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While California might be known as the Golden State, if you zoom out far enough on a satellite image, the state appears more green than gold. California has some of the largest and most vibrant cities in the country, but it also hosts tens of thousands of acres of incredibly diverse wilderness, from the redwoods of Northern California to the deserts of Joshua Tree. 

In fact, around half of the land in California is government-owned forest, national park or wilderness areas. These public lands are not developed or fully exploited for resource extraction; most are theoretically accessible to anyone, and they include some of the most recognizable landscapes in the world. 

In addition to serving as an incredible store of biological diversity, California’s public lands host sacred sites for the state’s many Indigenous people and provide a significant source of recreation and revenue. But with less funding in the current budget, the management of these lands is likely to change substantially, and this may have massive and unforeseen consequences for Californians. 

Funding the great outdoors

California’s vast green spaces don’t just offer leisure opportunities and benefits for the environment; they’re also a vital part of the state’s economy. California’s outdoor industry is especially important in rural areas, where jobs and investment can otherwise be hard to come by. Nationally, the outdoor industry generates $1.2 trillion in economic output. California generates about $81.5 billion each year from outdoor recreation, and the biggest contributors are boating, RVing, hunting and snow activities.

Katie Hawkins, California Program Director at the Outdoor Alliance, says that outdoor recreation is a “big tent,” and the reason for its massive economic impact is that so many Americans love the outdoors and access it in a huge variety of ways. “Because our state is vast in public lands,” Hawkins says, “a lot of people connect to nature differently, but this is why we have seen these robust numbers.” 

Outdoor recreation represents about 2.1 percent of state GDP, a little less than California’s neighbors (Nevada, for instance, generates 3.3 percent, and Oregon 2.6). Alongside this economic benefit, our green spaces capture carbon, help fight climate change and offer an intangible benefit to the millions of people who enjoy them every year. 

This impact is not just limited to California’s iconic National Parks, says Hawkins. She cites President Biden’s 2024 decision to expand Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in California to protect Molok Luyuk, which means “Condor Ridge” in the Patwin language. “It brings people from all over the country because it has some of the most robust conservation (for) land, but also migratory birds,” she says. “So you have people that go out there to go birding, (see) wildflowers and hike.” 

All of this natural beauty, she says, is in “near proximity to some of the most densely populated areas within Northern California. But it’s like this oasis.” It is not only an oasis for locals but also a significant boost to the local economy. “It’s the ripple effect,” Hawkins says; “people spending their local dollars, in the coffee shops, the cafes, the Airbnbs or the hotels.” 

Visits to public land and outdoor recreation have grown massively since 2020, when lockdowns and other pandemic protections caused a surge in interest in the outdoors. However, funding has not matched this increase in traffic. Temporary funding measures such as the Great American Outdoors Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided injections of cash for some projects, but not the permanent year on year funding that land management agencies say they need for staffing. 

The current House budget offers the Forest Service — which manages 20 percent of California’s landmass — half a billion dollars less than was asked for, leaving it looking to cut costs wherever it can. This budgetary shortfall is leaving many Californians concerned for the future of public lands in the state, as well as the outdoor recreation industry, which relies heavily on customers’ access to these lands. 

The United States Forest Service, which manages 20.8 million acres of land in California, just announced a hiring freeze for 2025. Due to budget shortfalls, the Forest Service will hire no seasonal employees other than those working as wildland firefighters. According to a written statement from the Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of outdoor advocacy organizations, “the seasonal workforce at the Forest Service does critical work to care for our national forests, from visitor services to trail maintenance to ecology to forestry work to botany.” 

Seasonal workers are particularly important for recreation — staffing campgrounds, managing trash and restrooms at trailheads, processing permits, serving as backcountry rangers and providing other critical visitor services. It’s hard to imagine the overburdened full-time staff getting out to repair trails or clean trailhead restrooms, but without these vital services, public lands become much less accessible to many people. 

Agnes Vianzon, executive director of the Eastern Sierra Conservation Corps, says that “there already is going to be irreversible damage from one summer of not having trail crews, trail maintenance.” Vianzon likened the situation to previous government shutdowns when reduced staffing led to the destruction of Joshua trees by unsupervised visitors and damage that will take centuries to recover. The damage is “already irreversible,” Vianzon says, and it is likely to get worse. 

