Land Sale of The Century

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Beyond these objections, environmentalists oppose the sales on principle, insisting that the Government should hold and manage these lands for the benefit of all Americans, not just those who can afford to buy and develop them. As a position paper prepared by the Wilderness Society puts it: "American history has demonstrated that the public is not well served, in the long run, by turning over commodity lands to private interests. The aim of business is short-run profits, not long-run preservation—and experience has shown that conservation of resources is critical to sustaining a high standard of living—or living at all."

For ranchers, profits and conservation go hand in hand. Preservation of federal lands means continued access to vast grazing areas. The sell-off threatens this arrangement, since ranchers may not be able to afford to buy the acreage for which they now hold federal grazing permits. Says Paul Bottari, executive secretary of the Nevada Cattlemen's Association: "Cattlemen would have supported the sale of public lands if there had been provisions built into the proposals to ensure that they would be able to utilize their present rights."

In effect, the ranchers want protection against themselves. One of the reasons that they are so dependent on public grazing lands is that private ranges have been grossly overgrazed. Environmentalists cite this as proof of their contention that commercial interests are often concerned only with profits. The timber industry has been another offender: it wants to buy national forests, in part because private lands have been overcut. Indeed, environmentalists note, the whole purpose of creating the national forest system was to prevent loggers from stripping the woods bare. "Two-thirds of the timber in this country comes from private land, and private timber industries can overcut or do whatever they want with that land and the timber on it," says Turnage. "But we want to make sure that the other third is managed properly so that we will all have timber into the 21st century."

Perhaps most important of all, opponents argue that the worth of land simply cannot be measured in dollars and cents. "The idea that man can assess the value of a piece of land doesn't take into account what we've learned about ecology in the last 40 years," says Maitland Sharp, conservation director of the Izaak Walton League. To be sure, there is no way to calculate the dollar value of the view from a mountaintop, the solitude of a forest or the airy freedom provided by a piece of open land near a crowded city. There is no way to put a price on an ecosystem that is destroyed to make way for a shopping center or a high-rise apartment.