Conservation Isn’t a Land Use — It’s a Responsibility

By Tom Opre

The U.S. Department of the Interior wants to classify “conservation” as a formal use of public land. Under a recent Bureau of Land Management rule, corporations and NGOs could lease federal ground not to graze cattle, harvest timber, or manage wildlife—but to do nothing at all. They’d call it restoration. Bureaucrats call it progress. Anyone who’s lived close to the land knows it’s neither.

Conservation isn’t a use. It’s a responsibility—the ongoing act of caring for land so that it continues to provide for both people and wildlife. Turning it into a legal category breaks that connection between stewardship and productivity. It turns a verb into a commodity.

The danger isn’t theoretical. Once “non-use” becomes a recognized “use,” the door opens for those with money and ideology to close public lands to the very communities that have sustained them for generations. That isn’t conservation; it’s the abandonment of stewardship disguised as virtue.

The Paper Theory vs. the Dirt Reality

For nearly 150 years, America’s public lands have been guided by a simple idea—multiple use and sustained yield. Grazing, forestry, energy, habitat, recreation: each belongs, provided the land is used wisely and renewed. It’s a messy, hands-on philosophy that demands work, compromise, and local knowledge.

The new rule tries to sanitize that complexity. It allows outside groups to lease land for “conservation,” effectively paying for the right to influence how it’s managed. In some cases, that could mean positive action—habitat restoration, prescribed burning, or selective logging to enhance ecological health. Those tools can and should be part of good stewardship. But the problem lies in intent. Too often, “conservation” becomes a bureaucratic shield for preservation—for locking up the land, restricting use, and celebrating absence as progress.

When that happens, the multiple-use foundation crumbles. Conservation isn’t the opposite of use; it’s what responsible use should produce.

What Happens When People Walk Away

I’ve seen where this road leads. In the Scottish Highlands, preservationist groups like the John Muir Trust and Trees for Life have taken vast estates and turned them into ideological experiments in “rewilding.” They plant non-native trees, build exclusion fences, and celebrate the return of a wilderness that never truly existed. But they’re not restoring the land—they’re rewriting it.

These organizations are not conservationists in the true sense of the word. They are preservationists—people who believe nature is healthiest when people are not impacting the land by managing it for their own use. Yet their entire philosophy merely replaces one set of human value judgments with another. Every tree they plant, every fence they build, every cull they authorize reflects a human choice about what the land should be. In the end, it’s still human management—just driven by ideology instead of experience.

In their pursuit of this imagined purity, they’ve destroyed the very upland heather moorlands that once sustained red grouse, golden plover, curlew, and countless other species. Red deer, the heartbeat of the Highlands, are being shot down to near elimination to meet arbitrary “density targets.” The professional stalkers and keepers who balanced those herds for centuries have been driven off the land. Without their management, the heather gives way to scrub and tree seedlings, choking out the ground-nesting birds that defined the ecosystem.

If this continues, the red grouse—the emblem bird of the Highlands—will almost certainly land on the IUCN Red List within a decade. The moors will no longer echo with their flight calls. The hills will fall silent. What remains won’t be wilderness; it’ll be vacancy—a museum diorama curated by outsiders who mistake desolation for restoration.

Preservationists celebrate absence as success. But absence is not balance. It’s death by neglect.

The American Parallel

In my travels across Montana, I see what real conservation looks like. Elk and whitetail deer graze beside cattle. Turkeys nest along creeks managed for wildlife. Forests regenerate where people thin old growth, clear deadfall, and use prescribed fire to keep the land healthy. That’s conservation—hands in the dirt, eyes on the land, constant care and adjustment.

Every decision is a balancing act. Too much grazing and the grass disappears. Too little, and it chokes itself out and fuels catastrophic fire. Real conservation is an art, not a checkbox. It demands presence, knowledge, and humility—the understanding that people are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it.

The new federal policy threatens to sever that relationship. It shifts control from those who know the land to those who only visit it. It gives distant organizations the authority to “manage” land according to ideology rather than ecology. The result could be fewer ranching families, fewer wildlife managers, and fewer working landscapes. The land might appear protected on paper, but without active stewardship, it risks quiet decline.

The Myth of Non-Use

Preservationists sell the idea that nature thrives when untouched. It’s an appealing narrative for city audiences who rarely walk a fenceline or burn a field. But ecosystems are dynamic; they depend on disturbance. Fire, grazing, flooding, and harvest are not threats to nature—they’re its rhythm.

The notion of locking land away from use is born from guilt, not science. It comes from the same mindset that created sterile “rewilded” estates in Scotland: the belief that people and wildlife cannot coexist. Yet everywhere I’ve filmed—from Zambia to Wyoming to the Yukon—I’ve seen that coexistence is the only path forward. When rural communities benefit from conservation, the land thrives. When they’re excluded, the land suffers.

You can’t save nature by removing humanity. You save it by aligning human needs with ecological health. That’s the foundation of sustainable use. That’s what Roosevelt meant by “wise use” and what Leopold called the “land ethic.”

The Price of Forgetting

Once people are pushed off the land, the knowledge that sustained it disappears with them. You can’t replace a gamekeeper’s instincts or a rancher’s sense of seasons with a management plan written in Washington or Edinburgh. Bureaucracy can measure outcomes, but it can’t see the subtle signs of a landscape in balance—the weight of the grass, the timing of a hatch, the color of new growth after a burn.

In the Highlands, that loss is already visible. The old keepers’ cottages stand empty. The hillsides once blanketed in heather are now cloaked in thick spruce monocultures where little else survives. When the heather is shaded out, the peat—one of the world’s most effective natural carbon sinks—dries and collapses, releasing its stored CO₂ back into the atmosphere. These dense plantations have become the only refuge for predators, which use them as cover to venture into the open hills and take down the remaining wildlife. What was once a living landscape has become an ecological contradiction—sold as climate action while quietly undoing everything it claims to protect.

The same fate awaits the American West if policy continues to favor preservation over management. When the people go, the land goes quiet.

Reclaiming Conservation

Real conservation is not passive. It’s earned through constant work—herding, thinning, burning, harvesting, watching, learning. It’s the act of living with the land, not retreating from it.

If we allow “conservation use” to become law, we invite the same hollow victory that has overtaken the Highlands. We’ll have miles of fenced-off “protected” ground, endless reports of “carbon capture” and “biodiversity goals,” and fewer people who know what healthy land looks like.

Conservation should be part of every management plan, not a separate category. It’s the measure of how well we manage, not an excuse to stop managing. The land doesn’t need our absence; it needs our care.

If America forgets that, our public lands will go the way of the Highlands—quiet, overgrown, and empty of both wildlife and people.

Conservation isn’t a policy. It isn’t a lease. It isn’t a theory.

It’s a responsibility—one that demands we keep our hands on the land and our hearts in the right place.

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About the Author

Tom Opre is a filmmaker and founder of the Shepherds of Wildlife Society. His films explore the intersection of human rights, wildlife management, and the future of rural communities around the world