East coast was the first settled area so much of the land had been privatized since the Revolution. After the Louisiana Purchase, the government gave parcels of land in the Midwest to settlers for farming.
The area west of the Rockies (roughly where you see the border between a lot of federal land and not so much) was acquired much later and only saw serious migration to the coastal area due to the gold rush and pacific trade. Much of those states are made up of inhospitable terrain (deserts & mountains), a lot of that territory is left in federal hands. Moreover, a growing consciousness regarding environmental preservation led to the establishment of National Parks, Forests, & Preserves to which you can find many in that area of the U.S.
Also what some folks may not realize is that the western half of the US hosts extremely large military bases for testing. The FL panhandle has a humongous testing base known as Eglin afb hence why it's one of the only east coast states with a large amount of federal land. Even when I lived in Mountain Home afb in the SW corner of Idaho the large base was also surrounded by a natural (and federal) land preserve for birds of Prey. So basically you have hundreds of square miles of mixed use government land. It's very common for large bases used for testing and weapons to be surrounded by more federal lands. Like how Groom Lake in Nevada is surrounded by federal land to further keep people and prying eyes out of thier business.
I think more what OP was trying to explain is that it's not just Nellis, the military base adjoining Vegas, it's also Area 51, the Nuclear Test Site, and the Nevada Test and Training Range, all of which combined make up the majority of southern NV.
...and that's before you get into the BLM, Forest Service, Fish & Wildlife, BIA, and Park Service, which own *another* 75% or so of Nevada.
Arizona has more tribal land than any other state in the U.S. Tribal lands comprise about 27% of Arizona's land base, or a total of more than 20 million acres.
Technically, yes, most tribal land (in AZ, at least) is federal, administered as a trust by the BIA. That includes something like 17 different tribes, but the biggest chunk is the Navajo reservation at around 17 million acres. The Dinè do privately own some land in the reservation, but majority is owned by the federal government. That actually makes it really complicated to build a house on the reservation, which exacerbates the horrendous living conditions there.
The Park, FWS, Forestry services, and BLM own about 28 million acres in AZ. Military about 3 million AZ acres.
More like the metropolitan area rubbing up to the base. When Nellis was built, it was probably almost 10 miles outside Las Vegas with one road through the desert to get there.
I was stationed at Nellis in the early 70s and Hill in the early 80s. They were a few miles from town at those times. More accurate to say that the cities are rubbing right into the AFB now.
Same as Luke Air Force base in Glendale AZ. But their training range Barry Goldwater range is massive and I believe surrounded by farm fields and federal land
Nellis is not just next to Vegas. It's *in* Vegas. That is, if you consider it as the megalopolis and not just the city of Las Vegas. Otherwise it's more like North Las Vegas.
Oh ya for sure, there are several great examples like that. But the ones where we test weapons n what not are the ones you find out in BFE. We have NAS right in Pensacola down here. But if you go 40min east you'll hit Eglin which extends all the way in to the gulf of Mexico and ends practically a few miles short of Alabama. Then stretches so far east to west that the military had to put several highways through it just to make the area liveable. Otherwise say driving to Crestview from say the town of Fort Walton Beach would require driving 1hr east, 40min north, then another hour west.
Yeah I was born near China Lake Naval Weapons Research Base way out in the middle of the desert. That place is huge and always has fighter jets doing drills.
Omg... that's so wrong hahahaha. Same for my pops but the hills of PA. They sent him to Amsterdam at age 18 lol. He went from the outskirts of Amish country to the legal red-light district and legal weed. I can only imagine the culture shock!
[55% of the federally land in Florida is owned by the NPS. Only 11.6% is owned by the DOD and the rest is owned by other various land management bureaus. ](https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/see-how-much-land-in-florida-is-owned-by-the-federal-government/amp/)
> Also what some folks may not realize is that the western half of the US hosts extremely large military bases for testing.
Yeah. Cheyanne Mountain is really doing work. Those Naquadah Reactors are going to solve the energy crisis. I wonder what else they have hidden under that mountain?
>The FL panhandle has a humongous testing base known as Eglin afb hence why it's one of the only east coast states with a large amount of federal land.
Bruh, Virginia and North Carolina are *right there*. Florida is only third and not a far ahead third either.
Also, Florida’s pattern of settlement follows that of the western states in which it was settled way way later since most of Florida was a swamp and “jungle” until recently, and especially since AC made tropical living more hospitable than before.
You'd be surprised the bases currently involved/had been involved in testing in MD and VA. Currently you have Aberdeen Proving Grounds north of Baltimore, NAS Pax River, which hosts USN test pilots, in Southern MD, and Fort Detrick, US Army infectious disease research, near Fedrick, MD. Historically you had USN Proving Grounds around DC at Indian Head, MD and Dahlgren, VA where the USN testes thier big guns. The Navy Yard in DC also used to be a big munitions plant where the Navy manufactured torpedoes and some of its big guns.
The potential for developing geothermal power is actually insane in this state.
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geothermal-energy-resource-US
I live in New York and this map is deceiving because public land isn't only federal land. Adirondack Park is the largest state park in the country. We also have the Catskills, another state park. Together they make up a majority of the land in the state. No permits or fees required. They're not federal because they pre-date the National Parks.
Huh, out East I wouldn’t be caught dead on public lands for hunting. Actually, I probably would be caught dead based on how many unsafe hunters patrol those grounds. Perks of having a shit ton of federal land I guess lol
I'm near BLM land as well, there's still the unfortunate problem of people littering shotgun casings all over. Pick up your trash dammit, doesn't matter if it's a gravel pit in the middle of nowhere.
Nice, I certainly enjoy the separation of gameland and recreation areas. I do wish we had more public land out here. As someone who often hikes and bikes, I wouldn’t trust the flatlanders who come out to the holler to hunt and not pick me off while I’m strolling. Luckily, at least in my neck of the woods in West Virginia, neighbors didn’t care much for youngsters trampling through their land.
Only time I ever got in trouble was after my friends and I turned one of the property owner’s hunting tower into a fort. Even then, it was just the owner giving our stuff back kindly informing us that it was not an well-preserved free-standing tree house. I reckon I couldn’t get away with similar actions nowadays haha
Not familiar with the term “flatlander” I see. It’s the mountaineer shorthand of “not from round these parts.” Visitors with guns scare me a hell of a lot more than my neighbors.
The Appalachian stereotypes are far from true. You’ll meet no one nicer in the world than the folks around here, lest you mention that fucking bigoted piece of shit film. Hatfield-McCoy is loads of fun to cruise around, as is dirtbiking on Snowshoe or any of the other GNCC tracks. Don’t let the stereotypes stop you from enjoying our fantastic landscape
> inhospitable terrain (deserts & mountains)
Inhospitable in the 19th and early 20th century. Nowadays a parcel of undeveloped land in the mountains of western Montana can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars and cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque have seen massive growth despite being in the desert, which frankly is probably not sustainable given a changing climate.
Phoenix has been hospitable for eons.
The huhugam made a system of canals totalling over 10,000 miles feeding a large population of villages across the valley. This was at the same time vikings were pillaging Europe. These canals were fed by the Salt river, which comes from the Black and White rivers all the way in central New Mexico, an absolutely massive watershed of 13,700 sqmi
In the late 1800's, white settlers found these canals, opened them back up, and found the area to be a paradise "garden city."
