The Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee’s contribution to the budget reconciliation bill, released last week and subsequently revised, includes mandates to sell approximately 3 million acres of public lands, along with provisions that would dramatically accelerate unsustainable and ecologically damaging resource extraction, including timber, oil and gas exploration, and coal mining, while diminishing investments in clean energy.

This bill is a massive attack on America’s public lands legacy, and a huge giveaway to corporations and the wealthy under fabricated pretenses of addressing the affordable housing crisis (it won’t) and securing America’s energy dominance (then they would cut investment in renewables). The bottom line: ordinary Americans lose access to cherished places, our public lands and wildlife suffer, the climate gets hotter, air dirtier, and the ultra-wealthy gain greater control of our shared lands and natural resources, as well as a massive tax cut.  And the deficit grows, according to multiple independent analyses.

For all these reasons and more, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance strongly opposes this bill. Although Montana and our mission area in the Crown of the Continent are not directly threatened by public land sales directly, for now, this bill would establish a terrible precedent that would normalize more mass sell offs in the future, including here in Montana.

Besides, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance knows a thing or two about what it’s like to have public lands in our backyard threatened to be given to corporate interests. So, we also oppose this bill in solidarity with local communities across the West who stand to lose the places they love to hike, hunt, fish, gather, practice ceremony, or to get outside to recreate or to connect with nature.

Other provisions would however, directly affect public lands or resources in the central Crown. The bill mandates vastly accelerated timber harvest– nearly doubling current output over the next decade–and to enter into long-term contracts with private companies to harvest timber in a given area.

We could also face expanded oil and gas exploration in our area on both public and split-estate private lands, under the bill’s mandate for quarterly lease sales, and requirement to lease any eligible lands nominated by the industry.

Take Action: Stop the Public Land Grab

Key Takeaways on the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee’s proposal

• The bill mandates the most significant sale of public lands in generations, approximately 3 million acres of National Forests and Bureau of Land Management lands – an area greater than Glacier and the Bob combined -- all to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
• At least 250 million acres of public lands are eligible for sale including roadless areas, recommended wilderness, areas of critical ecological concern, as well as multiple use lands crucial to wildlife and outdoor economies. If the bill’s criteria for eligible lands were applied to Montana, places like the Badger-Two Medicine or the Rocky Mountain Front could be sold!
• The bill fast track sales without any public participation or debate. That’s right, the public wouldn’t get a say or be able to challenge a proposed sale. The agencies are required to nominate tracts within 30 days, and then nominate more every 60 days until the mandated goal is met.
• The bill makes no provision for tribal consultation nor does it provide Tribal Nations a fair chance to bid on lands, including places considered sacred.
• The bill mandates massive increases in timber harvest, to the tune of a minimum of 250,000,000 board feet more per year than the previous year, every year for the next decade. This would lead to, at a minimum, a 40% increase in annual timber harvest over current levels, and harvest an additional 11 billion board feet of than would be cut based on current baselines.
• The timber harvest mandate allows no consideration for market forces, local mill capacity, ecological conditions, or other agency priorities and mandates, besides existing individual forest plan annual volume maximums, to affect the targets.
• Nor is it clear how the Forest Service will be able to responsibly and lawfully design and administer vastly expanded commercial harvest due to the massive compelled layoffs they’re experiencing. For example, the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest and Flathead National Forest have lost approximately 30% of their staff, many of them resource specialists necessary to design science-based forest management projects, with another round of cuts anticipated soon.
• To get around this limitation, the bill mandates the Forest Service enter into at least 40 long-term timber sale contracts with a single entity, raising the specter that  commercial harvest to benefit a single company will become the dominant use in a given area of a national forest.
• The bill mandates accelerated oil and gas lease sales across the west. While most national forest land in our area, including the Badger-Two Medicine and Rocky Mountain Front, has been Congressionally-withdrawn from future lease sales, most of the BLM land, private land, and tribal land along the front has not and would be open to leasing under this provision.
• To incentivize lease sales, the bill lowers royalties and limits environmental analysis and review.

There are also many other terrible provisions to greatly expand oil and gas leasing, coal mining, and to open the Arctic to energy and mineral exploitation.  For more information, check out the excellent analysis and maps from our friends at The Wilderness Society.

Please contact Montana’s Senators (or your home state) and tell them to not let this bill move forward with any public land sale provisions in it.