Advocates sound alarm bells

'No recovery from this': Grand Teton National Park advocates sound alarm bells over possible sell-off

A GOP bill puts public lands for sale. Its effects on Grand Teton National Park could be irreversible.

By Kylie Mohr

Senate Republicans recently proposed the sale of up to 3.29 million acres of public land across 11 Western states. While Grand Teton National Park and other national parks themselves aren’t on the chopping block, large swaths of national forest and Bureau of Land Management lands could potentially be sold and developed.

The Wilderness Society analyzed the reconciliation bill’s limitations and then released a map showing the more than 258 million acres eligible for sale if Senate Republicans’ proposal is included in President Donald Trump’s tax bill. 

That includes much of the national forests that surround Grand Teton National Park: the Bridger-Teton National Forest on the east side of Jackson Hole and the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, which directly borders the western side of the Tetons.

“Without surrounding public lands, the parks’ natural resources will be significantly impacted,” said Jenny Fitzgerald, the executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, of Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. 

Grand Teton National Park didn’t return a request for comment.

Protected areas like national parks can’t function in isolation, as wildlife move in and out of the park for habitat and food, crisscrossing between the national park and the public lands that surround it. Streams flow across land boundaries. Fragmenting habitat and migration corridors by selling public land and developing it as private land would hurt pronghorn antelope, bison, elk and other large mammals, Fitzgerald said. 

“The land around Jackson is pretty darned important to a lot of wildlife,” Gregg Servheen, board president of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, agreed. “These are the lands of grizzly bears, wolverines, mountain lions, migrating pronghorn, vast herds of elk that are all just dependent on these habitats.”  

Selling these lands for housing or other development, Fitzgerald said, would “unwind decades of conservation at a time that we are already environmentally taxed.”

“I fear there would be no recovery from this,” Fitzgerald said.  

“What’s on the table isn’t just scenic vistas or a place to escape or wildlife habitat, just because we like them,” she said. “It’s clean air, it’s clean water, it’s stable populations — from the largest mammals in North America to the smallest microbes that support this ecosystem.” 

Servheen said it was “breathtaking” that such a proposal was even being considered. “This wildlife and this wildlife habitat belongs to the American public,” he said. “We’re talking about selling that.” 

The bill is touted by its sponsors as a way to increase access to affordable housing. “The federal government is depriving our communities of needed land for housing and inhibited growth,” a summary of the mandatory land disposal proposal from June 11 reads. But that promise is falling short to appease Teton County, even though the area already struggles with soaring home prices and a lack of affordable housing. 

Teton County commissioners asked Wyoming’s congressional delegation — Sen. John Barrasso, Sen. Cynthia Lummis and Rep. Harriet Hageman — to remove the land in their county from consideration for sale. “Disposal of public land in Teton County, as contemplated in the reconciliation bill, is much more likely to worsen our housing crisis, rather than mitigate or address our housing shortage,” wrote Mark Newcomb, chair of the Teton County Board of Commissioners, in a June 17 letter. He worried that luxury homes, not affordable housing, would result from the sale.

Newcomb also noted that developing rural public lands “degrades wildlife habitat, which is a significant foundation of our local economic prosperity and quality of life.”