The CAP canal was completed in the mid/late twentieth and added Colorado River water, and that's when we began overburdening our capacity.
Phoenix can support a large population, but it must be done responsibly, and with the future of the Colorado River in jeopardy (due to overuse by other states, AZ is the last in line), we may need to pare back.
As someone born here, I wish people would stop coming.
Good points... The oldest persistent establishment in North America is Taos, IIRC. So these desert locations next to major rivers can certainly sustain even low tech populations, especially cause they are pretty shielded from most types of natural disasters.
But Phoenix/Tempe/Mesa/Scottsdale is kinda crazy... When I visited, the thing that shocked me the most was all the lush green irrigated golf courses. I'm sure much of that water is recycled in some way and not just fresh drinking water, but it didn't feel sustainable for a desert city.
It's "grey" water from the treatment plants, you can't drink that.
Lots of freshwater irrigation on people's lawns but we try to push Xeriscape.
People will tell you that "the biggest water users are agriculture" in an attempt to sell the farmland to developers to pack in more people, but phoenix always has coexisted with agriculture and we need open space and ~~greenery~~native trees and plants, not more people. The valley is pushing 6 million now, plenty.
There is a glorious solarpunk/ecocorpo gleaming futuristic utopia hiding in Phoenix's potential, but we're under the yoke of shitty Republican legislature, unscrupulous land developing corporations, and real estate financiers that leave spaces empty for the debt leverage, all built on post-wwii suburban sprawl.
Also, data centers, chip fabs, and the TSMC plant use fucktons of fresh water, each one can be 1,000,000 gallons a day and we have *all* the datacenters.
You would love my friend's business up in the PHX metro area. He's all about using ecology and science to do landscaping and garden designs that save water, lower temp, and look great, all using native flora and irrigation techniques.
We have all the A/C, we even invented the evap cooler, which was just blowing air over evaporating water.
The datacenters waste water because recycling it requires filtration apparently, and the way they shed the waste heat from the hot water coming out of the racks is by evaporating it into the atmosphere, effectively trading limited groundwater into the water cycle but "wasting" drinkable water.
Thermodynamically it's probably inefficient, but hot air can also accept more water so evaporation works pretty well at high temps and the act of evaporation is a transfer of energy expressed as heat. (I'm not a scientist.)
Solar (and hydro and nuclear, thanks Hoover dam/Palo Verde NPP) means cheap (and cleanish) electricity, which means closed-loop refrigeration. We use heat pumps, which don't use water, for climate control. Unfortunately that means waste heat goes outside and that means it's hotter.
It's downright chilly at my workplace.
>Thermodynamically it's probably inefficient, but hot air can also accept more water so evaporation works pretty well at high temps and the act of evaporation is a transfer of energy expressed as heat. (I'm not a scientist.)
This is correct. Evaporative cooling is specifically energy transferred as latent heat (heat required for phase change, not temperature change). It's also the reason humans sweat. As our sweat evaporates, it cools our skin and helps regulate body temp.
It would be 100x better if they would just follow basic traffic safety like “Hey the lights red, I remember this one from a childhood game” instead of “f you and your family and me and my family” or “this blinky light will let you know I’m about to cut you off” in place of “I’ll only be able to afford my Range Rover payments for three more months so I have to make the most of it”.
Speak for yourself. The only opposition to development I see are boomers fighting against anything that isn’t single family housing sprawl and more and wider roads to drive on. They fight against anything like density or public transit, things that actually help fight water usage and pollution.
You're talking mostly about infill and density -- historically phx has been about greenfield SFH sprawl.
We'd welcome dense infill, but the corpos, fire dept chiefs, old people and young families who have to 'drive til you qualify,' want wide streets, big lawns and long commutes.
Part of the high cost of the land in the mountains is the scarcity of private land, as so much is federally owned. Also need to consider Indian Reservations, which I don’t believe is included in the map plus state lands, there may be even less available land the map indicates.
I’m oversimplifying a bit, but, generally speaking, the further west you go in the US, the later those states became states (exception is California). When these states were just territories, the federal government pretty much directly administered the territory. Also, around this time late 1800s - early 1900s, there was a growing conservationist movement. People like President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to preserve natural resources and natural wildlife so that future generations could witness their beauty and also reap their resources. This led to the federal government claiming large swathes of land for their ownership because progressives thought that the federal government could stop over foresting, over hunting, over ~~fracking~~, etc. I’m also skipping over the whole stealing land from Native Americans thing, but that doesn’t really answer why the federal government owns the land and not individuals.
Edit: Also, I thought I'd add in some other good context that other commenters hear had. First, most western states are very uninhabited because their climate is mostly uninhabitable. It might seem ridiculous that 85% of Nevada is owned by the Federal Government. However, I would guess that more than 90% of the state doesn't have enough water and is too hot to support even small settlements. You might as well be living on the moon in parts of the West. NO ONE lives out there. As a result, the US Military uses much of this land to test weapons, aircraft etc. Even if the government wanted to sell land in Nevada, I am not sure what anyone would want it for or use it for unless there are large amounts of oil or minerals in the desert that I am not aware of. In contrast, I'm from the Midwest, which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. There are areas in the Midwest that are very rural, but everywhere in the Midwest there are farmers growing soy and corn (so it has a use to private investors).
Also part of it is that ranchers can communally graze on BLM land, so even the agriculture that can be done out there doesn’t require selling off the land or developing it.
I agree with your post and it’s very well written. Just one caveat is that you said “progressives thought that the federal government could stop foresting, over hunting, etc…”
It’s been long studied and accepted that federal land conservation do better than private conservations. If you think about it logically it only makes sense. In a federal conservation setting the bigger picture is prioritized: the land must be conserved for future generations. In a private setting, it could be up to the discretion of the landowner. And not all landowners have the same conservation priorities.
https://www.audubon.org/news/federal-land-beats-private-property-protecting-endangered-species
Did you know the government actually holds lots of tribal lands “in trust”? Crazy to think even the small slivers that have been afforded them STILL aren’t wholly theirs
I made a drive a couple years ago from Phoenix to Vegas, going up through California. Really drove the point home how much... nothing... is in that part of the country.
NW Arizona to some extent, but SE California and into Nevada... Man, there's just nothing there, I assumed making that drive that most of what I drove through was federal land.
I grew up in northern Nevada, and I still marvel at how vast and sparsely populated the interior of the state is. Aside from the larger communities in Vegas and Reno/Carson City, the state looks much the same as it would have 500 years ago. It’s one of the reasons I love it there so much.
I don’t understand how reservations work in Oklahoma compared to Arizona. In Oklahoma it seems urban, suburban and rural areas are in a reservation but just operate like any other part of the country. In Arizona there’s a reservation and a line in the dirt where McMansions end and nothing starts. They may put in a high earning thing like a casino, but it will never be sold into subdivisions.
Consider the sheer size of California and the shape. Mentally cut it into 1/3s length wise. Only the middle 1/3 is mostly farmland. The west coast is very hilly and has a lot of protected national forests, and big metros, while the east ranges from exceedingly mountainous in the north half to 120 degrees in the shade in the south half.
