If your roof leaks, you fix your roof. You don’t burn down the house.

Decades ago, Congress told the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to prepare management plans for the lands charged to their care. Agencies spent years developing and then updating those plans — a process involving extensive input from states, tribes, industry, environmentalists and the public. No one got everything they want, which is how compromises go.

But this Congress couldn’t palate some of those compromises, and instead of telling the BLM and Forest Service to fix specific plan provisions, Congress did what none before had done, it set fire to the offending plans.

But it’s much worse than that.

In using the Congressional Review Act to repeal individual plans, Congress inadvertently set ablaze the entire public land planning landscape.

The CRA is a 1996 law requiring agencies to submit rules to Congress before those rules can take effect. Failure to submit a rule is fatal and makes a rule unenforceable. Congress broke with 30 years of practice by, for the first time, holding that plans are “rules.” It then passed resolutions to repeal several plans, which the president signed into law, eliminating management standards covering millions of acres of public lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

By declaring land management plans to be rules, Congress and the president required that all such plans must be submitted to Congress before they can take effect, and therein lies the rub. No management plan issued in the 30 years following the CRA’s passage was submitted to Congress — and there are hundreds of such plans, including 25 BLM post-1996 plans governing management of lands within Utah.

Law professors from across the country told Congress that demolishing land management plans would spawn massively disruptive litigation. The timber industry, oil and gas industry, tribal governments and conservation organizations all did the same.

Sadly, those predictions came true June 24 when environmentalists in Oregon filed suit to stop a logging project. Cascadia Wildlands makes a simple argument: The CRA bars rules from taking effect unless they are first submitted to Congress. Land management plans are rules and therefore cannot take effect unless first submitted to Congress. The BLM issued the Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan in 2016 but did not submit it to Congress. The management plan is therefore invalid and unenforceable. Federal law requires that all “resource management authorizations and actions ... shall conform to the approved plan.” The Aloha Trout Forest Management Project was authorized pursuant to the Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan. Because the plan is invalid, so too is the timber sale, and federal courts must step in to stop the unlawful sale.

Cascadia Wildlands’ legal argument applies equally to authorizations involving vast tracts of national forests, national parks, national wildlife refuges and BLM managed public land nationwide, all of which are managed subject to plans that were never submitted to Congress. Logging projects are in question, but so are wildfire mitigation projects and permits to cut Christmas trees from national forests. The BLM has issued almost 10,000 to drill oil and gas wells on public lands, the majority of which (including over 800 wells in Utah) were likely issued based on potentially invalid management plans. The 166 rights-of-way for solar and wind projects on BLM Lands (including eight in Utah) are also now vulnerable to challenge, as are protective designations for sensitive areas like the 84 Areas of Critical Environmental Concern and Research Natural Area in Utah. And then there are the 120 or so ski areas operating on lands leased from the U.S. Forest Service, including six here in Utah. If it happens on public lands and requires federal authorization, it is now likely vulnerable to a legal challenge like the one filed in Oregon.

Reasonable people can disagree about how best to manage our public lands, but burning down the rules makes the problem worse, not better. “Lord of the Flies” ended when, after a descent into lawlessness and a devastating conflagration, sailors saw smoke and rescued the island’s inhabitants. Let’s hope we are as lucky.

Unlike the boys marooned on an island, Congress can rescue itself and all of us who care about public lands. Congress needs to first stop using the CRA and reinstate the revoked plans. They may not be perfect, but they are better than the alternative, and they create the certainty that industry and recreationists deserve. Congress then needs to repeal the Act.

This is not a partisan issue; this is about good governance.

John Ruple is a Research Professor of Law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law where he directs the Law and Policy Program for the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment. He has almost 30 years of experience with federal public land management, including serving a Republican Governor and Democratic President. He is writing in his personal capacity.

The Salt Lake Tribune is committed to creating a space where Utahns can share ideas, perspectives and solutions that move our state forward. We rely on your insight to do this. Find out how to share your opinion here, and email us at voices@sltrib.com.