It’s time to balance access with conservation on public lands and waters

There was some good news this week when a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that “corner crossing” from public land to public land is not trespassing on adjoining private lands.  

Thanks to that ruling, the efforts by another billionaire landowner to lock the public out of our own lands has failed – and corner crossing will now be legal in six Western states. 

The issue is significant due a horrendous policy mistake when the federal government deeded every other section of public land across the West to railroad barons between 1850 and 1872 as an incentive to lay track. 

The joke was on the public since many of those deeded lands never saw permanent rail lines built. Indeed it’s rare that one can see any railroads from most of the “checkerboard” sections.

Those lands in Montana were infamously logged mercilessly when Burlington-Northern Railroad’s subsidiary, Plum Creek Timber Company, decided to “liquidate its timber assets” in the 1980s. Adding insult to injury, it then turned itself into a Real Estate Investment Trust in 1999 and is now subdividing and selling off those formerly forested parcels across the nation.

Other checkerboard sections were purchased by wealthy individuals or corporations, in many instances with the goal of surrounding and locking up public lands and their fish, wildlife, and recreational assets by locking out public access, including “corner crossing” from one public section to another. 

That particular ploy has now fallen by the wayside after Wyoming hunters used a ladder to cross the private fence to the adjoining public land and never touched the private sections. Hence, the court’s decision that it was not trespassing.

Of course the ruling has been applauded by public lands advocates who have increasingly placed “access” as their main goal rather than conservation of the public resources. And therein lies the rub.  Access and conservation are simply not the same thing — especially not when those same public lands and waters are increasingly pressured.

A great recent example would be the Montana legislature’s recent move to spend a whopping $2.7 million to study who uses Montana’s rivers, many of which are now so crowded the once-common opportunity to enjoy a river in the quiet solitude of Nature no longer exists.

One wouldn’t have to study too long on the Yellowstone, Blackfoot, Bitterroot, Madison or Missouri Rivers to see the flotillas of outfitter and private drift boats, rafts, paddleboards and inner tubes clogging the river.   

But when politicians or agencies lack the courage to address a sticky problem, they appoint task forces, advisory councils and do studies.  A great example would be the Upper Madison where, after public outcry over too many outfitters on the river, task forces and studies have been on-going for decades without resolution.   

At some point, we have to weigh the impacts of use on the resource itself to determine the actual carrying capacity of our rivers and public lands to balance access with conservation. As usual, however, the commodification of those assets by profit-driven entities continues to outweigh the impacts to the public resource. 

The simple truth is that the conservation of those resources is going to require significant investment. For instance, Montana’s list of “chronically dewatered” rivers and streams has been in existence for decades — yet, most of those rivers remain chronically dewatered.  

If our legislature really wanted to do the right thing, they’d put half of that $2.7 million into buying and leasing water rights to keep those rivers flowing, the fisheries healthy and actually conserve the resource — instead of splurging on yet another study to document the on-going decline.

George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.