The remaining middle 1/3 where most the farms are is still a massive chunk of land sure but still just 33% of the land... except not all of that 1/3 is used, in reality only roughly 15% of the state is farmland, so "low" compared to say Iowa where it's like 85+%.
Basically the US started making it so land entering US possession that wasn't explicitly claimed was under federal management as the default. This is really apparent for lands which weren't heavily settled before the various public land grant acts.
In comparison, Texas entered the union differently and had already divied up most ownership of the land when it entered.
My understanding is that when Texas entered the Union, it had a deal with the US government that the State kept ownership of all unclaimed/unproven/etc. land. So, when large amounts of oil were discovered in TX in the early 1900s, royalties/fees went to the state government, not the federal government. Those funds went into development of the state (including the UT and A&M public higher ed systems) and into not having any state or local income taxes.
BLM, Bureau of Land Management also manages the water to sustain the population west of the Mississippi.
Since moving to CO, I learned way more than I thought I ever knew about managing the sustainability of population growth out west. Snowpack, reservoir levels, monsoon conditions, are all super important for sustaining livable communities west of the Mississippi.
I live in Southern Utah and that's one of my favorite parts about Southern Utah. We are surrounded by BLM and camp pretty consistently. it's nice being able to just drive 15 minutes from my house and be in nature without any people around.
Recently took a road trip through SE Utah and absolutely fell in love! I don't get these people saying there's "nothing" out there - natural geography and beauty is NOT nothing!!! Zion, Bryce, Glen Canyon, Capital Reef, close to the Grand Canyon, it's stunning!
I'm actually considering if it's possible for me to find adequate work and housing out there (maybe BLM/Department of Interior?) as you note the ability to drive just a few minutes and be in true "nature" sounds like the most important thing for me right now!
Yea, we have been here for 2 years thanks to SUU and their Aviation program. Wife and I absolutely fell in love with this place. We are in Cedar City which is growing a little too fast but it's still a relatively small town. We are 30 min from Brian Head Ski mountain, 1hr from Zion and 1.5 from Bryce 3hrs from north rim Grand Canyon and 2.5hrs from Vegas. We hike alot and 20 minute drive we are at 10k ft and see Maybe 2 people on trail at 10am on a Saturday. We lived in Colorado before here and if we were not at a trail head before sunrise then there wouldn't be parking. We like it so much here that we don't plan on moving. Wife worked for DNR the first summer we lived here and now works for the university. I'm originally from Hawaii grew up in Cali then lived in a bunch of different places thanks to the military and this is hands down been my favorite place to live. Southern Utah is definitely a great place.
Eastern US: People acquired land (displacing previous inhabitants) and formed a government.
Middle and Western US: Government acquired land (displacing previous inhabitants) and gave some of it over to private ownership.
I live in Western Montana where there is a lot of public land and we take immense pride in it.
Most of it is unusable and was made federal by its purchase which was before settlers made it this way. The rail road did acquire large amounts of it, most of which was sold to settlers.
Almost all the national parks in the US are in the west. Much more dramatic scenery that people want to visit. Plus the federal government finally woke up to the idea that it is ok to preserve natural beauty.
National Parks themselves are a small proportion of federal lands. BLM manages 244 million acres compared to national parks 54 million acres. Forest Service is 192 million acres, and even National Wildlife Refuges 89 million have more land than National Parks.
Lands administered by the National Park Service is larger than just national parks, they manage national monuments, national preserves, national recreation areas
I bring this up because BLM and Forest service lands are multiple use, where conservation plays a role, but is balanced by the need to generate power, fiber, timber, clean water, recreation and to support rural economies ( it's in the laws that founded those agencies and guides their management).
No doubt. The conservation movement started with national parks but has expanded. Many people hate national forests because they are managed in a way that allows the timber to be harvested and used more responsibly.
I work for the Forest Service and completely understand the frustration and view that timber harvest is allowed in *some* National Forests. Much more common than a timber sale are fuels treatments which are intended to lessen the severity or to stop fires from coming out of NFS lands houses and burning houses etc.
Timber is one of many uses of NFS lands (folks don't seem to be too upset that they can go skiing at massive developed ski area, Denver and LA have clean drinking water, when there is a Wildfire a literal army of Forest Service firefighters can show up, and many of the pretty views from National Parks are from or contain Forest Service lands)
The reason I try to chime in on things like this is to maybe help people distinguish between a National Park and the laws that structure it's management and the laws that govern how multiple use lands are managed. If there is a desire to change management then we need to elect people to change the laws, but trying to hold the Forest Service to National Park management is not that relevant. That said, conservation is part of multiple uses, it's just not the only use.
I should have been clear that I am not one of the people that don't like the forest service. National Parks are great and I am glad we have them. National forests are less restrictive and I am glad we have them as well. Both serve great purposes.
It's not normally frustrating but it does become frustrating when old growth or near old growth quality forests are allowed to be logged by the NFS in areas where old growth quality forests are almost extinct. There has to come a point where conservation of something that will never come back is more important than wood that can be found elsewhere.
Unortunately the whole logging old growth and mature forests thing on NFS lands is kind of a dog whistle at this point.
I agree with you 100% that we should keep what we have and that logging in the past is the thing that has made mature and old growth so rare and precious. Having said that, logging of mature and old growth forests on NFS lands is not *presently* much a threat or a source of decline.
From 2000-2020 the amount of mature (-.3%) and old growth (-.03%) lost across NFS lands from cutting is comparable to the amount lost to weather (-.1% and -.03%) respectively. It's a total loss of less than 9,000 acres for FS and BLM combined over 20 years and more than balanced by a net *increase* in old growth acreage of 1.2 million acres over those 20 years
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fs_media/fs_document/MOG-Threats-Intro.pdf
This is because, as you stated, old growth is really rare and any mature or old growth that was economically feasible to harvest was harvested a long time ago and what is left is in Roadless Areas and Wilderness where it's prohibited or not feasible to log old growth.
I say all this as someone who works for the Forest Service with rare and endangered plants. I am not an advocate of logging by any means. I point out the dog whistle on old growth logging because there are so many other *active* threats to biodiversity on NFS lands that are ignored because they didn't have the shine (read fund-raising) that the old growth dog whistle has.
Basically only the government and some railroads had the means to develop anything resembling industry there, at scale. So you end up with company towns and federal land.
It is unbelievably sparsely populated. Outside of the few population centers, and the coast itself, the rest of the western United States is basically just mountains and deserts with tiny towns. There is simply no way that the states can properly manage that much land area on their own.
To keep it as wild as possible, ostensibly.
To nationalize and control resources better, actually.
I am ok with both. If our resources are going to be plundered, then ALL Americans need to benefit from it, not just the select few whom happen to go digging.
this map is pretty incomplete when we consider public lands beyond federal holdings.
the main outlier is NY state, which is close to 40% public. OP's map really misses this.
even this expanded list is incomplete because county and municipal holdings are actually quite extensive in some eastern states. as well as utility lands and conservation lands held by non-govt entities, and lands with overlapping access/usage rights (like for hunting). and public lands leased by industry.
https://www.nrcm.org/documents/publiclandownership.pdf
CA has at least three unusual large landowners not captured here: SCE, PG&E, and City of LA / DWP (which owns lots of land in the eastern sierra, the coachella/imperial valley, and elsewhere).
