If ever there was a time for a defense of the federal public lands system, it is now. Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, has expressed his contempt for the preferences of the American people by presiding over the largest rescissions of federal land protections in history. In 2017, a huge majority of Americans–99.2 percent by one measure—were in favor of the preservation of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. Yet President Donald Trump, thirteen months after taking office, and acting on Zinke’s recommendations, reduced them in size by close to two million acres.

Right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Institute, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, Reason Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council applauded the decision. These groups, many of them funded by energy industry magnates Charles and David Koch, have been at the forefront of claims that public lands, burdened with environmental regulations, are a drain on the American economy.

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer Temple University Press 264, pp., $28.45

The ultimate goal of these groups, however, is not merely deregulation but a radical transformation of the more-than-century-old system of public ownership of hundreds of millions of acres of land, mostly in the Western states. Public lands, they say, should be privatized, sold off to the highest bidder for the best use, be it logging, cattle grazing, or exploitation for oil, gas, or hard-rock minerals. Subjected to market forces, the land, in this view, will yield a higher return to society than the current system that “locks it up” under the auspices of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service.

These three land management entities, along with other federal agencies, oversee approximately one-third of all land in the country. No matter that overwhelming numbers of Americans have decided that they like the Park Service, the BLM, and Forest Service and want to keep the land as a vast commons.

A compelling rejoinder to the noxiously anti-democratic program of land privatizers is Steven Davis’s new book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer. The chief argument for privatization, writes Davis, is based on a reductionist calculation of the operating budget of public lands agencies compared with the revenue those lands produce. Government statistics show that it costs ten times more to run the Forest Service than the service receives from users of the national forests. Therefore, goes the logic, junk it. In fact, the public lands system as a whole operates at a significant loss. In 2014, total appropriations for all federal land agencies came to $11 billion while revenue was only $1 billion. From the national parks to the national forests and monuments to the wildlife refuges operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it’s all money down the drain. They are economically inefficient. Therefore, the nation ought to abolish them. “To the advocates of privatization,” writes Davis, “the government’s management of public land is the main culprit in the thwarting of rational, efficient, and productive resource policy.”