The Clerk in Cleveland Owns Your Backyard

Proximity isn’t a property line. A federal acre in Oregon belongs to a line cook in Cleveland exactly as much as it belongs to me.

There’s a comment I get every time I write about a fight over a piece of land out West. It comes from someone who lives near that land, and it goes something like this. You don’t get a say. You don’t live here. This is our backyard, not yours.

I understand the feeling behind it. I really do. I’m an Oregonian. The Wallowas, Hells Canyon, the Oregon Dunes, Waldo Lake, Owyhee canyonlands, the trail up to Ramona Falls, these are the places that I love dearly. I’ve spent more nights on that ground than most people will spend in a lifetime. When somebody who’s never set foot in these places weighs in on what happens to it, part of me wants to say the same thing. Where were you. What do you know about this place.

But the feeling is wrong. And it’s worth being honest about why, because the “this is our backyard” argument is the friendly, reasonable-sounding cousin of a much uglier idea.

It’s the idea that public land has a rightful local owner and that everyone else is a guest.

That idea is false…