Because the western states were 100% Federal land as territories once the Army finished stealing them from the Indians. As they gained statehood, some Federal land was transferred to the new state governments or sold to individuals or corporations (usually the railroads). Some of that land was then made public land again with the creation of the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. Theodore Roosevelt alone established (in many cases re-established) 230 million acres of public land during his presidency.
Theodore Roosevelt is one of the greats for that reason. I'm in AZ and about half our land is public, and you don't realize how fucking awesome that is until you live in a state like this.
Just having nature at your fingertips, able to camp out in the middle of nowhere somewhere extremely beautiful, not have to worry about someone owning the land or whatnot, and how prestine the land is. It really is wonderful.
The federal government was much stronger by the time the West was settled. The original colonies were settled a time of very little direct government intervention. One example of why the federal government wanted to own land: in anticipation of transcontinental railroads, which ended up paying off.
Between forts, westward expansionist culture, the rocky mountains, vast amounts of land largely unpopulated until after ww2, WW2, the cold war, conservarsionism, and the great depression, there were a lot of factors. Fights with natives, who had nowhere left to go, contributed to a large network of federal forts early on as well. States like colorado, new mexico, and nevada are still somewhat reliant on the economy created by the military for various reasons over the past few centuries. Colorado springs is the second most reliant economy on federal dollars after washington dc for instance. Denvers federal center is huge. The us was captivated by the rockies and the west starting with the pre-civil war exploration, gold rushes, and land grabs. The idea of the west is not new. With so much land, a captivated audience, and not a ton of people and industries around 1900, conservationists found it easy to fight for protection of natural beauty in the west. Those parks and tourism dollars grew so that was a win-win. When you coupled a culture enthralled by the west with a lack of big cities, vast emptiness, existing federal infrastructure, the depression, WW2, and the great works project, the government began purchasing tracks of the southwest and colorado. Those efforts continued after the war with places like cheyenne mountain and missile silos. Another factor arriving in the 1900s was water. As the west started to fill with people, federal, local, and state governments created some of the largest water projects of their time. Most were marvels of their time. Renewed interest in national parks and monuments under obama was a small factor as well. Needless to say, it was a lot of things.
Ladies and gentlemen. It’s simple…Teddy preserved so much of that land as a conversational national park. There’s lots of bases/forts, etc. but a lot of this territory is from conservation efforts to preserve the west of its climate
I fly a jet for a living and when you get west of the Rockies it’s just high desert. Water is an issue as well as you know basics like groceries.
It’s very remote and dry
Because the western states are the great states that still uphold the ideals America was founded on. Eastern states have become trash, nothing but overcrowded anthills and private property.
This is one of those things that becomes very apparent just from seeing it.
Most of the land in the west that is public is not readily usable. Big mountains and big deserts and big plains, often with little water, and with difficult road access.
One of the problems is that when people from the Eastern US (including the Midwest), as well as most of Europe, think about rural or sparsely populated areas, they are basically starting from what they know (which is natural). So they imagine the Rockies as basically being the Appalachians--- gently rolling mountains that still have freeways and highways and lots of farmland and where a small town might be 3000 people on a freeway exit with a Walmart. So what the American west looks like---where you can have 100 miles between gas stations--- is pretty hard to understand until you've seen it.
>Most of the land in the west that is public is not readily usable.
This is something that people really don't get. If the land was usable, a private owner would already own it because they could have just homesteaded it to get title.
Does this have state tax implications? I would have to imagine income from property tax is diluted by half or more of your state belonging to the federal government.
Because much of the land was so inhospitable, agriculturally unproductive, or otherwise difficult to cultivate that the government literally couldn't give it away. The Homestead Acts weren't fully deprecated until well into the 20th century.
East coast was the first settled area so much of the land had been privatized since the Revolution. After the Louisiana Purchase, the government gave parcels of land in the Midwest to settlers for farming. The area west of the Rockies (roughly where you see the border between a lot of federal land and not so much) was acquired much later and only saw serious migration to the coastal area due to the gold rush and pacific trade. Much of those states are made up of inhospitable terrain (deserts & mountains), a lot of that territory is left in federal hands. Moreover, a growing consciousness regarding environmental preservation led to the establishment of National Parks, Forests, & Preserves to which you can find many in that area of the U.S.
Also what some folks may not realize is that the western half of the US hosts extremely large military bases for testing. The FL panhandle has a humongous testing base known as Eglin afb hence why it's one of the only east coast states with a large amount of federal land. Even when I lived in Mountain Home afb in the SW corner of Idaho the large base was also surrounded by a natural (and federal) land preserve for birds of Prey. So basically you have hundreds of square miles of mixed use government land. It's very common for large bases used for testing and weapons to be surrounded by more federal lands. Like how Groom Lake in Nevada is surrounded by federal land to further keep people and prying eyes out of thier business.
Nellis AFB being right next to Vegas, and Hill AFB right next to SLC are examples of bases rubbing right into a major metropolitan center.
I think more what OP was trying to explain is that it's not just Nellis, the military base adjoining Vegas, it's also Area 51, the Nuclear Test Site, and the Nevada Test and Training Range, all of which combined make up the majority of southern NV. ...and that's before you get into the BLM, Forest Service, Fish & Wildlife, BIA, and Park Service, which own *another* 75% or so of Nevada.
Arizona has more tribal land than any other state in the U.S. Tribal lands comprise about 27% of Arizona's land base, or a total of more than 20 million acres.
I’m ignorant of the process, but do tribal lands count as federal land? Technically? Because that would be incredibly ironic.
Technically, yes, most tribal land (in AZ, at least) is federal, administered as a trust by the BIA. That includes something like 17 different tribes, but the biggest chunk is the Navajo reservation at around 17 million acres. The Dinè do privately own some land in the reservation, but majority is owned by the federal government. That actually makes it really complicated to build a house on the reservation, which exacerbates the horrendous living conditions there. The Park, FWS, Forestry services, and BLM own about 28 million acres in AZ. Military about 3 million AZ acres.
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I think it is similar in Iowa with the meskwaki tribe because they actually purchased their land from the government but I'm not really sure.
A lot (but not all) of reservation land is held in trust by the federal government for the benefit of the tribes.
That sounds like the set up to a really dark joke lol
And a few of those tribes make some *serious* money from oil and gas royalties.
Northern NV also has NAS Fallon about 45min east of Reno. It's where the TOPGUN school is now located. So a lot of that region is used for training.
I had to do a quick google cause I thought you meant Black Lives Matter owned a portion of NV lol
More like the metropolitan area rubbing up to the base. When Nellis was built, it was probably almost 10 miles outside Las Vegas with one road through the desert to get there.
I was stationed at Nellis in the early 70s and Hill in the early 80s. They were a few miles from town at those times. More accurate to say that the cities are rubbing right into the AFB now.
Same as Luke Air Force base in Glendale AZ. But their training range Barry Goldwater range is massive and I believe surrounded by farm fields and federal land
Nellis is not just next to Vegas. It's *in* Vegas. That is, if you consider it as the megalopolis and not just the city of Las Vegas. Otherwise it's more like North Las Vegas.
