The envy of the world. Our scenic, iconic public lands have attracted and inspired generations of Americans and visitors from abroad as well. The United States was the first nation to establish national parks, creating a template for saving wild places—whether forests, grasslands, rivers, seashores or wetlands. From the Florida Everglades to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, these public lands provide a rich array of benefits to people, wildlife and the planet.

And literally from south Florida to the northern coast of Alaska, the Izaak Walton League has played a key role in shaping the laws and policies that have preserved these diverse landscapes for future generations.

The federal government manages about 640 million acres of land and waterways on behalf of the public. It’s worth taking a look at the different agencies and missions for managing these places, and some of the challenges and serious threats that confront public lands today.

How are public lands managed?

Four federal agencies manage most of these lands: the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The Property Clause in Article IV of the Constitution gives Congress authority to acquire, manage and dispose of federal property. States, counties and cities often own land used for government offices, schools, parks, ballfields and the like.

The National Park Service (NPS) manages our most familiar public lands with two goals in mind: preserving unique places and providing the public with the opportunity to enjoy them. The agency oversees 80 million acres and 431 units of land in the National Park System. The units fall into many categories such as national recreation areas, national parks and national historic sites. They include Yellowstone National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Gettysburg National Military Park and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) manages national wildlife refuges in order to conserve their flora and fauna for the benefit of current and future generations. One early, spectacular example is the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which the League was instrumental in saving from development in 1924. This refuge saved the wetlands along 261 miles of the river that are invaluable to fish and waterfowl. FWS helps to manage migratory birds and protect endangered species; it also enforces wildlife laws. Of the 89 million acres of refuges and “waterfowl production areas” within the National Wildlife Refuge System, 77 million acres are in Alaska.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has a mission to manage land for multiple uses including recreation, grazing, timber, conservation and wildlife habitat. Most of the 244 million acres of BLM land is in the West and 155 million acres are available for livestock grazing. A smaller portion, 37 million acres, is managed as National Conservation Lands to preserve scientific, cultural, historical and recreational characteristics.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFW), established in 1905, conducts research, advises nonfederal forest owners and manages 193 million acres of land for recreation, grazing and wildlife habitat in addition to timber. In response to indiscriminate clear-cutting in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia during the 1960s, the League successfully sued the Forest Service for violating the 1897 law that specified what timber could be cut on the nation’s forest reserves. The decision in Izaak Walton League v. Butz in 1975 led to the National Forest Management Act of 1976, which places some restrictions on clearcuts.

The Izaak Walton League has played a key role in shaping the laws and policies that have preserved these diverse landscapes for future generations.

The Forest Service is the only federal land management agency housed in the Department of Agriculture. FWS, NPS and BLM are part of the Department of the Interior. A fifth agency, the Department of Defense, manages about nine million acres of land for military bases and training ranges. Several other agencies manage about 23 million acres.

Within and across the four major land agencies there are numerous additional designation categories based on specific use and management guidelines.

National monuments preserve places that have a specific cultural, historic or natural feature and monuments can be managed by seven different federal agencies including the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force. Examples range from the Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico to the Statue of Liberty and Stonewall National Monuments in New York City.

Wilderness areas aim to leave land in its most natural state. Management of these areas prohibits roads, buildings or mechanical transportation while opportunities for outdoor recreation—from hunting and fishing to canoeing and camping—abound. More than 800 wilderness areas protect roughly 111 million acres in 44 states. One example that the Izaak Walton League has championed is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, the most frequently visited wilderness area in the U.S.

National seashores and national lakeshores preserve shores and islands and provide access to recreation. Three national lakeshores are located on the Great Lakes. Ten national seashores are found along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.

Forty national recreation areas near reservoirs provide visitors with opportunities for boating, fishing and other water-based recreation. In addition, there are a variety of national trails (Appalachian National Scenic Trail is one example) and wild and scenic rivers that keep rivers and surrounding land in their natural conditions (the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River, for example).

During their migration, monarch butterflies rest in St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida.

How we benefit from public lands

The millions of people who visit public lands every year typically make the trip for recreation or to enjoy a natural or historic setting. Public lands, whether forests, rivers or lakeshores, are treasured for their availability for camping, hiking, hunting and fishing.

Conserving natural resources to sustain outdoor recreation was one of the reasons for the creation of the Izaak Walton League. The early years of the League included many victories in protection of our public lands and it remains a top priority for the League.

But some of the benefits of public lands are less obvious and some could not have been imagined in the 19th century when the nation first began to protect these places. For example, climate mitigation and biodiversity are benefits that came into focus more recently.

Natural resources

For many years, timber production was the primary function of the U.S. Forest Service. Public lands have also produced a wealth of minerals and energy (more on that below). And wild places like forests, grasslands and wetlands also “produce” clean drinking water for a vast proportion of Americans. Forests and wetlands naturally filter and clean water for drinking. Over the decades, management of public lands has shifted from a primary focus on extraction to include conservation and recreation.

