We knew the war wasn't over when the outdoor community railed together and killed the public land sales in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" last month. We knew that was just one battle of many, as those on both the left and the right have a habit of sneaking in land sales, land leases with insane terms, and land swaps that do nothing for the public at large.
We knew more fights were coming.
But I don't think we thought, or rather understood, the amount of remaining language within that disastrous bill regarding public land and its continued federal management was the amount of wording regarding public land leasing still within its nearly 1,000-page heft. Indeed, not only did the bill still include lease language, but the way lawmakers on Capitol Hill wrote it made it so that the only beneficiaries of said leasing would be the extractive industries, i.e. oil, mineral, and gas, that would take our public lands and strip-mine them into nonexistence.
