Great American Outdoors Act
By Saul Levin
When President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act today, we received the most comprehensive conservation legislation in decades.
The bill will eliminate more than 75 percent of billions of backlogged park and recreation expenses and bolster the long defunded Land and Water Conservation Fund. And though the conservative-led bill has political intentions of smoothing over consistent Republican anti-environment legislation, the outcome is excellent, and recent history suggests that there are clear ways we could take conservation action further.
Republicans have stymied park funding until now. Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO), who introduced the bill in the Senate, is trying to obfuscate his own troubling environmental record that has earned him an 11 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. He is in the midst of a competitive race in a state that has trended blue. Furthermore, he represents Colorado, a state where 70 percent of voters prioritize environmental protection over economic growth. But even if the legislation amounts to little more than a transparent attempt to reverse past nonfeasance and pull together a semblance of conservative environmental credentials, it is urgently needed.
National Parks and other federal lands are key public sites of carbon sequestration, recreation and history. Highlighting one example, former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck said that water filtration is the key economic role of forests. All of these roles have become increasingly important amidst the climate crisis, and funding them is essential when park ecosystems and infrastructure have been eroding for decades.
Placing the bill in the context of the last major conservation legislation outlines an idea for where we can and should go next. While Trump posited today that “there hasn’t been anything like this since Teddy Roosevelt I suspect,” comparatively recent legislation has actually done much more than the current bill. The National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 (NRPA), a visionary omnibus project of San Francisco Congressman Philip Burton, compiled park expansions, proposals, historic site designations, and nearly every other conservation proposal his staff could find from preceding years. The NRPA amounted to Burton’s office passing the conservation priorities of Congresspeople in some 40 states and hundreds of congressional districts in a sweeping compromise. The bill established parks, extended trails, upgraded designations, and initiated studies of new areas, among other contributions. While the NRPA was a transformative moment for increasing conservation, the current bill is getting us back to neutral.
Now that Congress has caught up to the past with the funding in the Great American Outdoors Act, it is time to reimagine aspirational legislation like the 1970s NRPA, even while attuning it to the present. While it should complement legislation to ban fossil fuel leases on federal lands, a proposal a majority of Americans support for new leases, here I am talking about how more direct conservation legislation could expand justice and define and design conservation for justice.
This legislation could increase carbon sequestration while taking on the dual challenges of systemic racism and a boggled pandemic response. One lesson from the 1978 law comes from its preservation of places like the Maggie Walker National Historic Site, which honored a black civil-rights activist. New legislation could similarly begin the long overdue process of shedding light on the pivotal role Black Americans play in our history, a history that is often left out of textbooks and public sites. Responding to the urgent calls of the Movement for Black Lives, racist sites and monuments could be dismantled like statues, even while new sites adjacent to communities of color could democratize access to open space, an especially vital resource during a pandemic.
The legislation could and should go further. A comprehensive bill could deliver long overdue indigenous justice, building on the recent land return in Oklahoma by honoring broken treaties and returning stolen land. It could fund a more robust Native American-led review of our historic sites, which so often erase or misconstrue indigenous history and contemporary life, and instead fund and support indigenous conservation projects.
The Great American Outdoors Act is a welcome start to substantive conservation policy that we urgently need to accompany decarbonization. Now let’s learn from historic and imaginative legislation from the past to build towards a future of environmental, racial, and indigenous justice.
Saul Levin (@saaaauuull) is a Fellow at Data for Progress and organizer and policy writer in the climate justice movement.