The Washington Times uses bogus numbers to misrepresent 30x30
How much of America is really protected?
The Washington Times on Wednesday published an opinion piece by a conservative disinformation peddler that uses incorrect numbers in a clumsy attempt to discredit the Biden administration’s America the Beautiful plan to protect 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030.
The article’s entire argument (PDF archive) is based on this claim:
According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gap Analysis Project on the Protected Areas Database of the U.S., the total amount of land in the U.S. amounts to 622,630,476 acres, of which 252,758,091 are already protected from human activity. When calculated, that number rounds out to a whopping 40.6% — not 12% — of lands closed off to multiple-use.
That paragraph is false.
Data for the USGS GAP Analysis Project is publicly available. The relevant spreadsheet is the first download on that page and is also archived here. The second tab of the spreadsheet shows there are 2.4 billion acres of land in the United States and its territories. Of that 2.4 billion, 316 million acres are protected from extractive uses such as mining and drilling.
In other words, 13% of the U.S. is currently protected, not the 40.6% that the article falsely claims.
The writer of the op-ed, Gabriella Hoffman, is misleading readers about the difference between total acres in the U.S. and its territories, and public land that is owned by the American people. There are roughly 622 million acres of land managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service — which is the number Hoffman incorrectly cites as the size of the entire United States. Of those, 252 million acres are managed primarily for conservation and recreation. Hoffman previously cited this data correctly, which makes her Washington Times op-ed appear to be an intentional misrepresentation of the facts.
But the 30x30 effort has never been about protecting a subset of national public lands. In fact, some of the most biodiverse areas of the country are on state, local, and private land, especially in the American Southeast. That’s why the Biden administration’s America the Beautiful initiative made it clear that the path to protecting 30 percent of our lands and waters depends on voluntary conservation efforts across the entire country, not just on national public lands.
Because Hoffman’s opinion piece willfully uses false numbers to make its central argument, The Washington Times must immediately retract the article.
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