Not sure why I’m wading into this but the answer and compromise for sportsman IMO lies in fighting fire with fire in the privatization game. Hear me out. We have roughly 40 million hunting licenses/tags/permits sold in this country, let’s just assume individual licenses number 30 million. Let’s also assume while not all hunt or utilize public lands, that when you factor in other consumptive users (i.e, hunters, trappers, fishermen and not lumping in recreational only I.e. climbers, hikers, bikers users) you have roughly 30 million people who would pay $100 a year averaged out between them all to be used towards public lands.
Now stay with me. If we the consumptive sportsmen and women in this country could create a non-profit or hell just any entity to pool those resources together to buy and manage lands to keep open to the public we’d have roughly 3 billion dollars each year to buy up acreage, open it to the public, manage it effectively and get around some of the litigation that the govt has to deal with when it comes to doing any cutting (based on my experience the NC mountains) and effectively be setup to combat any land sales that may arise in the future via purchase. Obviously administrative costs, taxes, management costs, etc would cut into that number but the answer as I see it is to use grassroots and capitalism to our advantage instead of being Don Quixote and chasing windmills. Lots of assumptions I know (no more than what’s already in this thread) and organizing and getting something like that off the ground would be difficult but you can’t tell me between the current non-profits that it can’t be done, hell looked at APR. RMEF has experience in the land acquisition realm, Safari Club is deep in the legislative realm. It can be done and in a way where it’s strictly focused on land acquisition for public use that is technically in private hands like a Land Trust. Except this focus would be for consumptive users to utilize and not just for the sake of saving land. Of course I can already tell that there would be issues because someone doesn’t want a forestry plan that includes logging or someone wants solar and not oil and gas leases, etc. Everyone would have to leave their own biases, wants and desires at the door as the mission statement would be for land open to and managed for consumptive users, it starts and ends there. Recreational users would be welcome of course but there would be no catering to them. Now back to your regularly scheduled twisting at windmills.