More than 60% of Idaho is public land. That number is easy to say and hard to fully absorb until you’re standing in the middle of it, watching elk move through a meadow at dusk or listening to a river you’ve had entirely to yourself all day. On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist brought together two of the state’s most knowledgeable public lands advocates to talk about what that land means, why it’s under pressure, and what it’s going to take to protect it for future generations.

His guests were Nick Fasciano, executive director of the Idaho Wildlife Federation, who came to conservation through hunting after a career in venture capital and private equity, and Dan Waugh, executive director of the Idaho Recreation Council, a decorated military veteran and lifelong Idaho outdoorsman who now advocates for recreational access across the full spectrum of outdoor users. The conversation covered a lot of ground, from the recent national debate over selling federal lands to the economics of wildfire, the decline of rural timber communities, and the surprising political unity that public lands tend to produce when they’re genuinely threatened.

What’s Actually at Stake

Idaho’s public land footprint is staggering: roughly 20 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, another 12 million under the Bureau of Land Management, and an additional 2.5 million acres of state endowment land. Only Utah, Nevada, and Alaska have a higher percentage of public land. And that land drives an outdoor recreation economy that generates somewhere between $4 billion and $7 billion annually for the state, depending on how you count it.

That economic reality was front of mind during the national debate last summer, when federal budget reconciliation discussions included a proposal to sell or dispose of anywhere from half a million to potentially three million acres of public land. The response was swift and unusually bipartisan. Hunters, anglers, hikers, snowmobilers, conservationists, and motorized recreation users, groups that frequently disagree with each other on management issues, came together in near-unanimous opposition.

“Everyone stood in opposition,” Ahlquist noted. “You have conservationists at the table with hunting, fishing, outdoorsmen, snowmobilers, everything, and everyone’s saying don’t do this.”

Fasciano framed the history: the United States has been gradually reducing its public land holdings since the founding, through mechanisms like the Homestead Act and state statehood transfers. It wasn’t until 1976 that federal policy shifted to holding the remaining roughly 640 million acres in perpetuity. The proposal last summer was the latest in a long series of challenges to that policy, and it won’t be the last.

The Funding Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

The pushback against selling public lands was real and effective, but both guests were clear that the frustrations driving those proposals aren’t coming from nowhere. They reflect genuine, structural problems that have been building for decades.

The most immediate is the financial reality facing the Forest Service and BLM. The Forest Service alone was reportedly more than a billion dollars in the hole last year on operations alone, not counting hundreds of billions in deferred maintenance. Rural counties where federal land comprises the vast majority of the acreage, like Custer County, where just 158,000 of 3.1 million total acres are privately owned, have almost no property tax base to fund roads, schools, emergency services, or law enforcement.

Federal payments in lieu of taxes, known as PILT, were designed to offset this, but those payments are perpetually contested and uncertain. And as more people from out of state pour into Idaho to recreate, the strain on rural county services grows while the revenue to support those services doesn’t.

Waugh was direct about the long-term implication: “We have to keep our public lands public and manage them in a way where at least we’re breaking even. Otherwise the threat of sales will always be there. It’s always looming.”

How Wildfires Got So Expensive

The fire management conversation is closely tied to the funding crisis. A combination of decades of regulatory constraints, reduced timber harvesting, and a “let it burn” management philosophy created conditions where catastrophic wildfires are now a multi-billion dollar annual reality. The fuel loads that once would have been thinned through active forest management, controlled burns, or timber harvest have accumulated to the point where fires burn hotter, spread faster, and cost far more to fight.

Fasciano was careful not to reduce the issue to a single cause: mill technology, pricing, and regulatory constraints all contributed to the decline of the timber industry in rural Idaho. But the consequences are visible. Timber mills that once anchored small communities, generating jobs and tax revenue in places that have few other economic engines, are largely gone. The Forest Service is now spending at a scale that strains its budget every year just on fire suppression, with little left for the forest health work that would reduce fire risk in the first place.

The long-term answer, both guests suggested, involves some combination of active mechanical thinning, responsibly managed harvest, and a recognition that healthy forests actually support wildlife habitat better than overgrown ones. Deer and elk are early successional species; they thrive in the new growth that follows disturbance, not in dense old-growth stands. Active management isn’t anti-conservation. Done well, it’s what conservation actually looks like on the ground.

Hunting, Fishing, and the Conservation Model That Works

One of the most compelling threads in the conversation is the relationship between hunting, fishing, and conservation funding. The North American model of wildlife management, where hunters and anglers pay into the system through licenses and excise taxes on equipment, has funded the greatest wildlife recovery in the modern world. The Pittman-Robertson Act, which directs excise taxes on firearms and ammunition to state wildlife agencies, has been running for nearly a century and has helped restore species and habitat across the continent.

Fasciano described it as “conservation capitalism”: rational self-interest channeled into a system that perpetuates the resource everyone depends on. Organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Trout Unlimited, funded largely by sportsmen, have done enormous habitat work that benefits every user of public lands, not just hunters and anglers.

The irony, as Ahlquist noted, is that the people most caricatured as threats to wildlife are often its most committed stewards. “When you get to really know hunting families and legacy hunting, they’re probably some of our best conservationists.”

Waugh added that the outdoor recreation economy has grown to a scale, $1.2 trillion nationally last year, that demands a similar funding model for the users who currently pay nothing into the system. Motorized recreation users in Idaho already have a working model: OHV and snowmobile stickers fund trail maintenance programs that are the envy of other states. Non-motorized users, hikers, equestrians, mountain bikers, who use three-quarters of the state’s trails, have no equivalent program and no dedicated funding mechanism. Getting that infrastructure built is one of the near-term opportunities Waugh sees for the state.

What Unity Looks Like

Perhaps the most surprising takeaway from the conversation is how much agreement exists across groups that are often assumed to be adversaries. The threat of losing public lands entirely has a way of clarifying what matters. When Fasciano and Waugh talk about the path forward, they’re not describing a world where every user group gets everything they want. They’re describing a world where everyone comes to the table, has hard conversations, and finds the compromises that keep the land public and the access open.

“We have to keep our horse blinders off,” Waugh said. “We have to come to the table with unique ideas to make this work.”

For anyone who grew up in Idaho or has spent real time in the backcountry, that’s not an abstract argument. It’s about whether the places that shaped who we are will still be there for the people coming after us.

As Ahlquist put it, standing in the Payette River corridor with his grandkids recently: “I want their kids to experience this. That’s why you love the country.”