Show Notes
Public lands belong to all of us. Right now, that inheritance is being taken, not in secret, but in plain sight.
Last year, Americans rallied to stop a plan to sell off public land — and won. But the fight that made headlines mattered far less than the one that didn't. While the country celebrated, a far larger giveaway had already begun.
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. This series is a production of Eleven Dollar Bill, and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
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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.
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.
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?
Who really owns America's public lands, and who is trying to take them away?