The Most Patriotic Thing on the Ballot

You don't have to wait for an election to find out who's defending the land you own.

There’s an old idea, older than the parties, older than most of the arguments we have about them, that some things belong to all of us. Not to the government, not to a company, to us. The canyon you’ve never seen still belongs to you. So does the river three states over, and the stand of old growth you’ll never walk through, and the desert that goes orange an hour before anyone’s awake to watch it.

That’s the strange and radical thing about American public land. A barista in Oregon and a schoolteacher in Georgia own the same mountains. There’s no other inheritance quite like it on earth.

This week, six states voted. Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania. People got up early, stood in line, and made their choices. Some of them were thinking hard about the economy, about immigration, about the things that lead the news. Not enough of them were thinking about who would defend the land they hold in common.

Not because they don’t care. Because nobody ever handed them the rec…