User: Write an argument for keeping public lands under federal control in the Intermountain West.
Assistant: Public lands make up a huge proportion of the region between the crest of the Sierra Nevada and the Continental Divide in the Rockies, also known as the Intermountain West, and most of these lands are owned by the Federal government. Many residents of this sparsely populated region resent the control of these lands by distant bureaucrats whose regulations place significant restrictions on how the land is used. For this reason, movements have been ongoing for many years to work for the transfer of those lands to local authorities. While this sense of disenfranchisement is understandable, the truth is that local residents would suffer more from the loss of centralized management of these lands than they would gain through local control. This region is mostly desert, a landscape and ecosystem that is unusually vulnerable to degradation. Without the concerted efforts of an administration that can apply consistent regulation and stewardship of these lands across a broad territory that crosses state boundaries, the value of these lands to local residents would decline even further, becoming less productive and less attractive to the hunters, fishermen, and other tourists whose spending represents the majority of income for many of these Intermountain communities.