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Utah’s Bid to Take Control of Federal Lands

Will bad legal theories and unsound environmental policy find support in the Supreme Court?

Craig Axford
6 min readDec 2, 2024
Ancient Puebloan structure in Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. Photo by author.

When it comes to the management of public lands, consensus has proven elusive. Even those of us living near them who arguably know them best have found it impossible to reach agreement amongst ourselves on the question of how to best manage them.

While the phrase public lands technically include everything from local city parks to large national parks, here in the western United States it is most strongly identified with federal lands. These are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Forest Service, the National Park Service (NPS), and the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). With one exception, all of these agencies fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Interior. The Forest Service is a part of the Agriculture Department.

According to a 2021 draft document prepared on behalf of the Utah State Legislature, approximately 71% of the state is managed by the federal government. Most of this land is managed by the BLM.

Utah’s conservative legislators have long complained about the amount of land the federal government owns in the state. Every new national monument designation inevitably gets described as a “land grab” and every…

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Craig Axford
Craig Axford

Written by Craig Axford

M.A. in Environment and Management and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology & Environmental Studies. Living in Moab, Utah. A generalist, not a specialist.

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