The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast: This land is their land
Ethan Blevins, legal fellow at Pacific Legal Foundation, recently joined The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast for a lively discussion on the issue of federal land in the United States.
Charles and Ethan explored the history of federal land management, the federal government’s shift away from homesteading toward a policy of land retention, the issue of “democratic accountability,” and the State of Utah’s lawsuit challenging federal land retention.
The federal government manages more than 240 million acres of landmass in the United States beyond national parks, national forests, and Native American reservations.
“There really isn’t a dispute over whether or not the national parks should be given back to the states. That’s not an issue that’s at play right now,” Ethan explains
But should the federal government own roughly 80% of Nevada, 70% of Utah, and nearly two-thirds of Idaho?
Although the Department of the Interior has the authority to dispose of unused land if the disposition is found to be in the national interest, according to Ethan, it “almost never does.”
It comes, really, down to an incentives problem, right? If you put senators in New York and Maryland and other Eastern states in charge of what’s happening in 80% of Nevada, they don’t have a lot of incentive or reason to care about what the state constituents want or care about. The people who are closer to that issue and who are more accountable directly to the electorate are going to be more responsive to the state electorate.
A prime example of these misaligned incentives is the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Project in Utah. As Ethan explains:
The trouble is that this is a project that is going to be leased on public land, but the energy that will be produced by the project does not go to Idaho; it goes to California. So, Idaho is bearing the burden of this project, [but] all of the value is going to go to the federal government and the private company that’s the lessee, and none of it goes to Idaho. So, Idaho state citizens are very mad about it—they don’t want it. But the Bureau of Land Management has no reason to feel accountable to them.
You can listen to the full podcast below or find Ethan’s episode on The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.
