The Securities Exchange Commission’s (SEC) proposed rule allowing for Natural Asset Companies to be traded on the NYSE is reckless and politically motivated, exactly the opposite of the purpose of the SEC. The management of public lands ought not be for sale.

The SEC was created by Congress to ensure transparency, fair prices for trading, and a high degree of liquidity for traders following the 1929 Stock Market crash. The creation of NACs will harm the economy, especially in rural areas. The SEC has no authority to peddle the management of public lands.

According to the proposed rule filing, NACs will be corporations that hold the rights to the ecological performance (i.e., the value of natural assets and production of ecosystem services) produced by natural or working areas, such as national reserves or large-scale farmlands, and have the authority to manage the areas for conservation, restoration, or sustainable management. These rights can be licensed like other rights, including “run with the land” rights (such as mineral rights, water rights, or air rights), and NACs are expected to license these rights from sovereign nations or private landowners.

This proposed rule places public lands into private investment portfolios, including National Parks. This proposed rule would provide a vehicle to investors, including foreign governments, to further climate crisis policies and take a new approach to Biden’s embattled 30 x 30 agenda.

The preservation of land is removing it from all use, not just the uses the environmental types are particularly dismayed with, mineral extraction and grazing. NACs are not in any way conservation of resources; it is allowing the entity with the most money to control natural resources. Conservation and preservation are two distinctly different things. Total non-management of lands is not management at all. It is not fair to the land, the wildlife, the livestock, or the communities that rely on any combination of those resources.

The proposed rule grants management authority to the NAC, which gives private investors or investment companies management authority over federal lands. It is Congress alone that has the authority to manage these lands. Additionally, management must be, according to the proposed rule, for conservation, restoration, or sustainable management. This grants the highest bidder the ability to remove from federal lands not only qualified management, but also any productive use.

Though the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was formed in 1946, the agency’s mission was clarified by the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act or FLPMA. According to FLPMA, public lands and their resources are to be managed for multiple uses. Just as sloppy federal land grabs thinly veiled as monument designations is inappropriate, as is the elimination or preclusion of multiple use activities and access. Public lands are central to the economies of many rural communities in the West that rely on dollars from all of the multiple uses, be in grazing, recreation, mineral extraction, sustainable energy production, or timber. Each time a restriction is placed on public lands, reasonable or not, the local economy is affected, and the principle of multiple use is eroded. If NACs are allowed, those with radical climate goals and deep pockets will be allowed to prevent use of public lands, a direct assault on FLPMA and the centuries of combined expertise and experience that drove it and continues to heed it. A wiser columnist may surmise the deadline for Biden’s climate-driven goal of preserving 30% of lands and waters by 2030 is nearing and not quickly enough for some radicals. This rush is also illustrated in the hurried public comment period of a mere 21 days. Such a battering of property rights ought to at least warrant a longer comment period.

Through NACs, any investor, including adversarial nations, would be able to purchase the management rights to public lands, crippling this country’s ability to feed and fuel itself and making the US dependent upon foreign countries. As Sen. Pat Roberts from Kansas said, “show me a nation that can’t feed itself, and I’ll show you a nation in chaos.”

The public comment period ends on January 18.

Rachel Gabel is a longtime agriculture writer and the assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine.

RACHEL GABEL

Multiple-use lands are intended to provide access to, just as it suggests, multiple users. Preservation would close access to these public lands by all users.

Courtesy of Janie VanWinkle