Selling the Soil, Scrubbing the Story

How Congress Is Auctioning Public Lands While Rewriting the Story of Who We Are

As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, what should be a moment of national reflection is instead turning into a reckoning with how the country’s memory, land, and truth are being quietly but systematically stripped away.

The Senate has just revived and expanded a controversial plan to sell off up to 3 million acres of federal land—deserts, forests, wetlands, and sacred Indigenous sites. That’s just the beginning. As much as 250 million acres could be deemed “eligible for disposal,” including 14 to 17 million acres in Colorado alone. Much of this was stripped out of the House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year after public backlash. But in the Senate version, it’s back and bigger than ever, buried deep in the fine print.

This isn’t a one-off. It’s part of a deliberate, multi-front strategy to shrink the public sphere, rewrite the past, and silence dissent.

They’re not just selling the land. They’re whitewashing the monuments. They’re censoring the classrooms. They’re deleting the ancestors.

And if we don’t stop it, there may be nothing left to inherit.

What’s at Stake: These Aren’t Just Acres, They’re Stories

This isn’t idle land. It’s not forgotten space. It’s legacy, lived, sacred, and fought for.

The Senate proposal targets millions of acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, and National Park Service. This includes habitats, ceremonial grounds, carbon sinks, ancestral villages, and biodiversity corridors, the kinds of landscapes that sustain life and carry memory.

This land:

• Sequesters carbon in old-growth forests

• Shelters endangered wildlife and pollinators

• Protects watersheds and clean air zones

• Holds sacred meaning for dozens of Indigenous nations

• Anchors community identity and local economies

And it’s already happening.

Bears Ears (Utah)

A place of prayer and origin for the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Zuni, and Pueblo peoples, it was already reduced once under Trump. Now Bears Ears faces renewed threats under this legislative wave.

Oak Flat (Arizona)

Chi’chil Biłdagoteel to the Apache, this sacred ground is now poised to be destroyed for a foreign-owned copper mine. SCOTUS refused to stop it in May, clearing the way for its collapse into a two-mile-wide pit.

Grand Staircase-Escalante (Utah)

A geological and ecological marvel with dinosaur fossils, sacred petroglyphs, and untold scientific value, it was once cut in half, and is now on the chopping block again.

Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Monument (MS/IL)

Under internal review after being deemed “divisive,” the monument tells the truth of lynching and civil rights. Now it may be revised, renamed, or quietly defunded.

Larch Mountain and Oregon’s Rainforests

Targeted for sale despite being beloved for recreation and ecological stability, these are not forgotten parcels. They’re carbon vaults, bird sanctuaries, and homes to centuries-old trees.

These places aren’t just protected. They’re loved. And that’s why they’re dangerous to the people trying to sell the soul of the country.

The “Affordable Housing” Lie

Supporters of the land sale claim it’s a response to America’s housing crisis. But the truth is, this land isn’t suitable for homes, and it won’t go to the people who need them most.

These lands are remote, ecologically fragile, and far from infrastructure, employment opportunities, and essential services.

This isn’t Homesteading 2.0. No one’s handing out forty acres and a dream. They’re handing over millions of acres to private developers and foreign firms, not families.

This isn’t about building neighborhoods. It’s about opening the door to mining, drilling, deforestation, and speculation.

It’s not housing policy. It’s a handoff to the highest bidder.

We covered this deception earlier in The Public Land Fire Sale. That piece remains essential context: these land sales are part of a larger playbook, one that commodifies public trust for short-term profit and long-term loss.

See that article here:

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The Public Land Fire Sale: Trump’s Blueprint for Corporate Extraction

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What the Land Actually Provides

The lands being targeted for sale aren’t idle or unused. They’re doing essential work, silently and constantly. They absorb carbon, shelter biodiversity, support local economies, and connect people to history, culture, and healing. In many cases, they’re the last line of defense against climate collapse and cultural erasure.

Public lands offer environmental stability, with forests and wetlands filtering air and water, regulating temperatures, and providing buffers against droughts, fires, and floods. Without them, neighboring communities face higher disaster risk and degraded health.

They also serve as biodiversity sanctuaries, homes to endangered species, and migration corridors that keep ecosystems in balance. Once fragmented by roads or mines, those webs collapse, often irreversibly.

Economically, the National Park System alone supports over 415,000 jobs, generates more than $26 billion in visitor spending, and returns over $10 for every $1 invested. These parks aren’t burdens; they’re engines.

But perhaps most critically, these are living classrooms and cultural sanctuaries. Rangers teach students about fire cycles, Indigenous land management, and the truth of American history. These are not static museum pieces. They are evolving spaces that root us in reality.

This isn’t excess real estate. It’s the commons, and it’s being clear-cut from under us.

See our previous ode to the National Parks and federal land here:

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This Land Was Your Land

The Erasure Agenda: Selling, Scrubbing, and Silencing

The land isn’t the only thing being stripped. This is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to erase what cannot be sold: history, culture, truth, and memory.

In January, Trump issued executive orders targeting “divisive content” in education and federal programs. As we reported in Brainwashing 101: Trump’s Plan to Rewrite American History, these orders reinstated the 1776 Commission, banned discussions of systemic racism or gender identity in classrooms, and threatened schools with funding cuts for teaching anything that acknowledges oppression.

By spring, the erasure went visual. In May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered all federal monuments and park sites to install signs urging visitors to report content they believe paints Americans in a negative light. These QR-coded placards now stand next to some of our nation’s most painful truths, asking people to flag what makes them uncomfortable, as though history should comfort the privileged before it teaches the truth.

