On The Meaning of Public Lands

A reminder of what’s ours, and what’s being taken.

Your land in rural South Dakota

If you’re an American citizen, Yosemite National Park belongs to you. El Capitan, the valley floor, the waterfalls, the Mariposa Grove, they’re yours. You also own the Grand Canyon. You own the trail you hiked last fall, the lake you paddled as a kid, the red rock vista that took your breath away. You own them in exactly the same way every other citizen does. And no one owns a greater share than you. Not Exxon. Not the White House. Not Elon Musk.

That’s what “public land” means. It belongs to the public. It belongs to you.

But we don’t talk about it like that. Somewhere along the way, the phrase “public lands” got flattened into something bureaucratic, a label on a map, a line in a budget. People hear it and think: that’s government land. Federal land. Someone else’s land. Somewhere out there.

We go to national parks and pay our entrance fee like customers, forgetting we’re also the landlords. We see oil rigs and mining operations on public land and assume the companies own it, but they don’t. They’re leasing it from you. You own the ground beneath those drills more than they do.

It’s one of the most quietly revolutionary ideas this country has ever had. That the most beautiful, awe-inspiring, life-giving parts of the nation should be set aside, not for profit, not for kings, not for corporations, but for everyone. For all time.

We created the world’s first national park system. We invented the very idea of large-scale public conservation. We showed the world that a canyon or a mountain range could be more valuable left untouched than mined, dammed, or logged. That awe has worth. That wonder has value. That some things are sacred simply because they exist.

And the world noticed. Today, our public lands are the envy of the planet. Foreign visitors spend thousands of dollars and fly halfway across the globe to stand in silence beneath the granite walls of Yosemite. To gaze out across the Grand Canyon, unmarred by billboards or condos. To hike through the red rock cathedrals of Utah and marvel that they’ve been preserved for their own sake, not parceled off to the highest bidder.

It’s easy to take it for granted. But imagine what this country would look like without it.

Imagine if we had paved every valley. If we had clear-cut every forest. If every mountaintop had been leveled for ore and every river dammed for profit. We came close. But we didn’t. Because we had laws. Because we had people who fought for them. Because we had an ethic, a shared understanding that conservation wasn’t just about nature. It was about who we are.

And yes, many of our public lands aren’t parks or wilderness, and that’s fine. Some of them can be used. They can be leased for things that make sense and serve a real need. But they’re still public. They still belong to us and are there to serve our collective interests. And any use should leave the land intact, not degraded or destroyed.

Because here, we don’t just build roads wherever we want. We first ask what they’ll destroy. We don’t just approve mines because someone’s in a hurry to cash in. We ask if they belong there at all. We don’t recklessly log our forests or poison our rivers just because it’s profitable. We weigh the cost. We consider the harm. Because somewhere deep in our national DNA is the belief that not everything should be up for grabs.

Because we understand, or at least we used to, that there’s a different kind of wealth in this country. A deeper kind. Not measured in board feet or barrels or dollars, but in quiet. In majesty. In a trail through the woods. In a river left to run. In the kind of beauty that humbles you.

That’s what public lands are. They’re a covenant. A promise across generations. A declaration that some things are too important to sell.

And that’s what’s being erased and forgotten.

The Very Idea of Public Land is Under Attack

Bit by bit, the soul of the public estate is being stripped away. Not with bulldozers, not yet, but with memos. With fine print. With signatures behind closed doors. They’re hollowing out the laws, the agencies, the protections. Gutting environmental review. Slashing public input. Declaring sacred places “excess.” Fast-tracking destruction while the rest of us are still reading the headline.

No time to object. No one to listen. No need to explain. Just a frenzied race to dig, drill, and take before anyone can stop them.

And maybe the most disturbing part? They’ve stopped pretending it’s for the public good.

They call it “efficiency.” They call it “unlocking value.” But what they mean is unlocking it for them, the lobbyists, the developers, the billionaires who’ve always seen public lands not as sacred, but as a missed opportunity to turn beauty into profit.

You can hear it in their language, all those acres ‘locked away,’ they say. Locked away from what? From oil wells? From chainsaws? From mines? From condos and golf courses and whatever else they think makes land “useful”?

These places weren’t locked away. They were set free. Free to be forests and rivers and silence and sky. And they were set free for you.

So the next time you step onto a trail, or paddle across a lake, or stand on a cliff edge and feel the hush of something ancient, don’t forget who it belongs to. It’s yours.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Legally. Literally. Yours.

And if you don’t claim that ownership, if we don’t defend what’s ours, someone else will take it. They already are.

Because public lands aren’t just land. They’re proof that we once believed in something bigger than profit. They’re proof that we were capable of restraint. Of care. Of imagining a future we wouldn’t live to see and protecting it anyway.

That’s what made America different. That’s what made us the envy of the world.

And if we lose that now, we won’t just be losing parks and forests and rivers.

We’ll be losing who we are.

---