Book Review: The Other Public Lands: Preservation, Extraction, and Politics on the Fifty States’ Natural Resource Lands

Andy Kerr

Top Line: State public lands, far smaller than but otherwise like the federal estate, serve a variety of purposes, whether as parks with huge parking lots, protected natural areas, or clear-cuts and mines.

Figure 1. The new book by Steven Davis, just out from Temple University Press.

More than a quarter of the land mass of the United States (two-thirds of a billion acres) is federally owned. Americans are generally aware of these lands, as most are in units of the National Park, National Wildlife Refuge, National Forest, or National Landscape Conservation Systems—along with the vast majority of Bureau of Land Management holdings that are not part of the NLCS.

In The Other Public Lands: Preservation, Extraction, and Politics on the Fifty States’ Natural Resource Lands, Steven Davis introduces us to the 9 percent of the US land mass (nearly 200 million acres) owned by the fifty states—about one-third the size of the federal estate. Davis observes that these state lands have received “only a modicum of attention” despite their importance and “ever greater ubiquity.”

Unlike the federal lands, which are overwhelmingly situated from the Rocky Mountains westward, state public lands are found in every state and near every city, from one coast to the other from the Gulf to the Canadian border. As a consequence of this geographic dispersal, state lands have far greater levels of use and visitation than their federal counterparts.

Figure 2. State-owned land as a percentage of all land in each state. Hawaii tops the list at 37 percent and Kansas bottoms the list at 0.6 percent. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

Organized into seven chapters, Davis’s book is a scholarly yet readable introduction to these state lands. The paint often used by Davis to give us a picture of these state lands is data. Lots of tables and charts allow the reader to compare and contrast state lands. One can see how one’s own state measures up in both absolute (area) and relative (percentage) terms. Davis also compares and contrasts the state land management agencies with their federal counterparts.

Davis broadly categorizes state public lands into three types:

1. Preservation—To safeguard native ecosystems, natural landscapes, and the biodiversity contained within them as well as protect places with exceptional aesthetic, historical, cultural, or wilderness values.

2. Resource extraction—To utilize public land to produce marketable commodities such as timber, minerals, ores, energy, or livestock to support local economies and produce revenue for agency operations, the broader state government, or local jurisdictions (or some combination of all three).

3. Recreation—To provide various forms of passive and active recreational opportunities to the general public as both a public service and a source of economic development through enhanced tourism and revenue generation for the managing agencies.

Davis groups each state’s public lands into state parks, state natural areas, state forests (and “multiple use” areas), and state wildlife areas, and goes deep in separate chapters for each. In these chapters, Davis summarizes how these various kinds of public lands came to be.

Figure 3. State natural areas as a percentage of state public land in each state. For Hawaii, 3 percent of its state public land is in such areas, while none of the state public land in Alabama and Montana is in such areas. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

I learned a lot from this book. Who knew that the Washington Department of Natural Resources is the largest wheat farmer in the state, as it leases some of its trust lands for agriculture? Or that “deep blue California, meanwhile, has gone further with park privatization than many other more conservative states”? Or that the Georgia and South Carolina legislatures have enacted resolutions calling for the transfer of federal lands in the West to the states there, but not in their own states? Or that a Florida governor who still wants to be president has enough political sense to not apply his wrecking ball to the state’s public lands?

While Governor Ron DeSantis, a populist conservative, has worked to dismantle or otherwise shake up voting rights, LGBTA civil rights, higher education, K-12 education, and public health, he has largely not lifted a finger against Florida’s massive inventory of state land or its funding or its rather biocentric wildlife agency.

Figure 4. State parks as a percentage of all land in each state. New York has 10.7 percent of its land in state parks (think the Adirondacks and Catskills providing water for the City), while Arizona, Montana, Kansas, Mississippi, and North Dakota have less than 0.1 percent of their land in state parks. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

In the last chapter, Davis attempts to explain why state land policy varies so much.

A simple answer would harken back to Justice Brandeis’s “laboratories of democracy” framework; different states with different natural resources, populations and policy toil away to solve problems in innovative ways unique to their situation. However, an alternative explanation might focus on the fact that American politics since at least 2010 has been beset by intense polarization and increasing political radicalism.

This, in turn, has had profound effects on the very make-up of state legislatures as aggressively partisan redistricting and polarized and nationalized state elections create massive, often veto-proof majorities. In this scenario, one would expect, rather than a true “laboratory of democracy” type of policy variation, a sort of dual-track, red state/blue state sorting of land management polices as state public lands, despite strong and relatively broad-based public support, get swept into this ideological maelstrom. 

