Chapter IV

PUBLIC LANDS MANAGED FOR MULTIPLE USE

In more than eight decades of defending the public interest, the League has adopted hundreds of position statements concerning lands administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service (to which this section applies). The basic issues have changed little throughout the years: commercial interests seeking undue preference in management decisions or even outright title to the public’s lands; appropriations insufficient for the needs of professional resource management; restrictions on the public’s access to its own lands; and short-term management for commodity outputs. In principle, League policy applies to all lands owned by the federal government and to most state and county lands.

• A) Principles
  • 1) Public lands are a perpetual trust to be administered for the longterm benefit of all people. Local and other special interests should receive due consideration in the administration of public lands; however, the overall public interest must be paramount, and special interests must not be allowed to exploit public lands or to gain vested rights to the public’s resources.
  • 2) Any individual or group that is granted the privilege of special use of public lands should pay a reasonable fee for that privilege, based on fair market values, and should be held accountable for any abuse.
  • 3) There should be no mass transfer of public lands to private ownership, or of federal lands to the states.
  • 4) Public lands should be managed to protect or enhance the resource base.
  • 5) Under the concepts of sustained yield and multiple use, public lands should be managed for a mix of purposes including watershed protection, soil and forest conservation, wildlife habitat improvement, wilderness, and outdoor recreation—as well as for the production of timber, livestock, minerals, and other commodities. The public interest requires continued availability of renewable resources of the highest quality.
  • 6) Under the concepts of sustained yield and multiple use, public lands should be managed for a mix of purposes including watershed protection, soil and forest conservation, wildlife habitat improvement, wilderness, and outdoor recreation—as well as for the production of timber, livestock, minerals, and other commodities. The public interest requires continued availability of renewable resources of the highest quality.
  • 7) To realize long-term productivity potentials of public lands, mechanisms should be established to promote long-term management planning and to ensure commitment of long-term funding.
  • 8) To permit efficient administration and management of all public land resources, action should be taken to eliminate undesirable private inholdings, dispose of isolated tracts not useful to the public, block out boundaries, and otherwise consolidate public land holdings through exchange, purchase, sale, or other means.
  • 9) User advisory boards should be truly advisory—not administrative in nature—and should equitably represent all land-user interests, including outdoor recreation and wildlife.
  • 10) The League rejects the concept of dominant use proposed by the Public Land Law Review Commission and opposes any measure that would give timber production, livestock grazing, or mineral extraction philosophical or legal precedence over other multipleuse objectives for public lands.
  • 11) Public land resources should be managed by professional managers without political intervention in the analysis, evaluation, and display of management options. Choices among options may be made properly on political or economic grounds.
  • 12) Publicly owned conservation areas should not be used as waste disposal sites.
  • 13) The League supports payment-in-lieu-of-taxes systems as an option to compensate local governments for lost taxes from land within their jurisdictions taken from the tax rolls for conservation purposes such as forests, hunting, fishing, and other recreation.
• B) Public Forest Management
  • 1) Public forests include national forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service, the federally owned forests managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and numerous state forests dedicated to multiple- use management. Public forests should be managed to serve a broad spectrum of public purposes and uses, recognizing that the bulk of the nation’s long-term timber potential is on lands owned by industry, farmers, and other private parties. Commodity uses of public forests must not be overemphasized at the expense of public values, such as fish and wildlife, outdoor recreation, water quality, scenic beauty, wilderness, and natural ecosystems.
  • 2) The League supports the sustained-yield concept of forest management, but recognizes that sustained timber yields should not necessarily be taken from lands that are valuable primarily for non-commodity purposes and where sustained-yield harvest would be incompatible with those purposes.
  • 3) Management of timber on federal forestlands should be according to standards that:
    • a) Are consistent with the non-declining, even-flow, sustainedyield concept.
    • b) Analyze each proposal for the culture and harvesting of forest products and related construction activities in terms of impacts on water quality standards, fish and wildlife habitat, oldgrowth values, protective buffer strips, endangered species, aesthetic values, silvicultural practices, and forest type.
