With loss upon loss, I’m truly at a loss

Opinion

I wonder if everyone, as they age, develops a feeling of terminal loss not just for people we’ve known, but for places, too. I’ve seen it in others, and sometimes, it’s quite pronounced: the sense all the good is washing out of the world, leaving only bones.

But I didn’t expect to feel it so keenly myself, so soon and on so many fronts.

In the last six months or so, I’ve written about the loss of dear friends, the loss of a property in a wildfire, and the loss of my ability to travel, with a clear conscience, to parts of the United States — notably, parts of the western desert like the Black Rock Desert — I have visited many times and dearly love.

Now, I feel like I’m getting to be one of the many witnesses to irreversible change that’s only speeding up.

The latest little click of that clock? A budget bill addition in the U.S. Senate that will order the sale of millions of acres of public lands in western states, effectively to the highest bidder.

The bill, if passed, will order the sale of lands currently held by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest System in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington state and Wyoming.

It’s ostensibly to build housing. Truth be told, though, it’s probably designed to be for the profit of the modern-day carpetbaggers and robber barons, the people who have the money to snap up under-priced public assets and convert them for their own profit or pleasure.

Guardrails are few. Most of the legal requirements of the sales are set or defined by the decision of cabinet appointees. Like: “A tract of covered Federal land disposed of under this section shall be used solely for the development of housing or to address associated community needs as defined by the Secretary concerned.”

Now, there’s a gap you can drive a bus through.

And the plan has some interesting features: it wants to give priority for sale to federal lands that are close to existing infrastructure, adjacent to developed areas and suitable for residential development — which all sounds good for building housing — but the government only expects to collect US$10 billion in revenue, meaning the property is expected to sell in the range of US$3,030 an acre.

That’s startling. The average cost of developable land in the U.S. runs at around US$18,000 an acre, and developable land adjacent to already-developed areas and close to existing infrastructure can hit US$100,000 an acre.

So someone’s going to make a lot more money than the U.S. Treasury will on this deal.

As a percentage, the amounts of the land sales are small — just 0.5 per cent to 0.75 per cent of the lands held by the two agencies.

But just that tiny fraction of federal land holdings is equal to 2.2 million to 3.3 million acres of federal lands — in Canadian terms, at the high end, 2.4 times the size of Prince Edward Island.

It makes you think that many in government — both in the U.S. and Canada — spend little time in the outdoors, and more time calculating measurable short-term economic returns.

That’s very much the way Republicans seem to be pitching the selloff: Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee argued the move would turn “federal liabilities into taxpayer value,” tacitly voicing the concept that forest lands have value only as a commodity, and that stewarding them for future generations is necessarily a loss.

And don’t get me started on the sales of wood from existing U.S. National Forest lands — the bill also would increase cutting, saying, “For each of fiscal years 2026 through 2034, the Secretary shall sell timber annually on National Forest System land in a total quantity that is not less than 250,000,000 board-feet greater than the quantity of board-feet sold in the previous fiscal year.” By fiscal 2028, that would be a 25 per cent annual increase in wood cut on National Forest land.

It’s funny — when I think about the quiet beauty of the Modoc National Forest in California, walking on the deep cushioned mat of pine needles beneath the huge trees, the air hanging still in a way that engenders something close to reverence, I don’t think of how much more valuable it would be as a housing development or mall, or even how much the wood is worth.

Heading up to the Fandango Pass above Goose Lake, Calif., even travelling through the recovering burn scar of a forest fire that raced up the western face of the mountains of the Warner Range, the wildflowers rampant with all the new sunlight that’s now cast down beneath and through the burnt-black pines, I don’t think of board-feet of lumber. In the Black Rock Desert, I see the great open skies and the shoulders of the hills, not mineral reserves waiting to be harvested.

Why, some might say, it’s only a trim around the edges of natural reserves. There’s lots.

Until there isn’t.

And once gone, many things never come back.

I think that’s something you learn for keeps as you grow older.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca