>>1741767not all of federal land is composed of untouched national parks anon. in fact a large amount of it is land leased to private companies to gather raw resources via logging/mining (this is usually done via the BLM or USFS). As far as I know the only "untouched" or otherwise virgin lands are owned by the national parks service which only owns the light green in this map
>>1742201the reason there are no hypothetical passengers is because it's almost a legal impossibility to live on federal land. It could even be argued that the us federal government in its refusal to give federal land to the westernmost states is what led to these states having such a low population density outside of the coastal regions (which are natural environments of human settlement).
It's always a possibility that keeping human development down in the west is better for nature but we'd need to see the NPS (national park service) gain a lot of land to make the nature preservation argument
