On the first day of the 115th Congress, the US House of Representatives passed a wide-ranging rules package that included a controversial change to how Congress calculates the cost of transferring federal lands to states and other legal entities. Observers widely interpreted the move as a way to ease the sale of public lands, and Utah representative Jason Chaffetz confirmed these suspicions when he proposed a bill to transfer “excess” federal holdings to local control in ten Western states.

It’s tempting to view public land management as a niche issue, even for environmental justice activists. With constant assaults on human dignity and the climate crisis escalating every day, why focus on something so seemingly bland and byzantine?

Some supporters might point to public land’s long-term utilitarian purpose or to the intrinsic rights of the non-human world. The Left, however, should oppose these transfers for a very simple reason: they represent an assault on arguably the United States’ most successful experiment in public ownership.