Middle Fork Snoqualmie River, Washington | photo credit Monty Vanderbilt
The secret double life of America’s public lands
River Protection Director. My work in river conservation started in 2005. I had a summer fellowship in a chemistry lab in Austria, and after completing it, I traveled extensively throughout the Balkans. I was mesmerized by the rivers I encountered and understood that many of them would be lost in the coming years to an onslaught of poorly planned hydropower development.
By John Zablocki, American Rivers/Additions and Modifications by Henry Clement
Public lands are the birthright of every American. One of the great privileges of living in this country is the ability to access hundreds of millions of acres to enjoy the great outdoors, all for free.
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence.—Excerpt from The Wilderness Letter by Wallace Stegner
People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikers—there is something for almost everyone on public lands. But what if you live in a city and never set foot on public lands? Why care about them then?
Not everyone hunts, fishes, mines, ranches, hikes, or bikes, but everyone, truly everyone, depends on clean water
The big secret about public lands is that they are arguably the country’s single biggest clean water provider. According to the US Forest Service, National Forests are the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities across 33 states. Many of the country’s largest urban areas, including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta, receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.
Healthy forests and grasslands perform many of the functions traditionally provided by water infrastructure. They store water, filter pollutants, and transport clean water to downstream communities. And they do it naturally — essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price — literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.
What happens on the public’s land also happens to the public’s water. The importance of managing public lands for the benefit of public water is so fundamental that it has been a pillar of public lands management agencies’ missions since their inception over a century ago.
Photo credit American Rivers
The Organic Act of 1897, which created the US Forest Service, stated:
No public forest reservation [national forest] shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the reservation [national forest] or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.
When land is degraded due to mining, clear-cutting, overgrazing, and other uses, the negative effects are carried far, far downstream, all the way to your faucet. Poor land management practices also release sediments and contaminants into public water supplies. Such pollution has significant consequences, ranging from increased water treatment costs to potentially triggering a serious public health crisis.
Poor land management is the main driver of desertification — the phenomenon of lush riparian areas turning into barren plains. Desertification depletes the public’s supply of water, as well as the public’s supply of grass for livestock and big game that ranchers and hunters depend on.
Hatches occur on clean riverine waters—Eastern Green Drake Mayfly – Illustration by renowned watercolorist, fly fisher, and conservationist Thom Glace.
Access to clean, reliable water is a necessity that transcends all social and political divisions
It is fundamental to life, literally. Land management that neglects watershed health amounts to peeing in the nation’s public pool — something I think we can all agree we don’t want to happen to our drinking water.
For a good chronological summary of major FS law and policies since the Organic Act of 1897
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