Show Notes
Every argument for dismantling America's public lands is built to sound reasonable: we need affordable housing; the West shouldn't be run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington; public lands represent a broken promise to the states. Episode four, "The Lies," pulls those arguments apart, and asks a more consequential question: who profits when we believe them?
The episode opens with Scott Fitzwilliams, who spent his career in the U.S. Forest Service and rose to supervise Colorado's White River National Forest — the most visited in the country. He and his deputy carried more than sixty years of combined wildfire experience — knowledge that takes a career to build and cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Then came the DOGE firings: probationary employees terminated by form letter for "performance," a claim Fitzwilliams calls a bald-faced lie, just before fire season.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace how the hollowing-out of federal agencies is not an accident but a deliberate strategy. Land Tawney names the playbook — defund, dismantle, divest — and the episode follows it through Project 2025 and the budget starvation of agencies that together amount to less than a third of one percent of the federal budget. The decay that follows is easy to see: unmaintained trails, closed restrooms, expertise walking out the door for good. As Teal Lehto, Sarah Krakoff, and Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance Tania Lown-Hecht explain, an agency starved of people and funding becomes the argument for getting rid of public lands altogether.
On Common Ground: An American Inheritance tells the story of the lands that belong to all of us, and of the fight to protect them.
All six episodes available in August.
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On Common Ground: An American Inheritance is hosted by Bill Hedden and John Leshy. Produced by Sarah Hedden, Dagny Scott, and Del Feltz. Sound engineering by Joe Flood. Additional sound editing by Grace Wiley. This series is a production of Eleven Dollar Bill, and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
Correction: Episode 4 names Tania Lown-Hecht as a USFS Planner, instead of Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance. The Episode also uses a shortened version of her name "Tania Hecht," instead of her full name, "Tania Lown-Hecht."
More from On Common Ground: An American Inheritance
In this bonus episode of On Common Ground: An American Inheritance, we find inspiration in people who saw the places they love threatened and took action.
The finale of this 6-part documentary series offers hope and a vision of what public lands could still become if people are willing to stand up for the places they love.
In the 1970s, Bill Hedden took a job at the Atlas uranium mill on the banks of the Colorado River in Moab. He was lucky: a spot on the construction crew kept him away from the mill's most lethal work — the acid tanks, the yellowcake hearth, the men spreading fiberglass resin with their bare hands, who'd been told nothing about what it would do to them. Those jobs went to people without the education to know the danger, many of them Native laborers who commuted hours for the work, and many of them died young. When the federal subsidy ended, the company declared bankruptcy and walked away — leaving sixteen million tons of radioactive tailings on the bank of a river that supplies drinking water to forty million people. The cleanup has since taken twenty-five years and more than a billion taxpayer dollars, and it is still not finished.
Who really owns America's public lands, and who is trying to take them away?
Episode two, "The Land," is the origin story: how the United States came to hold 640 million acres in trust for the public, how concentrated wealth plundered and privatized much of it in the 1800s, and how the nation pulled back from the brink to build a system of parks, forests, and monuments that became the model for the rest of the world. But it's happening again: the richest Americans now command a share of the nation's wealth outstripping even the Gilded Age barons who plundered these lands the first time.