Voices: Utah’s public lands belong in public hands. They shouldn’t be managed in secret.

I grew up in a small house we didn’t own, on a tiny lot next to East Los Angeles. In 1953, when I was 8 years old, my family started spending two weeks each year in Sequoia National Park, five hours to the north. Those were the best weeks of my childhood. Often, we would watch the sunset sitting on the nearby glacier-polished Beetle Rock. The miracle of public lands that could be visited by a lower-income urban child became part of me.

Backpacking the 211-mile John Muir Trail through three national parks for 30 days as a 23-year-old made me wonder why loads of shrubs and grasses and flowers grew beneath aspen, but almost none below red fir. Which led to a doctorate in botany. Which threw me into a public lands issue in Oregon where I was living: the aerial spraying of herbicides on top of national forest clearcuts and the human communities beneath. An organization with which I was working developed an alternative to the spraying. It was one of the alternatives publicly considered in a subsequent environmental impact assessment — and the Forest Service selected it.

From that moment, I was hooked on the public process surrounding environmental impact statements.

The short and long of it: I have participated in public processes around national public lands management for the past 40 years. And never in those 40 years have these lands been under such incessantly emerging threats, including successive waves of crippling cuts to federal lands staff, elimination of consideration of climate change in federal land managers project decisions, and proposals for plans to sell federal public lands. Such threats are alive in Utah.

Since 2003, I have lived in Castle Valley, across the Colorado River from Arches National Park. As visitation to Arches nearly doubled during the 20 years after I arrived, the park expanded parking lots and pullouts. It wasn’t enough to end the long, time-wasting entry lines, frustrating searches for a parking spot or temporary closures when parking lots were full. The park gathered input on potential solutions through public meetings; online comment periods; visitor surveys; and conversations between park staff and local stakeholders: businesses, residents and government officials. It worked: Lines to enter the park got shorter, parking spots became easier to find, there were fewer closures.

But, recently, the Arches public processes, pilot program revisions and waiting-time reduction success have been upended — first, by a 4-3 vote on the Grand County Commission to send an access alternative to the park. This plan of unclear authorship would replace timed entry with expanded road, parking lot and trail access for more visitors to the park.

A Grand County Commissioner also presented this alternative at a Dec. 1, 2025 meeting convened by the State of Utah. Attended by some Department of Interior and State of Utah appointees and some Utah county commissioners, the stated purpose of the meeting was to “improve the coordination between the State of Utah and the National Parks [sic] Service . . . ultimately charting a path forward that benefits local communities while also achieving the goals of DOI and President Trump’s agenda.” National Park Service managers spent the day listening to plans for increasing visitation that had been devised by others without park or public input for the unit they manage by statute.

Three days later, on Dec. 4, park officials revealed to the interagency Canyon Country Partnership that plans for any 2026 timed entry program are now “under development.”

But this is all bigger than the issue of whether Arches National Park will be allowed to manage crowding through advance registration. It’s bigger than whether any national park managers will be permitted to enact the National Park System’s 109-year old purpose to conserve the national parks’ wildlife, scenery and natural and historical objects “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” It’s really about whether national public lands — such as national parks — will remain in the nation’s public hands. Or in the hands of local counties who regard their adjacent national park as a cash cow. Or in the hands of states who resent that national public lands in their midst are managed nationally by public processes they don’t control. Or even in the hands of an administration that is fundamentally transactional and anti-public-process.

If beloved national parks are going to be conserved for future generations — including lower-income children living in East Los Angeles — public participation is a requirement. We need transparency; robust discussion of the meaning of “unimpaired;” and publicly-developed, publicly-reviewed alternatives for conserving wild life, cultural sites, scenery and appropriate access.

And if that public participation isn’t invited, the public should find ways to participate anyway.

Mary O’Brien is a botanist living in Castle Valley, Utah. She is Executive Director of Project Eleven Hundred, which is working to end the permitting of (exotic) honey bee apiaries amid native bees on federal public lands.

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