    • c) Permit individual forests to set their own goals through the forest-planning process, even if those goals do not meet national output targets.
    • d) Provide for public participation in planning.
    • e) Identify areas where harvesting of forest products is prohibited or subordinate to other uses.
    • f) Require reforestation of inadequately stocked forestland and generally prohibit timber sales in the absence of techniques and funding to assure restocking with desirable species within five years.
    • g) Base allowable cut on actual standing timber, not on theoretical gains from intensive forestry practices.
    • h) Provide for the full utilization of any timber cut or killed.
    • i) Ensure that rotations are sufficiently spaced to serve wildlife, recreation, and other public purposes and are fully compatible with multiple-use management.
    • j) Prohibit conversion of existing stands to other forest types solely to maximize commodity outputs.
    • k) Ensure that management practices minimize damage to the environment and that unavoidable damage is promptly mitigated.
    • l) Encourage uneven-age management, especially in Eastern hardwoods.
    • m) Limit the size and visual impact of clear-cuts where even-age management is used.
    • n) Implement an environmentally safe gypsy moth management program.
    • o) Are conducted in strict compliance with all environmental laws.
  • 4) In general, the next generation of forest plans should de-emphasize timber harvest relative to other resource values, scale back excessive road building, and place greater emphasis on fisheries, aquatic resources, remote habitats, watersheds, and wildlife.
  • 5) When properly planned, controlled burning offers a valuable tool for scientific forest management.
  • 6) Exportation of raw logs from federal and state lands should be restricted to ease demands on federal forests and protect domestic wood products jobs. Importation of foreign timber products that have not been treated for pests should be banned.
  • 7) Federal old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest should be given special protection wherever old-growth values are incompatible with timber harvest. These forests should be managed to protect old-growth-dependent species through new management standards that minimize fragmentation of old-growth stands into smaller tracts, preserve migration corridors among stands, and maintain existing old-growth attributes, including dependent plant and animal communities. The old-growth conservation strategy recommended by the Interagency Scientific Committee should be implemented fully to protect the threatened northern spotted owl. Harvests of old-growth stands at unsustainable levels should not be mandated by law, nor should Congress limit judicial review of federal forest management.
  • 8) The national forest road system includes some 380,000 miles of roads, many of which are in poor condition and causing environmental damage. Approximately one-third of national forestlands are still roadless and provide many ecological benefits for wildlife and the environment. The U.S. Forest Service has established policies that would protect these areas from future road building and restore roads that are causing associated damage. The League supports:
    • a) Forest Service efforts to delineate and protect the inventoried roadless areas from permanent road building.
    • b) Elimination or repair of existing roads that are causing environmental damage.
    • c) Adequate Forest Service appropriations by Congress to accomplish these goals.
    • d) Exclusion of all off-highway vehicles within designated roadless areas, except on officially designated trails.
    • e) Active management, when deemed necessary, by stewardship contracting rather than commercial logging contracts.
• C) Public Rangelands
  • 1) Grazing by domestic and wild animals should be balanced with range capacity so that soils, forage, and other resource values are not depleted.
  • 2) Public rangelands should be classified according to their suitability for livestock grazing. Livestock should be excluded from unsuitable ranges.
  • 3) On suitable ranges, livestock numbers and seasons of use should be reduced as needed to rehabilitate depleted rangelands.
  • 4) Forage resources should be allocated to meet fish and wildlife needs fully.
  • 5) Protection and restoration of damaged riparian areas should be given high priority in management and funding.
  • 6) Livestock grazing programs should provide incentives for good stewardship and improved range condition.
  • 7) All permit and lease conditions should be enforced strictly.
  • 8) Range conditions and trends should be monitored aggressively on all allotments.
  • 9) Feral horses and burros must be held to population levels that protect native wildlife species and the productive capacity of the range. The League endorses disposal of feral animals by humane means, including shooting.
  • 10) Fencing that prevents free, natural movement or migration ofwildlife should be prohibited.
