000 miles of roads in the national forest system. These roads constitute a maze of lines that divide up the landscape, at once making remote areas more accessible for the public and industry and less accessible to wildlife.
The risks of roads are numerous. First is the most obvious—roads can lead to wildlife collisions. This is not a unique problem to public land: Drivers hit millions of large animals every year on public and private land. It’s an issue for human safety and wildlife well-being, and it can also be a significant financial burden. Hit an elk, and you can total your car and wind up in the hospital, or worse. Further, when a road has enough traffic, all those cars can create a “barrier effect” for animals. The presence of all those vehicles begins to appear like a wall to animals. Wildlife simply will not cross. This can create islands of wildlife populations and sever important routes that link populations and provide migration corridors.
These impacts are most acute with paved roads, but research shows that even temporary dirt logging roads can fragment habitat. A study on the Appalachians of North Carolina found that low-use roads hurt salamander populations located more than 100 feet from the roadbed itself. Roads also enable the rapid spread of invasive species, deposit toxic sediment into streams, and exponentially increase the risk for human-caused wildfires.
The federal government has taken action here before. In 2001, the Clinton administration enacted the “roadless rule,” which designated roughly 60 million acres of relatively intact national forest as “inventoried roadless areas.” The rule states that the government and industry can’t build or even reconstruct roads there, and it protects those landscapes from commercial timber harvest.
Another key solution is actually more infrastructure. Wildlife crossing structures, such as bridges and underpasses tailor-made for the needs of wildlife, are proliferating across the country. From the Snoqualmie Pass East project, which connects Pacific Northwest wildlife populations, to Florida’s 60 wildlife crossings used by endangered panthers, studies show that these structures are remarkably effective at helping creatures big and small cross the road safely. While there has been a strong push at both the federal and some state levels to get more crossing structures in place, advocates on the ground say making our ecosystems whole will take a massive investment ahead.
For better and worse, public land isn’t just for recreation. Our land management agencies’ “multiple use mandate” dictates that areas like national forest and BLM land are managed for hiking and backpacking as much as they are for mining, logging, grazing, and drilling.
Each of the above uses brings with it potential degradation to the land itself. Take livestock grazing, for example. Animals like cows graze on more than 250 million acres of federal public lands all over the country. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, about 56 million acres of BLM land alone is overgrazed enough to fail to meet the agency’s own health standards. Overgrazing is of particular risk to aquatic ecosystems, since cows can send sediment, feces, and chemicals into streams and trample riparian vegetation.
Oil and gas drilling plays a significant role on federal land. Roughly a quarter of oil and gas produced in the country comes from public land. Large-scale proposals to drill in remote, treasured landscapes like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have generated controversy for years. The infrastructure, machinery, and pollution involved with oil and gas production on public land can destroy habitats for animals from polar bears to trout. Plus, emissions associated with the activities contribute to global warming, furthering the damage.
There are active mining claims on about 1.3 million acres of federal land. The reporting requirements are uniquely low for mining on public lands, so little is known about how much of what is produced. But the activity itself can leave behind waste, heavy metals, and other dangerous chemicals that erode habitat and can find their way into our waterways. The future of mining on public land is especially murky and contentious regarding the necessary metal production for transitioning to renewable energy.
Logging, too, has long generated controversy. While the industry is a shadow of its heyday in the 1980s, the country still cuts a lot of wood on federal land. In 2023, national forests produced more than three billion board feet of timber. The ecological impacts of timber harvesting are nuanced and site-specific. But the road-building and heavy machinery that often accompany timber harvests can displace wildlife and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Intact old-growth forests, after all, function like enormous carbon sponges. All that said, it’s important not to paint activities like forestry and grazing on public land as one-dimensional. Many ranchers are working to restore land health from generations of overgrazing. Foresters have generally moved away from environmentally destructive logging methods like rampant clearcuts and are innovating to find financially sustainable ways to harvest the timber that’s most in need of removal—namely, small-diameter, young trees that wildfires would have historically burned out.
Other promising developments are afoot, too. A notable example is the “public lands rule,” which was recently finalized by the BLM under the Biden Administration. That rule officially puts conservation on a level playing field with all the other uses on BLM land. It directs the BLM to monitor landscape health and, instead of exclusively leasing to activities like grazing and logging, allows the agency to institute “conservation leases” for its land, too. Even in its infancy, the rule has proved controversial. We’ll continue to monitor how it plays out as a new administration takes over the Interior Department in January.
Dealing with all the forces taking a toll on public lands—along with the day-to-day management it takes for that land to flourish—doesn’t come cheap. Budgets of the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, BLM, and National Park Service haven’t kept up with the needs of the areas they manage. As of 2022, there’s a pileup of public land work that amounts to more than $35 billion, and that number is only growing.
That pileup of work, referred to as the “backlog of maintenance,” includes fixing up outhouses and campsites and building repairs in national parks. The budget shortfalls are getting so bad that in late 2024, the Forest Service refrained from hiring seasonal workers in the next fiscal year entirely. That could mean that trailhead bathrooms aren’t maintained, trails become overgrown, and even, that some avalanche forecast centers face shortfalls of staff.
In theory, the solution here is easy: give the agencies who manage public land more money. But that’s harder than it seems. While some organizations, like the Outdoor Alliance, are working to be a source of funding, long-term solutions must come from Congress. Some legislation, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, has already provided a bit more funding for our land management agencies. That’s a start, but it’s also just scratching the surface. While use continues to go up, there’s no question that public land management agencies will need more cash to maintain and conserve the landscape. Innovative funding models—like a tax on outdoor goods and equipment that could go straight to public lands conservation (often called the "Backpack Tax")—have been proposed in the past, but they’ve been met with backlash by the outdoor industry and, thus far, have gotten nowhere.
For more on this topic, read our article How We Fund Our Public Lands.
Ensuring our public lands stay ecologically intact and accessible in the future will require large-scale political action and local advocacy and stewardship. We outlined the beginnings of solutions above. But stopping the most damaging impacts on public lands—large-scale oil and gas drilling, climate change, and even the funding deficit—will take collective action. Charting a sustainable future for these lands requires hard questions: Who are public lands for? Can we love a place to death? How can we provide for both people and ecosystems? The answers to these questions don’t come easy.
It’s also worth noting that ping-ponging political administrations historically shift priorities in how our public lands are managed. President Trump has openly professed a preference for, in his words, a “drill, baby, drill” approach to land management. In just a couple months in office, he’s already issued executive orders to ramp up the pace and scale at which the country drills, mines, and logs. The administration has also fired thousands of workers from field positions at land management agencies—though many of those workers have had their positions temporarily reinstated due to lawsuits. So far, it’s clear that the changing executive branch places a higher emphasis on extraction than on recreation. We’ll continue to keep you informed as management changes on the ground as it all unfolds.
Public Lands
The Backpack Tax
Public Lands
Wilderness, Explained
Public Lands
The Life of a Trail
Public Lands
Public Access to Water
Public Lands
Easements, Explained
Public Lands
Public Lands Types
