Show Notes
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.
"The Inheritance" opens with Ada Limón, the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, who spent her tenure installing poems in national parks. Beauty, she says, is what makes us brave — and we need our bravery now. In a country where so much can be bought, public land remains one of the few places the promise of equality still holds.
Bill Hedden and John Leshy make the case through the people and coalitions who have defended these places: the hunters and anglers; local elected officials; a Havasupai teenager who helped a president create a monument her family had fought generations to protect; a band of Navajo grandmothers who took on a billion-dollar Grand Canyon resort and won; a fiscal conservative protecting taxpayers. What connects these stories are the long odds they faced and the love that motivated them — ordinary people defeating those with connections, access and extreme wealth.
From there, the episode turns to what getting it right would actually require. If extraction is allowed, companies should pay real royalties and restore the sites completely when they leave. The lands should be managed for the long term— the watersheds, the wildlife, the climate they help hold in balance. And we have to let the people who cared for this ground for thousands of years — long before the rest of us arrived — teach the rest of us how to do the same.
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 are 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 6 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.
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?
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.