Figure 5. Acreage of state trust land in each state. Alaska has 91 million acres of trust land, on which it cannot be trusted. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

Davis also gives us a succinct analysis of the Republican Party, which is useful for public lands conservationists as an aid to understanding, undermining, and—where possible—cooperating with that party.

It is important here to distinguish between the small-government, free market emphases of the earlier and more traditional manifestations of the GOP ideology and today’s more anti-corporate and culture war–oriented populism. The older free market ideologies are not necessarily synonymous with the more recent polarization that has marked our politics from the 2010 Tea Party movement to the Trump era, and these current lines of division no longer track cleanly along the traditional lines of debate about the role of markets. While both wings can often espouse explicitly antienvironmental views, there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences between them when it comes to public lands. While populists lash out at any issue they identify with “elite” culture (such as wolf protection, climate change, or limits on land use), they are in good measure less antagonistic to the very idea of public land than their more libertarian counterparts in the party.

It is the free market, libertarian wing of the party that is most interested in slowing down or stopping land acquisition, pushing aggressive revenue-generating activities on parks and forests, and implementing various privatization schemes, and this cohort has been at it since the 1980s, well before the current era of polarization. For this reason, a simple Trump-era, red state/blue state framework for understanding policy variation does not always quite fit.

In fact, some of the more populist-conservative states offer some surprising policies that one would not expect in a simple ideological polarization model of state land management. For example, state parks in Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kentucky all have no entrance fees. Kentucky, meanwhile, is the only state with a cabinet-level nature preserves agency overseeing its substantial natural areas program, and 6 of the top 15 states in Table 3.3’s ranking of the preservation orientation of state land inventories are deep red in their politics. Oklahoma and South Carolina, meanwhile, have wilderness areas, and Florida (which ranks fifth nationwide in percentage of public land) has assembled a massive inventory of public land practically from scratch in the last 50 years.

The recent creation of the 83,000-acre Elliott State Research Forest by decoupling the then-trust lands from Oregon’s Common School Fund was done with strong bipartisan support. There are other opportunities to elevate the conservation status of the state public lands, not only in Oregon but also in most of the fifty states.

The Other Public Lands has a prominent place on my virtual (paper is so twentieth century) bookshelf. I know that I will be referring to it often.

Figure 6. Wildlife management areas as a percentage of all land in each state. Hawaii has 9.1 percent of its state public land in state wildlife areas. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

For More Information

Besides urging you to buy a copy of The Other Public Lands, I here direct you to pertinent past Public Lands Blog posts on the subject of state public lands:

• “The Elliott State Forest Will Not Be Privatized—But Will It Be Saved?” (May 12, 2017)

• “State Wildlife Management Agencies in Crisis” (March 30, 2018)

• “What to Do with Stranded State Trust Lands in Federal Conservation Areas?” (August 14, 2020)

• “Converting State Trust Lands into Public Lands, Part 1: National Overview” (August 28, 2020)

• “Converting State Trust Lands into Public Lands, Part 2: Focus on Oregon” (September 4, 2020)

• “Oregon State Forest Lands, Part 1: A New Day?” (October 2, 2020)

• “Oregon State Forest Lands, Part 2: What, Where, Who, Why, and How Much” (October 14, 2020)

• “Oregon State Forest Lands, Part 3: ‘Greatest Permanent Value’” (October 28, 2020)

• “An Elliott State Research Forest” (January 28, 2022)

• “Oregon State Forests: Public Forests, Not County ATMs” (October 18, 2022)

Figure 7. Acreage of state forest in each state. Hawaii has 16.6 percent of its state public land in state forests. Minnesota has the most state forest land at 4.2 million acres. Source: The Other Public Lands (Davis 2025).

Bottom Line: Both a need and opportunities exist to elevate the conservation status of state public lands.

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Author
Czar at  | andykerr@andykerr.net | Website

Andy Kerr (andykerr@andykerr.net) is the Czar of The Larch Company (www.andykerr.net) and consults on environmental and conservation issues. The Larch Company is a for-profit non-membership conservation organization that represents the interests of humans yet born and species that cannot talk. Kerr started is professional conservation career during the Ford Administration.

He is best known for his two decades with the Oregon Wild (then Oregon Natural Resources Council), the organization best known for having brought you the northern spotted owl. Kerr began his conservation career during the Ford Administration.

