More about Our Public Lands…

We are familiar with the stunning vistas in our National Parks, Monuments, and some designated Wilderness areas.  But there are also vast areas of public lands overflowing with stunning natural beauty that remain unprotected from development and degradation.  Most of these unprotected public lands are remote and rugged landscapes. These hidden treasure lands, concealing eons of natural processes, are thankfully, not always easy to access.  

Explore them we must.  If citizen owners don’t realize what we have out there, narrow commercial interests may be able to carve up and steal away with our treasure while we are sleeping, unaware.

How should our public lands be used?

Must the land on our planet be used to have value? Is the value of your son or daughter based only on what they can produce ?  Or do you love them simply for who they are as unique individuals? Many voices are now joining the aboriginal peoples in their recognition of land value beyond the resource extraction valuations. The land certainly has intrinsic value as habitat for the plants and animals that make our natural systems work, and creating the very air we breathe.  But it also has value simply because of the unique landscape features that were created by forces and timescales that man cannot ever duplicate. That is reason enough to cherish and preserve them.

But there is another core human need for the wild public lands. Daily life in the large urban population centers can feel like living inside a beehive. Average citizens are experiencing increasing complexities of life and the future of our society appears to becoming even more complex. We are losing touch with the very nature from whence we came.

Leaving the beehive behind and finding your way to a remote wild land, you begin to settle in and let the quiet overtake you. Then, while observing a pristine landscape that was created over vast swaths of geologic time, a lighting bolt of realization strikes you that we are but newcomers riding on the surface of this ancient vessel that provides for our entire life support.  Moments like these replenish the soul and remind us what is important, and what is not.

Like pushing a spiritual reset button, we are then able to clearly see the contrast with our current world and better understand our place in it.  This is how we can keep our sanity, keep our perspective, and remember our commonality as humans sailing along together on an incredibly beautiful, but fragile planet.

The ultimate use of our wild public lands should be to provide a natural sanctuary for us to reconnect to our planet and our humble human beginnings.  Experiencing the quiet solitude and moments of reflection in a setting that is yet unchanged by man sends a shock wave deep into our collective human memory that recalls the land we came from.  We have to keep a reminder of what the planet was like before we started changing it, lest we completely forget. Nothing could be more important in the future of our species.

But here in Central Oregon, we must first acknowledge that we are now living on lands traditionally occupied for thousands of years by the ancestors of the Shoshoni peoples, the first humans to hunt, farm, and create societies on these lands, and that they did not give permission for the European settlers to take over their lands. We are obligated to find mutually acceptable solutions to correcting past wrongs.

Click here for a brief history of our public lands

Of course, the Bureau of Land Management must consider ‘more practical’ uses of the public lands when deciding which uses to allow that don’t conflict with each other.  Mining, oil & gas exploration, livestock grazing, and public recreation are uses typically considered by the BLM for our public lands. Resource extraction simply can’t be done without sacrificing more of our wild sanctuary land.  Ranchers are still trying to show grazing does not destroy ecosystems, but the jury is out.

We regular citizens must raise our voice on behalf of our wild public lands to preserve them just as they are.  Now and in the future, they have the ultimate value as our wilderness sanctuaries for the human spirit. Our children would expect nothing less.

How can we help protect our public land treasures?

Find and join a conservation organization who is working on public lands in your region.  

In the southeast Oregon High Desert region, a leading organization for public land protection is the Oregon Natural Desert Association.  ONDA is deeply involved in establishing permanent, legal protections to prevent the sale and development of our public lands. They have successfully brokered agreements between all stakeholders for positive outcomes, and they provide extensive public land on the ground stewardship efforts, which are only possible with large numbers of volunteer workers.

Years ago, the BLM inventoried our public lands to determine which areas might contain characteristics that could qualify them for permanent protection status as ‘Wilderness’.  ONDA played a pivotal role in reviewing their list of Wilderness Study Areas, and took legal action to require the BLM to add many additional WSAs. ONDA continues to work toward turning these study areas into protected ‘Wilderness’ status.  

Learn more about ONDA and how to support their work here.

Go, get out there...Check on your treasure. See it, experience it for yourself, because you own it. For now...

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” 
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire