Conspiracies that Wall Street Will Buy Our National Parks Are Out of Control

There’s a war raging over who owns our nation’s 640 million acres of public land. On one side, you have citizens just like you and me. We, who use the lands we collectively own for recreation, benefit from the healthy ecosystems they help sustain, and who financially rely on the millions of jobs and trillions of dollars they create each year. On the other, you have a small handful of large oil and gas companies, aided by the politicians they’ve bought off, trying to steal all that from us normal folks.

But in a Democracy, evil oligarchs can’t just steal our stuff. They need our approval first. So they try to trick us into letting them.

Putting that in simple, plain language sure makes it easy to understand, right? There’s a problem with that. While you may be a smart person who reads Outside, and trusts what I say, there’s plenty of people who choose to believe someone else.

Maybe that someone else is a politician like U.S. Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT), who takes money from oil and gas billionaires, even while voting on bills that would allow them to privatize the state’s wildlife. Or Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who is trying to give lands to oil and gas companies under the thinly veiled guise of providing affordable housing.

Maybe that someone else is a gun right’s organization, which lies to its members about the nature of public lands, while working to convince them to vote for privatizing them.

And maybe that someone else is a popular Instagram and TikTok account, which claims to advocate for public access to public lands, but instead distributes conspiracy theories designed to incept the idea that federal management of public lands is bad.

Conspiracies like this one. Which many readers have sent to me, and which has since been shared by other popular accounts in adjacent spaces, such as popular Mazda Miata fan page, TheGambler500.

Because the real takeaway here is all of us should endeavor to learn the complicated, nuanced realities behind simple messages before we choose to believe in them, let’s fact check some of the claims the BlueRibbon Coalition is making.

The Claim: “The Federal Government Wants to Sell off Your National Parks to Wall Street!”

The Reality: Selling Public Lands Would Require an Act of Congress

Creating a majority consensus around anything in Congress is difficult, let alone something that would be as politically charged as this. Assuming a single party had control of of both houses of Congress and the White House, any sale would require more than half of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a signature from the President. And even then, such legislation would likely attract significant, years-long legal challenges. While National Parks have had their designations changed several times in the past, in all cases those lands transitioned to even more significant levels of protection.

This is why it’s common to see rhetoric from Republican politicians around “returning” (states never owned the federal land within their borders), or “transferring” management of public land to state management, which presumably would avoid some controversy. Where the feds have a mandate to manage for conservation through multiple use, state governments are mandated to manage for profit—meaning extraction and development. And because they don’t have anything like the budget the federal government does, states would find themselves one wildfire or other natural disaster away from needing to recoup loses through sales.

You can learn more about how federal management of public land works in this article.

The Claim: Something Significant Is Hidden 68,811 Pages Deep into the Federal Register!

The Reality: This Is a Public Notice Mechanism

The Natural Asset Corporations (NACs) at the center of of these conspiracies have been the subject of news articles in major media outlets as far back at at least 2019. The Federal Register isn’t some secret document, it’s a public notice of proposed government rule making, for the purpose of soliciting public input. The many number of pages contained in this document aren’t some indication that shady operators are trying to bury information, but simply the result of how much business our government conducts, as it manages an economy producing over $25 trillion annually.

This leads to a larger truth. While federal management of public lands is often painted as a case of far-off bureaucracies making detached decisions without local input, the opposite is actually true. Any major decision a federal agency makes is subject to a significant public review process in which all stakeholders, including you, me and those oil and gas companies have the chance to make our voices heard. Publication in the Federal Register is merely one of the first steps in these processes, which typically take years, and involve everything from town hall meetings, to the assembly of stakeholder advisory committees. Throughout all this, the media serves as a further check and balance, informing the public and reporting on the process. Even if you don’t consider the Federal Register light reading, you’re going to hear about stuff that impacts you in a newspaper, an online news source, or on television.

You can learn more about the public review process in rulemaking on public land in this article.

The Claim: “The New York Stock Exchange Is Working with the Securities and Exchange Commission…to Create a New Type of Company Holding Rights to Public Land!”

The Reality: This Is About a Proposal to Create an Obscure Tax Loophole

Shadowy figures in far off places?! Next thing you know, they’re going to get the lizard people involved! E&E News, which reports on environmental policy, describes NACs:

“The idea proposed by the NYSE is to list companies with missions to improve ecosystems through management, maintenance, or restoration of public or privately-owned lands — and then put a dollar figure on the resulting benefits, like clean air or wildlife habitat.”

You can read more about the NYSE’s proposal to create NACs in the Federal Register here. You don’t even need to flip through 68,811 pages to find that information, it’s right there.

In any discussion of NACs, it’s important to note that this proposal is targeted at financial rulemaking, not public land management. At this stage, none of this has anything to do with public lands, it’s just an effort to establish a new type of corporation in law. You know, so they can do what any financial vehicle does and help rich people dodge taxes.

The basic concept of an NAC sounds far from evil. The gist is that people currently have the opportunity to invest in stuff that creates pollution, but not the opportunity to put their money into natural ecosystems, which fix pollution, without just buying property. Changing that might help address the climate disaster, or just be a new way for rich people to protect their money from taxation. Who knows!

Nowhere does the proposal list any formal designation for types of public land that NACs may work with, nor is there anything even mentioning the very large, very serious federal agencies (Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture et al.) that would have to spend years making rules around such an entity doing anything of any sort related to public land. “National Park,” appears nowhere in this document, nor does “National Forest,” “Wildlife Refuge,” “National Monument,” or any other major type of land I can think of.

You can read more about all the types of public land, and how you can use them, in this article.

The Claim: “So that Means the Federal Management Agencies Won’t Be Managing these Areas Anymore!”

The Reality: That’s Their Exact Job?

I can name plenty of corporations who operate on public lands, and have done so for decades: ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum, in addition to innumerable mining, timber, energy, and other giant extractive interests.

And that’s because public lands outside of national parks (which are managed for preservation) are managed for conservation under the principle of multiple use. Conservation is the managed use of natural resources, enabling them to pay for themselves so that they can continue to exist into the future.

While pollution and some of the issues associated with extractive industries operating on public land and water aren’t exactly great, the conservation and multiple use models are ultimately the reason why our nation so uniquely has so many natural places, and why we all have so many opportunities to hike, bike, drive, camp, hunt, and fish.

It’s the job of the Bureau of Land Management, or the Forest Service, or all of the other agencies involved, to make all that work. While there is no mention of NACs operating on public land in the Federal Register, assuming that they wanted to, they’d do so by leasing rights, just like ExxonMobil does, and all of their operations on that lease would be managed by the totality of federal rule making, which you and I have the opportunity to participate in. For all the reasons stated above, and again acknowledging that we’re speaking hypothetically here, should a hypothetical future NAC want to operate on BLM land or a National Forest, or a Wildlife Refuge, or whatever, they’d have to do so through a lease, not a sale.

You can read more about the financial impact of public lands in this article.

The Claim: “They Don’t Just Want to Lock Up Our Public Land, They Want to Lock Up Our Private Land Too!”

The Reality: This Doesn’t Make Any Goddamned Sense

The reel goes on to list things like “Blackrock!,” and “Quadrillions of dollars!,” and “Locking up National Parks!” I’m embarrassed for people who fall for this stuff. The total size of the world economy, for instance, is something like $85 trillion. A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion. You know that Captain Picard facepalm meme? I can’t help but cross my legs like a Frenchman as I write this.

All of this contains multiple overlaps with other conspiracy theories, all designed to melt people’s brains to the point where simple answers to complex issues start to sound like good ideas.

I feel it’s also important to mention here that conspiracy theories are dangerous. One comment in the Instagram reel mentions LaVoy Finicum, who apparently believed in anti-public lands conspiracies so much that, in 2016, he and other militia types staged an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. A high speed chase during the occupation ended when law enforcement officials were forced to shoot him.

I guess my entire point here is that we can and should be smarter than that. The processes and policies that govern public land are available to anyone curious enough to look them up, and open for all of us to participate in. The people responsible for managing our lands are real humans working hard to do their best at difficult jobs. And the way we all work towards a more harmonious future is through facts and reality, not fear and lies.