RANGEfire! | Report: “30 x 30” landgrab based on environmentalist hysteria, misinformation

Scientific Report Produced by Robert Gordon for The Heritage Foundation

I. Introduction

For too long, the environmental left has pushed a narrative that undeveloped land and wildlife are disappearing. This narrative has justified programs that expand government land ownership and the regulation of natural resources. The current Administration’s “30 by 30” proposal—that 30 percent of the nation’s land be conserved by 2030 to protect biodiversity—is a good example.

However, the reality regarding U.S. lands, habitat, and wildlife is encouraging, with many positive trends. Using actual data, this Special Report will show:

Forests, grasslands, range, and other lands in a generally natural state are not disappearing to development at an alarming rate, and urban sprawl is not a threat at the national level.
Government, predominantly federal, already owns over a third of the nation, and the federal government has regulatory powers that apply to likely hundreds of millions of acres of private lands. Additionally, private lands provide hundreds of millions of acres of habitat without necessarily being removed from tax rolls and often contribute to the economy. There is no reason to expect these private lands to be developed on a massive scale.
Many species have increased in population and range within the last century, indicating the availability of habitat and, for carnivores, the availability of prey necessary to support them.

This report serves as a detailed but concise primer for understanding land-use trends, land ownership, and management regimes, and it provides some information on wildlife populations as an indicator of habitat availability. The data provided here stand in stark contrast to what one typically hears in discussions of many environmental policies including the current Administration’s 30 by 30 proposal, which will also be addressed. While the Administration’s proposal is promoted as directed to threats to biodiversity and climate, the latter is not within the scope of this report.

II. 30 by 30

The Administration’s 30 by 30 proposal is a perfect example of the need for policymakers to have additional context and baseline data to be used as a measure of conservation and land-use policies.

A campaign to get nations to commit to protecting 30 percent of their land by 2030 gained momentum just prior to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A National Geographic press release notes that “key world leaders announced their support for the science-based target to protect 30% of the planet by 2030…days before a United Nations Biodiversity Summit—where Heads of State will lay down their proposals to curb biodiversity loss before next year’s 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Kunming, China.”

The main direct causes and impacts of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are well known…. The underlying causes include consumption and production patterns, human population dynamics, trade, and the use of technology, which are all affected by societal values, inequality, and behaviors. Although sustainable production practices exist, our food systems are currently the single biggest underlying source of decline in nature, responsible for three-quarters of deforestation.

Within a week of the Biden Administration assuming power, ambitious action came in the form of Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, which states:

We must listen to science—and act…. It is the policy of my Administration to organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis to implement a Government-wide approach that…conserves our lands, waters, and biodiversity.

Under the section titled Conserving Our Nation’s Land and Waters, the executive order calls for the Secretary of the Interior to prepare a report “recommending steps the United States should take, working with State, local, Tribal, and territorial governments, agricultural and forest landowners, fishermen, and other key stakeholders, to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”

An accompanying Department of the Interior press release states, “Approximately 60% of land in the continental U.S. is in a natural state, but we are losing a football field worth of it every 30 seconds.… The U.S. Geological Survey reports that only 12% of lands are permanently protected.”

These statements are intended to buttress the Administration’s dramatic policy adoption, but without additional context they do little more than provoke an emotive response. Are only 12 percent of the nation’s natural lands protected, and is a football field of land in a natural state lost every 30 seconds?

III. Land Use in the United States

Land-use trends do not support claims that natural lands in the United States are disappearing at an alarming rate or portend of an ecological disaster. These trends are discernable through satellite imagery.

Landsat, a joint effort of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is a series of satellites that has acquired images of the earth’s land surface, producing the world’s longest continuously acquired collection of space-based moderate-resolution land remote-sensing data.

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) has been created and continually expanded using these Landsat images and supplementary data.

Conterminous United States (48 States)

Using data from the NLCD, USGS, and other researchers recently published an assessment of the land cover change patterns from 2001 to 2016 for the 48 conterminous U.S states.

The analysis divides the area of the conterminous United States among land cover classes that are depicted for 2016 in Table 1.

 

The agricultural land classes (cropland and pasture and hay) combined account for 22.5 percent, and all the development land classes combined account for only 5.3 percent. The combined area of the remaining classes—over 70 percent—is, with some exception, composed of a variety of generally natural landscapes. On some of these lands, human-related activity—such as cattle grazing, timber harvest, or, on a small fraction, surface mining—is taking place, but generally these areas are more reflective of natural processes than intensive management.

