Water, the Public Trust, and Where the Forest Service Belongs

The case for Missoula, and the case against Salt Lake City. 

                                                         Missoula, Montana (2013)

I wrote last week about why the U.S. Forest Service should not be moved to Salt Lake City, and why the existing nine-region structure should be kept and tightened rather than dissolved. That post focused on the agency’s field organization. This one goes deeper, to the value the field organization exists to protect.

The single most important value of the National Forest System is permanence — the simple fact that 193 million acres of land remain in public ownership, in perpetuity, held in trust for citizens not yet born. Everything else the system provides depends on that prior fact. If the land leaves federal ownership, the other values become contingent on whoever owns it next. If the land stays, every other value remains possible to manage for, debate over, and adjust across generations.

The second most important value, and the one with the broadest political coalition behind it, is water. The two are not separable. Water is the value that has done the most political work, historically and now, to defend permanence. It is also the value that most directly answers the Salt Lake City proposal on its own terms.

A founding mandate

When Congress passed the Forest Service Organic Administration Act in 1897, it gave the agency two founding purposes: to furnish a continuous supply of timber, and to secure favorable conditions of water flows. Those words — favorable conditions of water flows — are not decorative. They were the political coalition that built the National Forests. Pinchot leaned on water more than on timber when he made the case to Congress and to the press, because urban populations downstream were the constituency willing to fight for federal forest protection. The forests were proposed, defended, and expanded as watersheds first.

A century and a quarter later, that mandate has only deepened. The Forest Service’s own Forests to Faucets 2.0 assessment, published in 2022, finds that forest lands are the source of nearly two-thirds of surface water in the 48 contiguous states, and that more than 150 million Americans drink water that originates on forested lands. National Forest System watersheds in particular supply the headwaters for major metropolitan systems across the country — Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Atlanta, Portland, Seattle. The link between federal forest management and the tap water of ordinary Americans is not metaphorical. It is geographic, measurable, and mapped.

This is the value any reorganization of the Forest Service has to be evaluated against. Does the proposed change strengthen the agency’s capacity to deliver on its water-flows mandate, or weaken it? That is the test.

A test case in the proposed host state

Salt Lake City sits inside one of the most visible water-policy failures in the modern American West. The Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater body in the western hemisphere, has been declining for decades through upstream over-allocation of the Bear, Weber, and Jordan rivers. In November 2022 it reached its historic low of 4,188.5 feet — more than 11 feet below its long-term average and roughly 23 feet below its 1986 historic high.

Two consecutive wet winters in 2023 and 2024 brought modest recovery, but the lake’s south arm ended the 2025 water year at 4,191.1 feet — the third-lowest level recorded since 1903, and within the range Utah’s own Great Salt Lake Strike Team classifies as serious adverse effects. The same Strike Team’s 2026 report concluded that returning the lake to healthy levels by 2055 would require a sustained additional inflow of 800,000 acre-feet per year. That is a volume of water roughly equal to the annual consumption of a major American city, redirected to the lake every year for thirty years.

The consequences of the decline are not abstract. Exposed lakebed sediments contain arsenic and other heavy metals; dust storms carry that material into the airshed of the Wasatch Front, where two and a half million people live. Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah have warned that without sustained policy change, the lake could effectively collapse as a functional ecosystem within a generation. The state has begun to act — the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, the GSL 2034 charter, conservation legislation, agreements with mineral extractors — but the underlying water-rights regime that drove the depletion is still in place. Agriculture, municipal and industrial use, and mineral extraction continue to consume more water than the lake can spare.

I do not raise this to score a point. I raise it because it is direct evidence of how the political culture of the proposed host state treats water. Water in Utah is treated, by long custom and by statute, as an allocable commodity — a property right held by the user, transferable and severable from the land. That is one tradition in American water law and it is the tradition that built the Bear, Weber, and Jordan diversions. It is not the tradition that built the National Forest System.

Two traditions of water

The Forest Service’s organic mandate sits inside a different tradition: the public trust doctrine. The doctrine traces back through the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1892 decision in Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois — holding that certain natural resources are held by the state in trust for the public and cannot be alienated to private interests — and was given its modern theoretical framing in Joseph Sax’s 1970 Michigan Law Review article The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resource Law. In this tradition, water and certain other natural resources are not commodities. They are held in trust. The trustee’s obligation is intergenerational, not transactional.

The public trust tradition has been quietly reaffirmed in recent state court rulings, including the Montana Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Held v. Montana, which upheld a constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment and the public-trust character of the state’s natural resources. That decision is the most recent significant restatement of a doctrine that has been part of American law for more than a century. It is the legal expression of what Pinchot meant by favorable conditions of water flows: water held for the public, across generations, not for the highest bidder this year.

These two traditions — water as commodity and water as trust — are not abstract differences in legal philosophy. They produce different decisions about diversions, different decisions about reservoir releases, different decisions about minimum flows for fish and for downstream communities, different decisions about who pays when an aquifer runs dry. An agency centered in a state that has lived inside the commodity tradition will absorb that tradition’s assumptions. An agency centered in a state that has reaffirmed the trust tradition will absorb those.