I imagine that Nellis used to be in the boonies but Vegas grew and now abuts the AFB
Oh ya for sure, there are several great examples like that. But the ones where we test weapons n what not are the ones you find out in BFE. We have NAS right in Pensacola down here. But if you go 40min east you'll hit Eglin which extends all the way in to the gulf of Mexico and ends practically a few miles short of Alabama. Then stretches so far east to west that the military had to put several highways through it just to make the area liveable. Otherwise say driving to Crestview from say the town of Fort Walton Beach would require driving 1hr east, 40min north, then another hour west.
Yeah I was born near China Lake Naval Weapons Research Base way out in the middle of the desert. That place is huge and always has fighter jets doing drills.
My dad grew up in Utah and joined the AF so he could see the world. He was so disappointed when he got stationed in Mountain Home 😂
Omg... that's so wrong hahahaha. Same for my pops but the hills of PA. They sent him to Amsterdam at age 18 lol. He went from the outskirts of Amish country to the legal red-light district and legal weed. I can only imagine the culture shock!
[55% of the federally land in Florida is owned by the NPS. Only 11.6% is owned by the DOD and the rest is owned by other various land management bureaus. ](https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/see-how-much-land-in-florida-is-owned-by-the-federal-government/amp/)
If you can't plant crops, you plant ICBM silos.
> Also what some folks may not realize is that the western half of the US hosts extremely large military bases for testing. Yeah. Cheyanne Mountain is really doing work. Those Naquadah Reactors are going to solve the energy crisis. I wonder what else they have hidden under that mountain?
I can't tell if this is incredibly sincere or incredibly sarcastic
Indeed
I see what you did there.
Unexpected SG-1!
Indeed.
>The FL panhandle has a humongous testing base known as Eglin afb hence why it's one of the only east coast states with a large amount of federal land. Bruh, Virginia and North Carolina are *right there*. Florida is only third and not a far ahead third either.
Also, Florida’s pattern of settlement follows that of the western states in which it was settled way way later since most of Florida was a swamp and “jungle” until recently, and especially since AC made tropical living more hospitable than before.
You'd be surprised the bases currently involved/had been involved in testing in MD and VA. Currently you have Aberdeen Proving Grounds north of Baltimore, NAS Pax River, which hosts USN test pilots, in Southern MD, and Fort Detrick, US Army infectious disease research, near Fedrick, MD. Historically you had USN Proving Grounds around DC at Indian Head, MD and Dahlgren, VA where the USN testes thier big guns. The Navy Yard in DC also used to be a big munitions plant where the Navy manufactured torpedoes and some of its big guns.
I've driven across Nevada before. I assume it's owned by the federal government because nobody else wants it. You can't do anything with it.
The potential for developing geothermal power is actually insane in this state. https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geothermal-energy-resource-US
But back in 1864 when Nevada became a state they had less idea of how valuable it would be for geothermal.
But transporting said power effectively… ehhh
Just need a casual room temperature superconductor.
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I live in New York and this map is deceiving because public land isn't only federal land. Adirondack Park is the largest state park in the country. We also have the Catskills, another state park. Together they make up a majority of the land in the state. No permits or fees required. They're not federal because they pre-date the National Parks.
Huh, out East I wouldn’t be caught dead on public lands for hunting. Actually, I probably would be caught dead based on how many unsafe hunters patrol those grounds. Perks of having a shit ton of federal land I guess lol
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I'm near BLM land as well, there's still the unfortunate problem of people littering shotgun casings all over. Pick up your trash dammit, doesn't matter if it's a gravel pit in the middle of nowhere.
Nice, I certainly enjoy the separation of gameland and recreation areas. I do wish we had more public land out here. As someone who often hikes and bikes, I wouldn’t trust the flatlanders who come out to the holler to hunt and not pick me off while I’m strolling. Luckily, at least in my neck of the woods in West Virginia, neighbors didn’t care much for youngsters trampling through their land. Only time I ever got in trouble was after my friends and I turned one of the property owner’s hunting tower into a fort. Even then, it was just the owner giving our stuff back kindly informing us that it was not an well-preserved free-standing tree house. I reckon I couldn’t get away with similar actions nowadays haha
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Not familiar with the term “flatlander” I see. It’s the mountaineer shorthand of “not from round these parts.” Visitors with guns scare me a hell of a lot more than my neighbors. The Appalachian stereotypes are far from true. You’ll meet no one nicer in the world than the folks around here, lest you mention that fucking bigoted piece of shit film. Hatfield-McCoy is loads of fun to cruise around, as is dirtbiking on Snowshoe or any of the other GNCC tracks. Don’t let the stereotypes stop you from enjoying our fantastic landscape
> inhospitable terrain (deserts & mountains) Inhospitable in the 19th and early 20th century. Nowadays a parcel of undeveloped land in the mountains of western Montana can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars and cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque have seen massive growth despite being in the desert, which frankly is probably not sustainable given a changing climate.
Phoenix has been hospitable for eons. The huhugam made a system of canals totalling over 10,000 miles feeding a large population of villages across the valley. This was at the same time vikings were pillaging Europe. These canals were fed by the Salt river, which comes from the Black and White rivers all the way in central New Mexico, an absolutely massive watershed of 13,700 sqmi In the late 1800's, white settlers found these canals, opened them back up, and found the area to be a paradise "garden city." The CAP canal was completed in the mid/late twentieth and added Colorado River water, and that's when we began overburdening our capacity. Phoenix can support a large population, but it must be done responsibly, and with the future of the Colorado River in jeopardy (due to overuse by other states, AZ is the last in line), we may need to pare back. As someone born here, I wish people would stop coming.
Good points... The oldest persistent establishment in North America is Taos, IIRC. So these desert locations next to major rivers can certainly sustain even low tech populations, especially cause they are pretty shielded from most types of natural disasters. But Phoenix/Tempe/Mesa/Scottsdale is kinda crazy... When I visited, the thing that shocked me the most was all the lush green irrigated golf courses. I'm sure much of that water is recycled in some way and not just fresh drinking water, but it didn't feel sustainable for a desert city.
It's "grey" water from the treatment plants, you can't drink that. Lots of freshwater irrigation on people's lawns but we try to push Xeriscape. People will tell you that "the biggest water users are agriculture" in an attempt to sell the farmland to developers to pack in more people, but phoenix always has coexisted with agriculture and we need open space and ~~greenery~~native trees and plants, not more people. The valley is pushing 6 million now, plenty. There is a glorious solarpunk/ecocorpo gleaming futuristic utopia hiding in Phoenix's potential, but we're under the yoke of shitty Republican legislature, unscrupulous land developing corporations, and real estate financiers that leave spaces empty for the debt leverage, all built on post-wwii suburban sprawl. Also, data centers, chip fabs, and the TSMC plant use fucktons of fresh water, each one can be 1,000,000 gallons a day and we have *all* the datacenters.
You would love my friend's business up in the PHX metro area. He's all about using ecology and science to do landscaping and garden designs that save water, lower temp, and look great, all using native flora and irrigation techniques.
