Nailed to the Gates of Yellowstone: Ten Theses to Take Back Our Public Lands

A Citizen’s Framework to Reclaim the American Commons

They were never supposed to become profit centers.
Not the parks, not the forests, not the deserts, not the mountains.

Public lands were meant to be our inheritance – a common treasury of wildness and silence, solitude and scale.
A bulwark against the market. A chance, for once, to be citizens instead of consumers.

But they’re being taken.

The rangers are few and getting fewer.
We’re getting priced out of our lodges.
Our campgrounds are being privatized.
Our access is being gated, monetized, and funneled into third-party platforms we never asked for.

You can still find a ranger if you’re willing to look.
But their numbers are dwindling, and their reach is stretched thin.
They’re being replaced. Not by force, but by budget and policy.
Replaced by contractors in branded polos.
Where a ranger once answered your questions or carried your kid off the trail increasingly there’s a QR code in their place.
This isn’t progress. It’s retreat.
A disgraceful abandonment of the promise that these places would be…