The reduced staffing could also have trickle down effects, such as reducing the capacity of volunteer search and rescue teams, which are often comprised of seasonal employees in parks and forest areas.

Groups like the American Climate Corps, a New Deal-inspired program set up by the Biden Administration that places young people in temporary jobs and gives a pathway to federal climate-related careers, may disappear entirely, Vianzon says. 

Some public lands advocates are concerned that a second Trump administration could wind back protections for the outdoors or further cut funding to the agencies that manage them. On the campaign trail, both Trump and many congressional candidates showed a skepticism for environmental regulation and a preference for fossil fuel extraction, with Trump repeatedly using the slogan “drill, baby, drill” including in his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The current Supreme Court shares this perspective and has tended to rule against environmental protections, striking down the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emission in 2022 and generally weakening federal agencies with its decision on the Chevron Doctrine in June of 2024. 

Part of the issue, Vianzon says, is the uncertainty. With different messages coming from Trump’s appointees, the campaign and Republican politicians, “literally nobody knows,” she says. In his previous term, Trump signed laws protecting parks and funding outdoor infrastructure and maintenance, but also authorized drilling in public lands across the USA, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s likely we will see a similar mixed bag this time, and this leaves many Californians worried that their cherished outdoor spaces might be those that end up underfunded or lacking protection.  

There is, however, also cause for hope, according to Hawkins of the Outdoor Alliance. “Maybe the most historic funding legislation that passed for outdoor recreation was in 2020, and it was signed by President Trump,” Hawkins notes. The Great American Outdoors Act “included permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and it also addressed the funding for maintenance backlogs, on national parks, national forests, public lands,” she says. This piece of legislation is up for reauthorization in 2025. 

Outdoor recreation is a very broad category, as Hawkins pointed out. “It’s motorized, non-motorized, but it also can be having a picnic in a public space,” she says. This broad base of people enjoying the outdoors means lots of them are willing to advocate for it, she says. Not only people, but also local government and even business interests see value in the outdoors, Hawkins says, noting the example of Dos Rios State Park in Modesto, which has been “a partnership between private and public sector for decades.” 

Monuments at risk 

Many of California’s most iconic sites, from the Presidio of San Francisco to the giant redwoods and Joshua trees, are protected by national parks. Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president can designate historically or scientifically significant areas for special protection. Such protection preserves the sites and makes resource extraction and many other commercial activities illegal. 

In the first Trump administration, some national monuments that were designated under the act were shrunk, most notably the Bears’ Ears National Monument, and President Joe Biden re-expanded them. The incoming administration has indicated a willingness to shrink or commercialize public land, with JD Vance saying, “What Donald Trump has said is that we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything” in an October vice presidential debate. 

At particular risk would be Carrizo Plains National Monument, an area that was approved for drilling in the last Trump administration but which was spared thanks to legal challenges from the National Resources Defence Council and opposition from California representatives on both sides of the aisle. “California does not want or need to open up our most precious pieces of open space for additional oil drilling,” wrote Republican Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham in a statement in 2020. 

Currently, the state regulatory authorities remain opposed to drilling and have been issuing fewer permits each year. As long as there is no change in the Sacramento government, there is little the federal government can do to impact the state’s strategy of leaving fossil fuels in the ground. The federal government only has exclusive authority on drilling once the site is more than three miles from the California coast, and coastal drilling off California is relatively expensive and unlikely to be a major growth area.  

State legislators’ bipartisan stance against drilling in public lands demonstrates that California politics do not always reflect national politics, and that it is not always possible to predict what will happen here based on what happens in Washington. 

Hawkins believes that given the amount Californians benefit from the outdoors, people will continue to advocate for funding, as they have since 2020. “And as a constituent, my member of Congress needs to hear that. We need to properly staff our agencies, whether it’s the Forest Service, the BLM, the National Park System,” she says. “We need to be able to staff these because we have to have the quality infrastructure to welcome people to these areas.”  

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