Why Don’t Environmentalists Just Buy the Land They Want To Protect? Because It’s Against the Rules.

STOP ME IF you’ve heard this one before: An environmentalist walks into a federal auction and buys up the drilling rights to thousands of acres of public lands. But instead of developing the leases, he decides to keep the oil and gas in the ground, because to him the landscape is more valuable conserved than developed.

Funny, right?

Anyone who follows environmental politics knows that environmentalists have a reputation for being more likely to lobby, litigate, or regulate than to simply pay for what they want to protect. Yet when Tim DeChristopher went to protest an energy lease auction by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2008, he tried the more direct approach. DeChristopher walked into the lease sale in Salt Lake City and ended up outbidding developers for more than 22,000 acres of drilling rights on public lands near Moab, Utah. His reward for winning: a prison sentence.

DeChristopher didn’t exactly bid in good faith. As a college student at the time, he went to the auction expecting to join a group of other protesters. But when he arrived, the auctioneers asked if he was there to bid.

“They said, ‘Are you here to be a bidder?’” DeChristopher later recounted. “And I said, ‘Well, yes, I am.’” They handed him a bidder’s paddle, and once the auction began, he started bidding for leases. The prices varied. One sold for $500, or just $2.25 per acre. Another for a mere $77. Others went for much more. Soon, DeChristopher won the drilling rights to 14 parcels for a total of $1.8 million—money he didn’t have and had no intention of paying.

Auction officials eventually caught on to DeChristopher’s bogus bids, and he was arrested and later sentenced to two years in prison for making false statements and interfering with a federal lease auction. And while DeChristopher became an environmental folk hero for monkey wrenching the process, the event raised a question: Why don’t environmentalists just bid for leases on public land?

The answer, it turns out, is complicated. Technically, any U.S. citizen can bid for and hold leases for energy, grazing, or timber resources