Did you know that there are still 1.6 million acres of unprotected lands inside of our national parks, and even more in our national forests, wildlife refuges, and other public lands? These areas are called “inholdings,” and they are privately-owned islands inside publicly-owned spaces. They can be at risk of development, which occurs more often than most may realize, like when trophy homes were built inside of Zion National Park in Utah.
Luckily, a program exists that enables our government to buy these inholdings from willing sellers. It’s called the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and it’s been a highly successful program that has enabled land managers to make our parks and public lands whole, thereby increasing access and recreation opportunities.
Federal land acquisitions are currently a topic of hot debate, because some members of Congress—like Utah Representative Rob Bishop—have let LWCF expire in large part due to their ideological opposition to the basic notion of the government acquiring and managing lands on behalf of all Americans.
Now, using data first made available by Phil Taylor at Energy and Environment News, we’ve created an interactive map that shows how important LWCF land acquisitions have been to communities and their nearby public lands across the country.
Take a look and see if your Congressional district is one of the 188 districts where LWCF money went to land acquisitions between 2011-2015.
There are a few key takeaways from this map and the underlying data:
- Republican congressional districts benefitted the most from LWCF federal land acquisitions, receiving twice as much money compared to Democratic districts.
- Some of the districts represented by members who are most ideologically opposed to federal land ownership have significantly benefitted—such as Utah, whose deep red districts saw nearly $10 million in land acquisitions and their benefits in the last four years alone.
- Agencies acquiring land isn’t just something that happens in the West. It happens across the country, helping people get outdoors from places like the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Rep. Dan Benishek’s Michigan district to Prince William Forest Park in Rep. Robert Wittman’s Virginia district.
But rather than extend this significant program, some members of Congress have proposed gutting LWCF and its land acquisition component. As a recent CWP analysis shows, Rep. Bishop’s “reform bill” (which diverts a large portion of conservation funding to oil companies) provides a miniscule amount of the funds that agencies need to make our public lands whole. This proposal is intentionally designed to hurt the Western U.S. the most.
Members of Congress opposed to land acquisitions are fond of criticizing the “bloated” federal government for acquiring more lands and increasing the size of the federal estate. However, they fail to note that the amount of lands owned by the federal government has shrunk by 18 million acres since 1990.