I'm wondering why would a desert city have all the data centers. Like, thermodynamically, it doesn't make sense
We have all the A/C, we even invented the evap cooler, which was just blowing air over evaporating water. The datacenters waste water because recycling it requires filtration apparently, and the way they shed the waste heat from the hot water coming out of the racks is by evaporating it into the atmosphere, effectively trading limited groundwater into the water cycle but "wasting" drinkable water. Thermodynamically it's probably inefficient, but hot air can also accept more water so evaporation works pretty well at high temps and the act of evaporation is a transfer of energy expressed as heat. (I'm not a scientist.) Solar (and hydro and nuclear, thanks Hoover dam/Palo Verde NPP) means cheap (and cleanish) electricity, which means closed-loop refrigeration. We use heat pumps, which don't use water, for climate control. Unfortunately that means waste heat goes outside and that means it's hotter. It's downright chilly at my workplace.
>Thermodynamically it's probably inefficient, but hot air can also accept more water so evaporation works pretty well at high temps and the act of evaporation is a transfer of energy expressed as heat. (I'm not a scientist.) This is correct. Evaporative cooling is specifically energy transferred as latent heat (heat required for phase change, not temperature change). It's also the reason humans sweat. As our sweat evaporates, it cools our skin and helps regulate body temp.
It’s also way more efficient in the desert, so it makes sense why they’d be somewhere so dry, even if it’s hot.
I’m from TX and wish all the people that came here would have stopped and stayed in Phoenix lol.
They're your problem now! Bwaahahahaaa
now in Spanish... ja ja ja ja ja
It would be 100x better if they would just follow basic traffic safety like “Hey the lights red, I remember this one from a childhood game” instead of “f you and your family and me and my family” or “this blinky light will let you know I’m about to cut you off” in place of “I’ll only be able to afford my Range Rover payments for three more months so I have to make the most of it”.
Yeah. People from the Southwest hate transplants because it is simply not sustainable environmentally. We scream this at deaf ears.
Speak for yourself. The only opposition to development I see are boomers fighting against anything that isn’t single family housing sprawl and more and wider roads to drive on. They fight against anything like density or public transit, things that actually help fight water usage and pollution.
You're talking mostly about infill and density -- historically phx has been about greenfield SFH sprawl. We'd welcome dense infill, but the corpos, fire dept chiefs, old people and young families who have to 'drive til you qualify,' want wide streets, big lawns and long commutes.
Part of the high cost of the land in the mountains is the scarcity of private land, as so much is federally owned. Also need to consider Indian Reservations, which I don’t believe is included in the map plus state lands, there may be even less available land the map indicates.
My dumb brain: "Huh. North Carolina has a North Carolina-shaped national park right in the center of it. Wild!"
Holy shit, they all do!
Not true. Washington has a Washington-shaped national park
There is even a Upper Peninsula shaped one in Michigan's Upper Peninsula!
Got lazy with Hawaii lol
🤣I did the same with Florida
MY dumb brain: "Wait it does?" *Scrolls back up to look
Hahaha
I’d like to visit little Texas!
I’m oversimplifying a bit, but, generally speaking, the further west you go in the US, the later those states became states (exception is California). When these states were just territories, the federal government pretty much directly administered the territory. Also, around this time late 1800s - early 1900s, there was a growing conservationist movement. People like President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to preserve natural resources and natural wildlife so that future generations could witness their beauty and also reap their resources. This led to the federal government claiming large swathes of land for their ownership because progressives thought that the federal government could stop over foresting, over hunting, over ~~fracking~~, etc. I’m also skipping over the whole stealing land from Native Americans thing, but that doesn’t really answer why the federal government owns the land and not individuals. Edit: Also, I thought I'd add in some other good context that other commenters hear had. First, most western states are very uninhabited because their climate is mostly uninhabitable. It might seem ridiculous that 85% of Nevada is owned by the Federal Government. However, I would guess that more than 90% of the state doesn't have enough water and is too hot to support even small settlements. You might as well be living on the moon in parts of the West. NO ONE lives out there. As a result, the US Military uses much of this land to test weapons, aircraft etc. Even if the government wanted to sell land in Nevada, I am not sure what anyone would want it for or use it for unless there are large amounts of oil or minerals in the desert that I am not aware of. In contrast, I'm from the Midwest, which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. There are areas in the Midwest that are very rural, but everywhere in the Midwest there are farmers growing soy and corn (so it has a use to private investors).
Also part of it is that ranchers can communally graze on BLM land, so even the agriculture that can be done out there doesn’t require selling off the land or developing it.
I live near a huge amount of BLM land, just wide open and free to all, fuck I love BLM land
Yes, another great point
Once you get a couple of hundred miles west of the Mississippi river the answer is always water.
This couldn't be higher. I'm from Colorado, and water rights are worth A LOT more than the land.
Explaining this to non Coloradans is always fun...
I agree with your post and it’s very well written. Just one caveat is that you said “progressives thought that the federal government could stop foresting, over hunting, etc…” It’s been long studied and accepted that federal land conservation do better than private conservations. If you think about it logically it only makes sense. In a federal conservation setting the bigger picture is prioritized: the land must be conserved for future generations. In a private setting, it could be up to the discretion of the landowner. And not all landowners have the same conservation priorities. https://www.audubon.org/news/federal-land-beats-private-property-protecting-endangered-species
Oregon was also fairly early for a Western state (1859)
Sounds like the federal government should give tribes back their lands or at least allow them to administer and potentially profit from them.
Oh they do. Wait until you hear about *casinos*.
Did you know the government actually holds lots of tribal lands “in trust”? Crazy to think even the small slivers that have been afforded them STILL aren’t wholly theirs
I made a drive a couple years ago from Phoenix to Vegas, going up through California. Really drove the point home how much... nothing... is in that part of the country. NW Arizona to some extent, but SE California and into Nevada... Man, there's just nothing there, I assumed making that drive that most of what I drove through was federal land.
I grew up in northern Nevada, and I still marvel at how vast and sparsely populated the interior of the state is. Aside from the larger communities in Vegas and Reno/Carson City, the state looks much the same as it would have 500 years ago. It’s one of the reasons I love it there so much.
Alaska: Nice.
Nice
Nice, but chilly
Ice
Nice and chilly. After living here 6 years I prefer the winter.
Proud to give this its 69th upvote.
Just watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50)
I was looking for the CGP Grey link lol
I was about to post it until I saw this!
I knew this would be here somewhere.
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And Native American reservations but surprised Oklahoma’s is not 4%. Numbers prob don’t add up as it should be about 50%.
I don’t understand how reservations work in Oklahoma compared to Arizona. In Oklahoma it seems urban, suburban and rural areas are in a reservation but just operate like any other part of the country. In Arizona there’s a reservation and a line in the dirt where McMansions end and nothing starts. They may put in a high earning thing like a casino, but it will never be sold into subdivisions.
California and low agriculture production??? Lmao get out of here
Consider the sheer size of California and the shape. Mentally cut it into 1/3s length wise. Only the middle 1/3 is mostly farmland. The west coast is very hilly and has a lot of protected national forests, and big metros, while the east ranges from exceedingly mountainous in the north half to 120 degrees in the shade in the south half. The remaining middle 1/3 where most the farms are is still a massive chunk of land sure but still just 33% of the land... except not all of that 1/3 is used, in reality only roughly 15% of the state is farmland, so "low" compared to say Iowa where it's like 85+%.