The Forest Service’s organic mandate is on one side of this divide. The proposed host state is on the other.

Where the agency belongs

I am not opposed to a move. The Washington office handles national functions — Congress, OMB, the Department of Agriculture, tribal governments at the national scale — and those functions belong in Washington. But the agency’s operational center, if it is going to be located in any one place, should be located where it makes both ecological and political-cultural sense. There is one obvious candidate, and it is not in Utah.

Missoula, Montana, has the densest Forest Service institutional footprint of any city in the country outside Washington itself. The Aerial Fire Depot and the Missoula Smokejumper Base. The Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Fire Sciences Laboratory — the agency’s flagship fire research center, and arguably the most important fire science institution in North America. The Missoula Technology and Development Center. Region 1 headquarters. The University of Montana’s W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation. And in July of this year, the new National Forest History Museum opens on the city’s south side. If you were going to consolidate the operational center of the Forest Service somewhere, you would consolidate it where the agency already lives.

An honest objection

One honest objection to Missoula has to be acknowledged before going further. Salt Lake City International is a Delta hub with roughly twenty-eight million passengers a year, direct international service, and broad connectivity across the West and beyond. Missoula International is a small-to-medium regional airport that served about a million passengers in 2025, with direct flights to roughly fifteen domestic destinations on six airlines. For an agency whose leadership travels constantly to Washington, to other regional offices, to fire incidents, and to tribal nations across the country, that difference is real and should not be waved away.

But the comparison is not between Missoula and Salt Lake City alone. The Forest Service’s headquarters has sat in Washington for more than a century, served by Reagan, Dulles, and BWI. The baseline against which any relocation has to be evaluated is Washington, not the alternative move. Against that baseline, neither Missoula nor Salt Lake City is more convenient than where the agency currently is. The relocation itself is the disruption; the choice between destinations is a second-order question.

Within that second-order question, Missoula’s daily direct service to nine major hubs — Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City itself, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dallas–Fort Worth, Chicago O’Hare, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco — covers the agency’s actual travel pattern, which is overwhelmingly domestic and regional. The places where Salt Lake City’s hub status offers genuine advantage — international travel, premium-cabin service, Asian and European connections — are not where the Forest Service operates. And in the one area where aviation matters most to the agency’s mission, Missoula already holds a comparative advantage that Salt Lake City does not: Neptune Aviation, the country’s largest private aerial firefighting fleet, is based at Missoula International, alongside the Aerial Fire Depot and the Smokejumper Base.

Travel logistics matter. They cannot override statutory mandate. Convenience is a real consideration; the 1897 Organic Act is law.

Montana’s public-lands politics also run differently from Utah’s. The state’s lived relationship with federal lands — hunting, fishing, fire, recreation, the working ranches that border national forests — cuts across party lines in ways that shape its political culture from the ground up. The Montana Supreme Court’s recent affirmation of the public-trust character of natural resources runs in exactly the opposite direction from Utah’s litigation seeking transfer of federal public lands to state ownership. A Forest Service centered in Missoula would absorb the civic norms of a state whose courts have recently reaffirmed that public natural resources are held in trust. That is the inverse of the Salt Lake City structural problem.

There is also a symbolic dimension that should not be dismissed as sentimental. The National Forest History Museum opens this summer in Missoula. A national headquarters announcement made there, on the steps of the museum, with the full institutional history of the agency literally behind it, would say something coherent about what the agency is and why it exists. It would mark the moment as a recommitment to the founding design rather than an abandonment of it.

Keep the regions, move the headquarters honestly

My position is the same as it was last week, refined: keep the nine regional offices intact in the cities they currently occupy, leave the Albuquerque Service Center handling back-office consolidation, leave the Washington office handling national policy and congressional liaison, and if a move of the operational center is going to happen, move it to Missoula rather than to Salt Lake City. That is a reorganization that strengthens the agency’s water-flows mandate rather than betraying it.

The Forest Service was built to keep water on the land, watersheds intact, and forests in public hands across generations. A reorganization worthy of that mandate has to be evaluated against it. By that test, Salt Lake City fails. Missoula passes.

A note on sources.

Great Salt Lake elevation and inflow figures from the Utah Great Salt Lake Strike Team’s 2026 Data Report, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Utah Division of Water Resources. Drinking-water figures from the USDA Forest Service’s Forests to Faucets 2.0 assessment (Mack et al., 2022). Public trust doctrine framing from Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois (1892) and Joseph Sax, The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resource Law, 68 Mich. L. Rev. 471 (1970). Held v. Montana decided December 2024 by the Montana Supreme Court. Forest Service institutional history from Peter L. Stark’s Field Organization and Administrative History of the National Forest System. Missoula International Airport passenger and route data from the Missoula County Airport Authority and Montana Department of Transportation 2025 statistics.

Samuel Lammie is a geospatial professional (GISP) and former federal employee whose career began as a Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) Forester and volunteer firefighter on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author’s.