Sites now under “internal review” for “unpatriotic content” include:

• The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument

• Manzanar and other WWII internment sites

• Civil Rights landmarks and LGBTQ+ heritage sites like Stonewall

See our reporting on the education executive order here:

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Brainwashing 101: Trump’s Plan to Rewrite American History

They don’t want to teach history. They want to manage nostalgia. This policy isn’t about education, but rather memory control.

Nowhere is the erasure more violent than in Indian Country.

Erasure by Design: The Indigenous Frontline

In Columbus, Cuts, and the Continued Erasure of Indigenous America, we documented how the Trump administration has gutted protections for tribal education, housing, health, and environmental sovereignty:

• Over $900 million in proposed cuts to Indigenous services

• Oak Flat handed to a mining company despite tribal resistance

• Pages honoring Navajo Code Talkers deleted as “diversity content”

• Tribal colleges, climate programs, and language schools defunded

This isn’t policy neglect. It’s a calculated campaign to erase Indigenous presence and power, culturally, legally, and physically.

The land they haven’t sold, they’ve desecrated. The history they can’t deny, they whitewash. The communities they can’t silence, they defund.

“They want our ceremonies, but not our sovereignty.” — Cutcha Risling Baldy

See that article here:

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Columbus, Cuts, and the Continued Erasure of Indigenous America

Teddy Roosevelt & The Warning We Ignored

“Of all the questions which can come before this nation… there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t just a president; he was the architect of the American conservation ethic. A Republican, a veteran, and a hunter, he created 150 national forests, five national parks, and 51 federal bird reserves. His mission wasn’t nostalgia but rather national survival.

He saw what was coming: a country so consumed by profit that it would chew through its forests, strip its mountains, poison its rivers, and call it progress.

“The time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted…” he said.

This wasn’t hypothetical. It was a moral warning, and it echoes louder than ever as public land is auctioned to corporations, sacred sites are leveled for copper, and the very rangers Roosevelt empowered are fired in the name of “efficiency.”

We are the silver spoon heirs of a legacy he built, and we’re burning the inheritance.

He’d be horrified, not just by what we’re losing, but by how willfully we’ve forgotten what we were entrusted to protect.

The Fight for What Remains

They are selling what should be sacred. They are rewriting what should be remembered. They are gutting the very institutions meant to protect the people, the land, and the truth.

This isn’t just bad policy. It’s an ideological purge, a war on the commons, on history, on anything that reminds us of who we are and what we owe to one another.

But here’s what they always underestimate: We remember. We fight back. And we protect what protects us.

Public land is more than property. It is promise, the idea that something in this country can still belong to all of us.

Let’s keep that promise.

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What You Can Do

• Call your members of Congress.
  Demand they remove the land sale from the final version of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Ask them to restore funding to the National Park Service, tribal programs, and educational institutions.

  Use this sample script:
  "I’m a constituent and I oppose the public land sale buried in the budget. These lands are ecologically vital and culturally sacred. I also urge you to support restoration of funding to national parks, Indigenous services, and truth‑based education."

• Support the watchdogs.
  Follow and donate to groups like

  • Alt National Parks,

  • The National Parks Conservation Association,

  • and Indigenous-led efforts like Apache Stronghold.

• Spread the word.
  Share this article. Post screenshots of your favorite park signs before they’re scrubbed. Talk to friends and family about what’s at stake. Memory is power. Use it.

• Visit the places they want forgotten.
  Go to Manzanar. Visit Bears Ears. Walk Selma. Let the land and the stories anchor you in what’s real and worth defending.

• And when you see those QR codes asking you to report “unpatriotic content”? Use them.
  Tell the Department of the Interior that censoring history is un‑American.
  That scrubbing the truth is not patriotism; it’s propaganda.

  If they want a report, give them one. Loudly. Proudly. Truthfully.

They thought the parks would go quiet.
They thought the people would forget.
But the land remembers, and so do we.

Bibliography:

• Hall, Travis. “Senate Bill’s Public Land Sell-Off Proposal Balloons to More Than 250 Million Acres.” Field & Stream, June 18, 2025.

• “Controversial senator trying to sell millions of acres near Yosemite, Tahoe.” SFGate, June 17, 2025.

• “250+ Million Acres of Public Lands Eligible for Sale in SENR Bill.” The Wilderness Society, June 13, 2025.

• “Public Lands for Sale: Outdoor Alliance Map Shows the Extent of Sell‑Offs.” Outdoor Alliance, June 16, 2025.

• “What To Know About the Senate’s Public Lands Sell-Off.” Center for American Progress, June 18, 2025.

• “Policy Update – Senate proposes 3 million acres in public land sales.” Glacier Two Medicine Alliance, June 17, 2025.

• Richards, Heather. “Burgum orders signs to flag ‘negative’ depictions of history at national parks.” E&E News, May 22, 2025.

• “Interior Secretary Orders National Parks to Ask Visitors to Report Negative Depictions of U.S. History.” National Parks Traveler, May 2025.

• “Texans now able to flag ‘negative’ history displayed at national parks.” Houston Chronicle, June 2025.

• “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” Federal Register (EO 14151), January 20, 2025.

• “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K‑12 Schooling.” Federal Register (EO 14190), January 29, 2025.

• “‘Patriotic education’: Trump orders federal push to monitor K‑12 curriculum.” 19th News, January 2025.

• “Trump issues orders on K‑12 ‘indoctrination,’ school choice and campus protests.” Politico, January 29, 2025.

• “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History (EO 14253).” Federal Register, April 3, 2025.

• “National monument honoring Emmett Till at risk of removal from ...” CBC News, June 2025.

• Roosevelt, Theodore. “Conservation as a National Duty” (speech, July 7, 1907). In Voices of Democracy, University of Maryland.

• Theodore Roosevelt. Quoted in National Park Service, “Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation,” last updated April 2017.