Land change is constantly occurring as a result of both natural and human activities. The rate of change can be immediately apparent or so slow that it is more difficult to observe. For example, natural grassland may transition to shrub/scrub that is eventually succeeded by climax forest. At the other end of the cycle, forest cover may change back to grassland following fires, loss to insects or disease, or timber harvest. Agricultural use may change pasture to cultivated crop or to shrub/scrub if farming is abandoned, fields are idled, or land is entered into easements, or it may be developed. A unit of land may change from one land cover class to another over time.

However, as can be seen in the accompanying graphic and table, between 2001 and 2016, the land area within each land cover class remained rather stable. Forest cover decreased the most in absolute terms, and developed land increased the most on a percentile basis. Each of the classes showed some change between 2001 and 2016, with the sole exception of a small area of permanent ice and snow that remained a constant 198.5 square miles over the decade and a half.

The authors reported no land cover change for the vast majority of remaining land—about 92 percent—from 2001 to 2016.

(See Chart 1.)

 

Of the 7.6 percent where change was observed, nearly half involved forest change driven by harvest, fire, disease, and pests resulting in an overall forest decline.

“The bulk of this change,” covering an area somewhat smaller than West Virginia, “is because of forest harvest and regrowth…with much of the rest coming from stand-replacing forest fires primarily in the West.”

Alaska and Hawaii

Separate land cover data for Hawaii and Alaska show that only a small percentage of land is developed and intensively managed for agriculture in the two states. In Hawaii, developed land classes and agricultural land cover account for 6.7 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively.

Only 0.08 percent of Alaska is developed, with just another 0.02 percent in agricultural land cover.

This leaves almost 99.9 percent of Alaska, which accounts for about 16 percent of total U.S. land, in generally natural landscapes.

Developed Areas and “Urban Sprawl”

Development, referred to in some cases as “urban sprawl,” is not a national threat. In 2016 only 5.3 percent of the conterminous United States fell within one of the four developed land classes, leaving almost 95 percent of the lower 48 states for agricultural covers, forests, and other generally natural settings.

The developed land classes are differentiated from one another by the percentage of impervious surface, which includes “constructed surfaces such as buildings, roads, parking lots, brick, asphalt, and concrete.”

“Developed open space” (< 20 percent),
“Developed low intensity” (20–49 percent),
“Developed medium intensity” (50–79 percent), and
“Developed high intensity” (80–100 percent).

As depicted in Chart 2, over half (54 percent) of all developed land in the conterminous United States is developed open space, which the USGS states most commonly includes “large-lot single-family housing units, parks, golf courses, and vegetation planted in developed settings for recreation, erosion control, or aesthetic purposes.”

 

In the decade-and-a-half between 2001 and 2016, all developed land classes combined increased as a percentage of the conterminous 48 states by just 0.3 percent.

At this rate, it would take another four decades for developed areas to encompass about another 1 percent of the conterminous United States. While some of these acres may be “lost” from the Biden Administration’s perspective, for others these lands now have neighborhoods, schools, grocery stores, churches, or places of work. Further, for the 2001–2016 period, the “overall trend is a declining rate of urbanization, suggesting that such factors as the 2008 global recession may have dampened urban growth.”

High-intensity developed land, where 80 percent or more of the land area is impervious, took up an additional 0.05 percent of the conterminous United States in the 2001–2016 period and accounts for just one-quarter of 1 percent of the lower 48.

Forest Land

When the United Nations states that “our food systems [are] currently the single biggest underlying source of decline in nature, responsible for three-quarters of deforestation,”

It is either not speaking about the United States or is misinformed.

According to the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS’s) report on sustainable forests, total U.S. forest area “currently amounts to 751 million acres, or about one-third of the Nation’s total land area. Since the beginning of the past century, the size of this inventory has been relatively stable, and the forests it represents remain largely intact. This stability is in spite of a nearly three-fold increase in population over the same period and is in marked contrast with many countries where wide scale deforestation remains a pressing concern.

It is estimated that about a third of some 1 billion acres of forest cover was converted to agricultural land beginning with European settlement until about 1900, with most of this occurring before the Civil War and ending a century ago.

By the mid-1800s, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont had been reduced to about 35 percent forest cover and New Hampshire to about 50 percent.

