America's Changing Land Ethic

You might recall the heated debate back in June over whether to include the sale of millions of acres of federal land in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Utah Senator Mike Lee, along with several of his Republican colleagues, had proposed selling up to 1 percent of BLM and Forest Service land to help balance the federal budget.

That idea so riled up hunters and anglers that Lee eventually abandoned his idea of selling public lands across the West, which he said would have been used for affordable housing. You may have participated in this legislative drama by calling your senator or representative to tell them that, as we’re losing traditional access to private lands, and as more hunters and anglers crowd our existing public lands and waters, the idea of having less public land is a political no-go, regardless of which party proposed it.

But the exercise in civic engagement has a deeper resonance, and it extends beyond our public lands to all the lands we either own or borrow for our hunting.

Nearly 75 years ago, the philosopher-king of American hunters, Aldo Leopold, framed his thoughts about our relationship with land in his classic collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac. In it, he basically said that we needed a new “land ethic” to restore impaired habitats and ensure that humans, wildlife and even overlooked plants are considered in what we do with and to the land.

At the time of its publication in 1949, A Sand County Almanac was responding to intensive farming practices, widespread deforestation in the West and Midwest, increased use of pesticides and herbicides and accelerated mining and energy development of our lands to fuel the post-WWII economy.

Perhaps because the nation’s collective memory could recall a time a generation earlier when we had little wildlife or protected places, Leopold’s ideas caught fire, resulting in modern wildlife management and land conservation. Americans generally determined we didn’t want every acre to be plowed or clearcut or managed, and as state and federal agencies had the funds and abilities, they started acquiring vacant land and then conserving it as watersheds, wild places and even designated wilderness.

Leopold’s perspectives can be seen in practice today in the Conservation Reserve Program, other wildlife-friendly practices supported by the federal Farm Bill and in conservation easements, land trusts, rewilding of flood-prone lands and open-space and parkland bonds.

But despite the investment in our national inventory of wild lands, we are fast returning to the sort of inflection point that stirred Leopold to action 75 years ago, as the Trump administration doubles down on energy development on public lands, as exurban development spreads from suburbs and as our agricultural economy demands more from each acre of arable land.

But hunters, too, have a changing relationship with the lands we hunt. Those of us who lease private land for hunting are maximizing its productivity for our benefit. We’re planting food plots or manipulating the forage to produce more and bigger deer, not mainly because that’s what’s best for the land itself. In this way, we’re mimicking the agriculture industry’s pursuit of higher yields and increased efficiencies, which in farm country means larger fields with fewer wildlife-friendly edges or boggy spots.

This transactional relationship that hunters have with our lands isn’t limited to private property. Even public-land hunters have an expectation of productivity from the state-owned wildlife management areas and the expansive stretches of federal BLM rangelands and U.S. Forest Service-managed wilderness we hunt.

We apply for years for special big-game permits for these lands, and when we finally draw one, we expect abundant game with trophy antlers and horns, forgetting sometimes that these lands are public largely because they’re so biologically and agriculturally unproductive that no one wanted them a century ago.

MANAGING OUR EXPECTATIONS

But they are now extremely wanted. One of the concerns with Lee’s land-sale idea was that the enabling legislation was worded so loosely that investors—even foreign countries—could have swooped in to buy cherished public land for their own uses, which would almost certainly not have included affordable housing. Private property that abuts inaccessible public land has never been more valuable, which helps inform why the energy around accessing public land is so intense.

We could see the “corner-crossing” appeal go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court next year, in which the high court may finally determine whether it’s legal to access checkerboarded public land at the corners where public land parcels touch. The fact that this land-access issue has ascended so far is another indication that we expect more of our public lands than they may be capable of delivering.

All of this is to say that the notion of an American “land ethic” is under serious stress. Even Leopold’s foundational concept—that we borrow land from the next generations—is flawed. Investors are trying to make quick money in the real estate market. Ag producers are trying to maximize production to pay off their annual operating loan. Hunting leases are perishable as landowners navigate generational transitions.

Given all those dynamics, it’s no wonder we have a complicated relationship with our land. We expect it to give us more than it’s capable of giving, which is precisely what Leopold observed in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. We plowed and planted more than the earth could deliver, and when the climate changed, the rains stopped and the winds blew, the land couldn’t recover fast enough.

It’s instructive to think about what we owe the land, and what it owes us, as we are in the midst of another hunting season. Does the land you hunt function not only for the deer or grouse or rabbits you hunt, but as a water filter, tree-grower and soil-holder? Does your investment and improvement of the land you hunt extend to seasons that you will never see, let alone hunt?

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• This article was featured in the November 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.

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