Through 2019, Kerr has been closely involved in with the establishment or expansion of 47 Wilderness Areas and 57 Wild and Scenic Rivers, 13 congressionally legislated special management areas, 15 Oregon Scenic Waterways, and one proclaimed national monument (and later expanded). He has testified before congressional committees on several occasions.

Kerr was a primary provocateur in getting the Clinton Administration to impose the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, which at the time was the largest landscape conservation in the world.

He has lectured at all of Oregon’s leading universities and colleges, as well at Harvard and Yale. Kerr has appeared numerous times on national television news and feature programs and has published numerous articles on environmental matters. He is a dropout of Oregon State University.

Kerr authored Oregon Desert Guide: 70 Hikes (The Mountaineers Books, 2000) and Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness (Timber Press, 2004). His articles on solar energy, energy efficiency and public policy have appeared in Home Power magazine.

Kerr participated, by personal invitation of President Clinton, in the Northwest Forest Conference held in Portland in 1993 for which Willamette Week gave Kerr a “No Surrender Award.”

The Oregoniannamed Kerr one of the 150 most interesting Oregonians in the newspaper’s 150-year history.

Time reporter David Seideman, in his book Showdown at Opal Creek, described Kerr as the “Ralph Nader of the old-growth-preservation movement.”

Jonathan Nicholas of The Oregonian characterized Kerr as one of the “Top 10 people to take to (the) Portland bank” for “his gift of truth.”

The Oregonian’s Northwest Magazine once characterized him as the timber industry’s “most hated man in Oregon.” In 2010, The Oregonian said Kerr was “once the most despised environmentalist in timber country.”

The Lake County Examiner called Kerr “Oregon’s version of the Anti-Christ.”

In a feature on Kerr, Time magazine titled him a “White Collar Terrorist,” referring to his effectiveness in working within the system and striking fear in the hearts of those who exploit Oregon’s natural environment.

The Christian Science Monitor characterized Kerr as “one of the toughest environmental professionals in the Pacific Northwest.”

Willamette Week said Kerr “is entirely unwilling to give an inch when it comes to this state’s remaining old-growth timber.”

In his book Lasso the Wind, New York Times correspondent Tim Egan said of Kerr, “(h)e has a talent for speaking in such loaded sound bites that it was said by reporters that if Andy Kerr did not exist, someone would have to invent him…. (Kerr) forced some of the most powerful timber companies to retreat from a binge of clear-cutting that had left large sections of the Oregon Cascades naked of forest cover.”

High Country Newsranks Kerr “among the fiercest and most successful environmentalists.”

The Salt Lake Tribune described Kerr as “part provocateur and part policy wonk… Kerr . . . has long been a bur in the side of the cattle industry.”

Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman said, “There were a lot of environmentalists working to stop logging on old growth national forests in the 1980s and 1990s. But few were more outspoken and effective than Andy Kerr.”

Veteran Pacific Northwest journalist Floyd McKay, writing in Crosscut.com, said Kerr was “once considered [a] wild [man], aggressively challenging federal agencies and corporate land managers” who is now “an elder [statesman] in the region’s environmental leaders.”

His next book is Beyond Wood: The Case For Forests and Against Logging, which will argue that trees generally grow slower than money, forests are more important for any other use than fiber production, America can get nearly all of its fiber products from agricultural waste and other crops with less environmental impact, and that most private timberland in this nation should be reconverted to public forestlands.

Past and current clients include Advocates for the West, Campaign for America’s Wilderness, Conservation Northwest, Geos Institute, Idaho Conservation League, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, Oregon Natural Desert Association, Oregon Wild, Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, The Wilderness Society, Western Watersheds Project and the Wilburforce Foundation.

Current projects include advocating for additional Wilderness and Wild and Scenic Rivers in Oregon, achieving the permanent protection and restoration of mature and old-growth forests on lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, facilitating voluntary grazing permit buyout of federal public lands, conserving and restoring the Sagebrush Sea, opposing oil and gas exploitation offshore Oregon and elsewhere, and securing permanent conservation status for Oregon’s Elliott State Forest.

Kerr is a former board member of Friends of Opal Creek, Oregon League of Conservation Voters, The Coast Alliance and Alternatives to Growth Oregon.

Kerr’s only official public office is that of having been an Oregon Notary Public from 1983-1999.

A fifth-generation Oregonian, Kerr was born and raised in Creswell, a recovered timber town in the upper Willamette Valley. He splits his time between Ashland in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, and Hancock, in Maine’s Downeast—both recovered timber towns. He still regularly gets to Washington, DC, where the most important decisions affecting Oregon’s and the nation’s wildlands, wildlife and wild waters are made.

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