  • 11) The League supports the restoration of soils, watersheds, riparianareas, vegetation, and fish and wildlife populations as the priorityfocus for federal investment in improving range condition on thelands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
  • 12) Public land grazing fees should be set at fair market values and, at a minimum, should cover administrative costs and needed improvements. The League has proposed an innovative compromise that increases grazing fees to fair market value, but buffers the impact on ranchers by offering an offsetting credit to any public land rancher who meets conservation targets.
  • 13) Multiple-use advisory councils that represent all public land usersshould replace grazing advisory boards.
• D) Mining on Public Lands
  • 1) Mining andoil and gas operations on public lands should be regulated so that all other resource values are protected to the fullest extent, and that water and land resources are restored insofar as possible to their previous conditions.
  • 2) TheMining Law of 1872 should be replaced with a mineral leasing system that no longer will allow mining interests to gain ownership rights to the surface. An acceptable approach would include provisions to:
    • a) Ensure thorough consideration of non-mineral values before adecision is made to allow mineral recovery.
    • b) Protect air, water, and adjacent land resources.
    • c) Ensure fair return to the federal treasury for the value of mineralsextracted.
    • d) Protect units of the National Park, National Wildlife Refuge,National Wild and Scenic River, and National WildernessPreservation systems.
    • e) Require mining companies to provide irrevocable financialassurance to cover liabilities such as reclamation and cleanupafter closure.
  • 3) The leasing of hard-rock minerals should be prohibited within designatedwilderness or wilderness study areas. Oil and gas leasingshould be permitted only if Congress and the President approve aspecific exception.
  • 4) The League generally opposes strip-mining of public lands. Whensuch mining is in the public interest, mining practices should beinstituted to give maximum protection to other values and ensurecomplete reclamation by the mining company.
• E) Public Lands Access
  • 1) All public lands should allow for a range of outdoor recreation opportunities consistent with other values and uses, although not every type of recreation should be accommodated on every public land area.
  • 2) Government should ensure public access to public lands.
• F) Military Lands and Uses
  • 1) Military lands of the United States should be available for the use and enjoyment of the public to the extent practical and consistent with public safety and national security. The recreational assets of military lands should not be considered a special privilege reserved for military personnel.
  • 2) All renewable resources of a military reservation should be managed professionally and used to serve the public interest, in general accordance with management practices, laws, and regulations applying to other lands.
  • 3) TheLeague opposes the use of public parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, or other conservation areas for military training missions.
• G) Surplus Federal Lands
  • 1) Outdoorrecreation, environmental protection, and related purposes should receive equal consideration with other public uses in determining proper disposal of land that is surplus to the needs of the federal government.
  • 2) The League consistently has rejected proposals to sell off or give to states large tracts of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service or the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Our multiple-use public lands are an irreplaceable public asset; they are not surplus to the nation’s needs.
  • 3)Individual tracts of public land that are identified as surplus through the land-planning process should be exchanged for other tracts of greater value for multiple-use management.
  • 4) Any federal land-exchange program should focus on enhancing resource management, stewardship, and protection equally with increasing administrative efficiency. The League calls for reform of the public land exchange process that would:
    • a) Require public notice written in a local newspaper for general circulation and Internet notice to all interested parties at least 180 days prior to approval of any public lands exchange.
    • b) Provide opportunities for public on-site inspection of proposed lands to be exchanged provided by the controlling agency.
    • c) Consider all non-monetary values, such as loss of access to adjoining public lands and wildlife habitat values associated with those lands to be exchanged.
  • 5) The League opposes the transfer or sale of any public lands bought with Pittman-Robertson or Dingell-Johnson funds, state license fees, or other user-group funds without full public participation and unless the property is replaced with other lands of equal conservation value.
  • 6) The League opposes “no net loss of private lands” legislation that restricts or limits land or property sales to public and nonprofit buyers.
  • 7) The League also opposes any law that allows local government officials to veto land purchases by states or nonprofit organizations.