However, vast areas that had been denuded of forest cover, often marginally productive agricultural land that was abandoned, have been reclaimed by forest. As reported in The Atlantic 25 years ago, “less than two centuries later, despite great increases in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today, and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands rebound to the point where they cover nearly three-fifths of southern New England.”

When Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) categories of forest land and “Special Use Lands”—the majority of which is park and wildlife land—are combined, the data show Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire with about 90 percent, 86 percent, and 84 percent forest cover in 2012, respectively.

This spectacular regeneration is a testament to the fact that, in general, renewable natural resources are resilient and dynamic.

NRCS data for the near four decades from 1982 to 2017 also show that nonfederal forests grew from about 412 million acres to 417 million acres.

These forests include not only state and other government forests but also private forests that, according to the USFS, account for 56 percent of U.S. forests and, in 2007, provided 92 percent of the timber harvest.

In addition to a significant amount of forest land being regenerated and the amount of forest cover stabilizing, for the near-half-century period from 1953 to 2002, the proportion of forests where an average stand of trees is 10 inches in diameter or greater in the three USFS conterminous regions (North, South and West) increased.

While the proportion of forest in different diameter size classes can vary with harvest, more recent data show that in the southern states—where 80 percent to over 90 percent of forests are privately owned, with the exception of Florida (63 percent), and where most timber comes from—growth has exceeded removals by 34 percent to 70 percent.36

Agricultural Land

The U.N.’s warning about large-scale forest land conversions to agricultural land does not apply to the United States, either. NLCD data for the 2001–2016 period shows that the number of acres dedicated to agricultural uses (cropland, and hay and pasture combined) was basically flat, with 449 million acres in 2001 and 450 million acres in 2016.

Different analysis by the NRCS for the longer period from 1982 to 2017 shows that cropland and pasture combined declined from about 552 million acres to 489 million acres.

It should be noted that these figures do not reflect livestock grazing that occurs on NRCS rangelands or NLCD land cover classes such as “grassland/herbaceous,” but these land cover classes are generally “not subject to intensive management” because of grazing.

Greater agricultural productivity has meant less deforestation. While conversion of forest cover to agricultural use occurred on a large scale from colonial times into the first part of the 20th century, American farmers have been able to feed a population that more than tripled to over 330 million and export $150 billion worth of agricultural products in 2020 without converting more forest land.

In fact, over the past 75 years, while using less land, farmers almost tripled farm output, and by 2019, Americans spent a historically low percentage of their disposable income on total food.

NASA has pictures to prove just how productive American agriculture is. NASA scientists used satellites to measure the amount of light plants emitted during photosynthesis when plants take in and convert carbon dioxide into food and release oxygen as a byproduct. The light, bioluminescence, which is invisible to the naked eye, can be used to estimate plant productivity. NASA scientists found that the during the Northern Hemisphere’s growing season, the Midwest region of the United States boasts more photosynthetic activity than any other spot on earth.

In fact, data showed that fluorescence from the Corn Belt, which extends from Ohio to Nebraska and Kansas, peaks in July at levels 40 percent greater than those observed in the Amazon, which is often referred to as “the lungs of the Earth.

The remarkable productivity of modern agriculture evidences that the learning curve is green. As arts and science and technology advance, farmers learn how to get more from less.

Wetlands

While the area of wetlands fluctuated with variables such as precipitation, NLCD data show little change to wetlands extent from 2001 to 2016, with 116.4 million acres and 116.5 million acres, respectively.

NRCS data, though measured differently, report 111.4 million acres for 1992 and 111.2 million acres in 2017.

IV. Government Land Ownership, Federal Regulations, and Designations

Consideration of land-use and conservation policies, in general—and 30 by 30, in particular—requires establishing some basic facts about the extensive land ownership by government in the United States. Additionally, it is important to have an idea of the more important federal management regimes affecting those lands as well as some of the natural resource regulations and conservation designations that can apply to government land or private property.

Government Ownership

Government, predominantly federal, owns over a third of the nation.

This does not include some 57.2 million acres of mineral rights held by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) beneath private or other nonfederal property.

The USGS’s Protected Areas Database (PAD-US) is “America’s official national inventory of U.S. terrestrial and marine protected areas that are dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity and to other natural, recreation and cultural uses, managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means.”

U.S. Geological Survey, “Gap Analysis Project,” https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/science-analytics-and-synthesis/gap/science/protected​-areas (accessed June 16, 2021).

