On Feb.12, the Senate passed a huge bipartisan conservation bill. Like the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Bill, the Natural Resources Management Act, which still has to pass the House and gain the president’s signature, accomplishes a lot for local constituencies painstakingly built up over years. The achievements come from the bill’s scale, though, not its direction. For the most part, it simply adds more to the existing public-land system rather than examining and potentially redirecting it. This may be the 21st century’s way of legislating large for public lands, but history shows other possibilities. Between 1879 and 1970, the federal government convened four public-land commissions to assess the current policies and recommend overhauls for congressional legislation. We may well benefit from another round of deep thinking in today’s substantially different environmental and political contexts. The first commission, which convened from 1879 to 1883, was tasked with considering the wide collection of laws meant to convert public domain into private property, after title to the land had been wangled from Indigenous people by some combination of war, treaty or fraud. But the commission ended up arguing that some of the public domain should remain permanently under public control, laying the foundation for public lands as we know them today...MORE
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