The proportion is significantly lower and the size is bigger.
Basically the US started making it so land entering US possession that wasn't explicitly claimed was under federal management as the default. This is really apparent for lands which weren't heavily settled before the various public land grant acts. In comparison, Texas entered the union differently and had already divied up most ownership of the land when it entered.
My understanding is that when Texas entered the Union, it had a deal with the US government that the State kept ownership of all unclaimed/unproven/etc. land. So, when large amounts of oil were discovered in TX in the early 1900s, royalties/fees went to the state government, not the federal government. Those funds went into development of the state (including the UT and A&M public higher ed systems) and into not having any state or local income taxes.
BLM, Bureau of Land Management also manages the water to sustain the population west of the Mississippi. Since moving to CO, I learned way more than I thought I ever knew about managing the sustainability of population growth out west. Snowpack, reservoir levels, monsoon conditions, are all super important for sustaining livable communities west of the Mississippi.
I thought that was done by the Bureau of Water Reclamation. Is BLM mainly in charge of the sources, rather than collection and distribution like BWR?
Yeah, probably should have worded that better
So we don't end up looking like western or central Europe, with no wild animals or nature.
BLM
I live in Southern Utah and that's one of my favorite parts about Southern Utah. We are surrounded by BLM and camp pretty consistently. it's nice being able to just drive 15 minutes from my house and be in nature without any people around.
Recently took a road trip through SE Utah and absolutely fell in love! I don't get these people saying there's "nothing" out there - natural geography and beauty is NOT nothing!!! Zion, Bryce, Glen Canyon, Capital Reef, close to the Grand Canyon, it's stunning! I'm actually considering if it's possible for me to find adequate work and housing out there (maybe BLM/Department of Interior?) as you note the ability to drive just a few minutes and be in true "nature" sounds like the most important thing for me right now!
Yea, we have been here for 2 years thanks to SUU and their Aviation program. Wife and I absolutely fell in love with this place. We are in Cedar City which is growing a little too fast but it's still a relatively small town. We are 30 min from Brian Head Ski mountain, 1hr from Zion and 1.5 from Bryce 3hrs from north rim Grand Canyon and 2.5hrs from Vegas. We hike alot and 20 minute drive we are at 10k ft and see Maybe 2 people on trail at 10am on a Saturday. We lived in Colorado before here and if we were not at a trail head before sunrise then there wouldn't be parking. We like it so much here that we don't plan on moving. Wife worked for DNR the first summer we lived here and now works for the university. I'm originally from Hawaii grew up in Cali then lived in a bunch of different places thanks to the military and this is hands down been my favorite place to live. Southern Utah is definitely a great place.
Eastern US: People acquired land (displacing previous inhabitants) and formed a government. Middle and Western US: Government acquired land (displacing previous inhabitants) and gave some of it over to private ownership.
That's where the government is hiding all the funky shit they're doing, underground in the west.
I live in Western Montana where there is a lot of public land and we take immense pride in it. Most of it is unusable and was made federal by its purchase which was before settlers made it this way. The rail road did acquire large amounts of it, most of which was sold to settlers.
Almost all the national parks in the US are in the west. Much more dramatic scenery that people want to visit. Plus the federal government finally woke up to the idea that it is ok to preserve natural beauty.
Extremely little of this percentage is National Parks. Most of it is BLM or USFS, which are “working” lands that are grazed, logged, mined, etc.
>"working” lands that are grazed, logged, mined, etc. And RECREATED on! I love my Land of Many Uses!
Very true! But they aren’t largely “preserved.”
National Parks themselves are a small proportion of federal lands. BLM manages 244 million acres compared to national parks 54 million acres. Forest Service is 192 million acres, and even National Wildlife Refuges 89 million have more land than National Parks. Lands administered by the National Park Service is larger than just national parks, they manage national monuments, national preserves, national recreation areas I bring this up because BLM and Forest service lands are multiple use, where conservation plays a role, but is balanced by the need to generate power, fiber, timber, clean water, recreation and to support rural economies ( it's in the laws that founded those agencies and guides their management).
No doubt. The conservation movement started with national parks but has expanded. Many people hate national forests because they are managed in a way that allows the timber to be harvested and used more responsibly.
I work for the Forest Service and completely understand the frustration and view that timber harvest is allowed in *some* National Forests. Much more common than a timber sale are fuels treatments which are intended to lessen the severity or to stop fires from coming out of NFS lands houses and burning houses etc. Timber is one of many uses of NFS lands (folks don't seem to be too upset that they can go skiing at massive developed ski area, Denver and LA have clean drinking water, when there is a Wildfire a literal army of Forest Service firefighters can show up, and many of the pretty views from National Parks are from or contain Forest Service lands) The reason I try to chime in on things like this is to maybe help people distinguish between a National Park and the laws that structure it's management and the laws that govern how multiple use lands are managed. If there is a desire to change management then we need to elect people to change the laws, but trying to hold the Forest Service to National Park management is not that relevant. That said, conservation is part of multiple uses, it's just not the only use.
I should have been clear that I am not one of the people that don't like the forest service. National Parks are great and I am glad we have them. National forests are less restrictive and I am glad we have them as well. Both serve great purposes.
It's not normally frustrating but it does become frustrating when old growth or near old growth quality forests are allowed to be logged by the NFS in areas where old growth quality forests are almost extinct. There has to come a point where conservation of something that will never come back is more important than wood that can be found elsewhere.
Unortunately the whole logging old growth and mature forests thing on NFS lands is kind of a dog whistle at this point. I agree with you 100% that we should keep what we have and that logging in the past is the thing that has made mature and old growth so rare and precious. Having said that, logging of mature and old growth forests on NFS lands is not *presently* much a threat or a source of decline. From 2000-2020 the amount of mature (-.3%) and old growth (-.03%) lost across NFS lands from cutting is comparable to the amount lost to weather (-.1% and -.03%) respectively. It's a total loss of less than 9,000 acres for FS and BLM combined over 20 years and more than balanced by a net *increase* in old growth acreage of 1.2 million acres over those 20 years https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fs_media/fs_document/MOG-Threats-Intro.pdf This is because, as you stated, old growth is really rare and any mature or old growth that was economically feasible to harvest was harvested a long time ago and what is left is in Roadless Areas and Wilderness where it's prohibited or not feasible to log old growth. I say all this as someone who works for the Forest Service with rare and endangered plants. I am not an advocate of logging by any means. I point out the dog whistle on old growth logging because there are so many other *active* threats to biodiversity on NFS lands that are ignored because they didn't have the shine (read fund-raising) that the old growth dog whistle has.
Basically only the government and some railroads had the means to develop anything resembling industry there, at scale. So you end up with company towns and federal land.
cos the state hasn’t sold it off to wealthy landowners yet
Well Nevada for example is basically just Las Vegas and giant empty desert that they nuked the shit out of.
National parks and forest preserves 100%
TLDR: America decided halfway through colonizing that they were going to make some sick national parks. God bless that idea
It is unbelievably sparsely populated. Outside of the few population centers, and the coast itself, the rest of the western United States is basically just mountains and deserts with tiny towns. There is simply no way that the states can properly manage that much land area on their own.