PAD-US data includes not only federal land, but also state, county, municipal, and other government lands, as well as some private lands, such as those held by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have conservation easements. This land is addressed in Appendix 1.

U.S. Geological Survey, “Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 2.1 Summary Statistics by GAP Status Code.”

The data reveal that the federal government is a massive landowner, with the four largest land-holding agencies, in order, being BLM, USFS, National Park Service (NPS), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). According to the USGS, together these agencies are charged with managing 973,000 square miles, a quarter of the nation.

With other federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, Army Corps of Engineers, and Department of Energy included, the USGS figure rises to over a million square miles, about 27 percent of the United States.

When USGS figures for state, regional, local, and other government entities are added, the square miles swell to more than 1.3 million, almost 36 percent of the United States—an area larger than India.

Additional land holdings of note include American Indian lands that take up an area larger than the combined lands of California and Maryland and NGO-held easements totaling an area larger than the lands of Maryland and Vermont combined. There may be a significant area of easements that have not been integrated into these figures.

Also relevant are the many different environmental regulatory regimes that can affect governmental and private land as well as the designation programs related to land use and conservation, in general, and 30 by 30, in particular. Appendix 2 provides some metrics for these programs.

Worthy of particular note are the vast areas designated as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—from over 110 million acres to over 250 million acres depending on counting method—and wetland acreage of a similar extent that is potentially subject to wetlands regulations.

Appendices 1 and 2 clearly demonstrate that government owns a vast amount of the nation, already has an expansive regulatory reach onto private lands, and is tracking designated properties for various reasons.

V. Habitat for Wildlife

Conservation of land ensures that there is adequate habitat to support wildlife, a primary mission of the largest U.S. land-holding agencies. Laws such as the ESA were enacted to conserve endangered species, and regulations such as those governing wetlands were adopted in large part because of wetlands’ value as habitat. The USGS explains that “detailed information about the conservation status of our country’s protected areas is crucial to improving our understanding of how well we are protecting the animals and plants that inhabit those areas.”

However, the vast area of the United States and the fact that so much of it currently provides habitat—in combination with the nation’s biodiversity—makes it impossible to determine the status of all these species. Often proponents of various conservation policies cite statistics such as species estimated to be vulnerable or endangered. There are, for example, some 94 federally endangered U.S. insects, of which 20 are beetles.

The significance, however, of 20 out of perhaps 30,000 kinds of beetle in North America being declared federally endangered is unclear.

Similarly, pre-colonial ranges and guesstimated populations for wildlife from that time are compared with more recently estimated populations and ranges, implying a straight-line—and usually miserable—trajectory. These grim numbers are then compared to statistics on habitat alteration or the growth of the nation’s economy or population and presented as evidence of the need for urgent action. Again, the reality is much better than the popular misconception: Many species have increased in number, including many larger carnivores and ungulates (hooved mammals), indicating availability of habitat and prey.

An oft-cited example of this approach is Range Contractions of North American Carnivores and Ungulates.

Rather than report the area of an animal’s current range as a percentage of its historical range, the authors report a species’ “area of persistence.”

A table legend indicates that this measure is the percentage of the species’ historical range that is currently occupied. It excludes any areas into which the species has expanded beyond its historical range. The paper then focuses on just those species that the authors calculate to have range contractions of 20 percent or more.

When all the species are considered and range expansions included in the calculation, however, 37 of the 43 species occupy 50 percent or more of their historical ranges. For well over half of the species, the current range is at least 75 percent of the historical range. For almost half of the species, the current range is equal to or greater than the historical range.

(See Chart 3.)

 

The authors state, “We are aware that species ranges are dynamic and that there may have been contractions and expansions between the two time periods we considered. We stress that this study was conducted on a relatively coarse scale and that we examined broad changes.”

This caveat seeks to inoculate the authors from the fact that their grim characterization can conceal changes in the rate of decline as well as trend direction for many species.

One such species is Puma concolor, popularly known as the mountain lion or cougar. It has one of the largest range requirements among North American mammals, generally 200 square kilometers or more for a single male.

NatureServe reported the total U.S. mountain lion population as 15,000 in 1976.

Although the population estimate cited by NatureServe was four decades old when it was reviewed in 2016, the record affirms a global conservation ranking of G5 and an equivalent national conservation ranking of N5.

A G5 ranking means the species is at very low risk of extinction or collapse due to a very extensive range, abundant populations or occurrences, and little or no concern from decline or threats. It is the best ranking NatureServe has to offer.

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