Wildlife habitat and biodiversity

To preserve fish and wildlife populations, we need to preserve their habitat. Early conservationists like the League and the Boone and Crocket Club have long understood this. Today, to conserve our dwindling biodiversity, we need to preserve a wide array of specific ecosystem types that are essential to specific flora and fauna that have adapted to those types over millions of years. In his book Half-Earth, the late biologist E. O. Wilson argued that the survival of humans as well as wild animals will be imperiled if we don’t protect at least half of the earth’s surface as wild places where biodiversity can persist.

The outdoor recreation economy: $1 trillion

Outdoor recreation on public lands provides millions of jobs and drives the outdoor recreation economy, which has been valued at $1 trillion in economic activity in the U.S. That includes hospitality, gear and other spending in gateway communities and in industries that support outdoor recreation. Whether for hiking, hunting, fishing, camping or paddling, public lands provide most of the space where Americans can get outdoors for recreation.

Energy production

Public lands in the U.S. produce an immense proportion of the fuel for the nation’s energy including oil, natural gas, coal and renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.

Public lands and federal offshore waters produced about 25 percent of the nation’s crude oil and 10 percent of its natural gas in 2021. And coal taken from leases on federal land represents 45 percent of the nation’s coal production.

At the same time, fossil fuels taken from our federal lands contribute about 25 percent of total carbon emissions in the U.S., so the federal government can play a role in the transition to cleaner energy generated on lands owned by taxpayers.

Grasslands, wetlands, forests and other wild places can store vast amounts of carbon to help mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

Climate mitigation

Grasslands, wetlands, forests and other wild places can store vast amounts of carbon to help mitigate the worst effects of climate change. These natural places can also soak up stormwater to reduce the impact of flooding, exacerbated by warmer temperatures and extreme weather. In cities, which can become dangerously hot during the summer, urban parks with trees help to cool the air.

Migration corridors and control areas

The nation’s network of public lands can help wildlife that need to migrate. This is true for elk, mule deer and antelope that face treacherous annual migrations across a patchwork of landowners in Wyoming. It’s also true for plants in Virginia that need to migrate upslope or north to cooler temperatures in order to survive. Land managed as wilderness areas is largely left untouched and can serve as a “control” against which we can measure and understand how wild places deal with challenges, like a changing climate.

Threats to public land

The push to extract public lands from the public hands began in earnest during the 1940s when private cattle and wool interests wanted to own those lands to graze livestock and stop paying a below-market fee to the government for grazing. One breath-taking legislative idea championed by Wyoming Senator Edward V. Robertson and Nevada Senator Pat McCarren was proposed in 1946. Backed by livestock interests, the bill would have given away for free more than 145 million acres of BLM lands (which are owned by all Americans) to the states, where they would have been put up for sale to stockmen and wool growers for as little as nine cents per acre.

A column titled “The West against Itself ” by writer Bernard DeVoto exposed the McCarren bill as a greedy land grab. Published in Harpers Magazine in January 1947, the column led to a series on the topic that resonated in Washington and across America. McCarren objected to the columns. At the Izaak Walton League convention in Chicago a few months later, the senator said he was in fact a “Theodore Roosevelt” man. A conservationist. But popular opposition to the land grab killed the idea.

There have been more attempts to transfer public lands to private interests. An effort dubbed the “sagebrush rebellion” opposed conservation on public lands in the late 1970s. In 2014, a Nevada rancher—who had stopped paying grazing fees and owed a million dollars in fees and penalties—organized an armed standoff to prevent enforcement of grazing laws.

Today, grazing on public lands is less common and less profitable but ranchers and, more to the point, extractive industries seeking to mine or drill on public lands are very interested in acquiring millions of acres of those lands.

Preservation of public lands has enjoyed wide bipartisan support for many decades. But our public lands still face several threats.

League-inspired laws like the Land and Water Conservation Fund make public lands more accessible in every corner of the U.S.

One is funding. Some popular parks and wild places, like Yellowstone, are “loved to death” due to the number of visits. Growing need for updating infrastructure has fallen behind due to underfunding. The cost of fighting and managing wildfires has escalated rapidly in the past decade as drought and our long history of fire suppression have exposed forests and grasslands to catastrophic wildfires.

The bipartisan popularity of public lands, whether in Maryland or Montana, has not prevented attempts to begin the process of selling off or giving away these lands that, again, are owned by all Americans.

Renewed threats to public ownership emerged when Congress convened in January 2025. The House of Representatives adopted a special rule that would make it easier to transfer public lands to the states. The rule zeroes out the value of certain public lands so that transferring them to states would not hurt the owners of the land—the American public.

The push to “return” federal lands to western states is specious since western states gave up claims to federal land as a condition of being admitted into the Union when the territories applied for statehood. Also, the Property Clause of the Constitution clearly gives Congress, not states, the authority to make decisions about public lands.

The Izaak Walton League has a long history of policy and advocacy defending the nation’s public lands and it helped to establish one of the most productive laws that helps to ensure Americans have access to those lands: the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Read more about that in “League’s Legacy: America’s Most Successful Conservation Law,” Outdoor America, Issue 2, 2021.

Top photo: In 1864, President Lincoln signed a bill to protect Yosemite Valley in California for public use, resort and recreation. Eight years later, Yellowstone National Park was established. Credit: iStock.