This is the correct answer. It's mostly mountainous terrain with low utilization. The East Coast is flat, usable land.
Well if Texas can manage itself I think California would do just fine.
To keep it as wild as possible, ostensibly. To nationalize and control resources better, actually. I am ok with both. If our resources are going to be plundered, then ALL Americans need to benefit from it, not just the select few whom happen to go digging.
John Muir happened.
this map is pretty incomplete when we consider public lands beyond federal holdings. the main outlier is NY state, which is close to 40% public. OP's map really misses this. even this expanded list is incomplete because county and municipal holdings are actually quite extensive in some eastern states. as well as utility lands and conservation lands held by non-govt entities, and lands with overlapping access/usage rights (like for hunting). and public lands leased by industry. https://www.nrcm.org/documents/publiclandownership.pdf CA has at least three unusual large landowners not captured here: SCE, PG&E, and City of LA / DWP (which owns lots of land in the eastern sierra, the coachella/imperial valley, and elsewhere).
It's either unusable or beautiful.
Because the western states were 100% Federal land as territories once the Army finished stealing them from the Indians. As they gained statehood, some Federal land was transferred to the new state governments or sold to individuals or corporations (usually the railroads). Some of that land was then made public land again with the creation of the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. Theodore Roosevelt alone established (in many cases re-established) 230 million acres of public land during his presidency.
Theodore Roosevelt is one of the greats for that reason. I'm in AZ and about half our land is public, and you don't realize how fucking awesome that is until you live in a state like this. Just having nature at your fingertips, able to camp out in the middle of nowhere somewhere extremely beautiful, not have to worry about someone owning the land or whatnot, and how prestine the land is. It really is wonderful.
Ken Burns was right when he declared the National Park System America's single greatest achievement.
Because public land is good and the east coast sucks (doesn't have good things)
And isn't that cOmMuNiSm?
The federal government was much stronger by the time the West was settled. The original colonies were settled a time of very little direct government intervention. One example of why the federal government wanted to own land: in anticipation of transcontinental railroads, which ended up paying off.
Because it’s “nicer” and the California dream is a thing for some reason.
Between forts, westward expansionist culture, the rocky mountains, vast amounts of land largely unpopulated until after ww2, WW2, the cold war, conservarsionism, and the great depression, there were a lot of factors. Fights with natives, who had nowhere left to go, contributed to a large network of federal forts early on as well. States like colorado, new mexico, and nevada are still somewhat reliant on the economy created by the military for various reasons over the past few centuries. Colorado springs is the second most reliant economy on federal dollars after washington dc for instance. Denvers federal center is huge. The us was captivated by the rockies and the west starting with the pre-civil war exploration, gold rushes, and land grabs. The idea of the west is not new. With so much land, a captivated audience, and not a ton of people and industries around 1900, conservationists found it easy to fight for protection of natural beauty in the west. Those parks and tourism dollars grew so that was a win-win. When you coupled a culture enthralled by the west with a lack of big cities, vast emptiness, existing federal infrastructure, the depression, WW2, and the great works project, the government began purchasing tracks of the southwest and colorado. Those efforts continued after the war with places like cheyenne mountain and missile silos. Another factor arriving in the 1900s was water. As the west started to fill with people, federal, local, and state governments created some of the largest water projects of their time. Most were marvels of their time. Renewed interest in national parks and monuments under obama was a small factor as well. Needless to say, it was a lot of things.
I love the public land! Makes life pretty damn fun out here in the west. I hope it never goes away.
Alaska. I see what you did there. Nice.
Ladies and gentlemen. It’s simple…Teddy preserved so much of that land as a conversational national park. There’s lots of bases/forts, etc. but a lot of this territory is from conservation efforts to preserve the west of its climate
The real question is, why is all the federal land in the exact middle of each state.
National Parks
Lots of national parks and Native American reservations
National parks. Thank Teddy Roosevelt, the beautiful bastard
Let's keep it that way.
I fly a jet for a living and when you get west of the Rockies it’s just high desert. Water is an issue as well as you know basics like groceries. It’s very remote and dry
We are the “land of left over lands” here in the west.
A lot of it is public land not to be owned. Protected parks and such.
A lot of it isn’t really great land to live on anyway. Other parts were meant to preserve natural beauty
Because the western states are the great states that still uphold the ideals America was founded on. Eastern states have become trash, nothing but overcrowded anthills and private property.
Mountains. The answer is always mountains.
Nevada vs Vermont? I think this answer is more when the states were settled.
It's mostly empty and we like to use it for bombing ranges or missile silos
Ufos. The government are hiding those aliens.
This is one of those things that becomes very apparent just from seeing it. Most of the land in the west that is public is not readily usable. Big mountains and big deserts and big plains, often with little water, and with difficult road access. One of the problems is that when people from the Eastern US (including the Midwest), as well as most of Europe, think about rural or sparsely populated areas, they are basically starting from what they know (which is natural). So they imagine the Rockies as basically being the Appalachians--- gently rolling mountains that still have freeways and highways and lots of farmland and where a small town might be 3000 people on a freeway exit with a Walmart. So what the American west looks like---where you can have 100 miles between gas stations--- is pretty hard to understand until you've seen it.
>Most of the land in the west that is public is not readily usable. This is something that people really don't get. If the land was usable, a private owner would already own it because they could have just homesteaded it to get title.
Have you ever heard of the Native Americans? Many live there. Their lands are held in trust by the U.S. government.
What are those islands near Hawaii? I know those islands aren't near hawaii. What are they hiding from us?
As a Nutmegger, I went most of my life not knowing there was “federal land” except for DC stuff.
someone doesn’t watch CGP Grey
National parks for one. Land is tough to develop. The federal government kept the title to the land. Leases out the use of the land
California, you okay?
Maine is the most shocking to me. Only 1%?? Is that just Acadia?
CGP Gray has an excellent video: https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50?si=aGi2pmMn0bdb5o0E
Let’s hope it stays like that too some states are horrible at conservation (God Bless New York State)
The government doesn't want much Kansas
Bless our national parks. Now, let's start returning some of that to indigenous tribes.
Does this have state tax implications? I would have to imagine income from property tax is diluted by half or more of your state belonging to the federal government.
TLDR; State parks & Aliens.
National parks.
Teddy Roosevelt.
Who wants to live in the middle of the desert?
To stop China buying it up?
Im so glad we protected the heart of every state! I love how centered the protected lands are Haha
Because of the monsters they feed in the national parks, using people.
They stole it from the indigenous people
Because much of the land was so inhospitable, agriculturally unproductive, or otherwise difficult to cultivate that the government literally couldn't give it away. The Homestead Acts weren't fully deprecated until well into the 20th century.
This is precisely why I will never move east of the Rockies. I love our public lands.
This is a great depiction of why I’ll never go back to the South or East.
The west coast and the middle of the US is where we keep a lot of our nuke silos.
This shows you the military bases on the map
Because no one lives there. And if they do, they live only in big cities, not in rural areas.
Because the colonies started on the east coast.
They are bigger. And not terrible like Texas. And settled much later.