Show Notes
Last summer, millions of Americans rose up to defeat Senator Mike Lee's plan to sell off 3.5 million acres of public land. Hunters and anglers, climbers, veterans, and tribal nations all joined the fight.
It felt like a victory. It turned out to be a diversion.
While the country celebrated, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, forcing open more than 200 million acres of America's public lands to industrial development: 60 times what the Lee amendment proposed selling. There were no hearings, and no debate. The law now mandates oil and gas lease sales every quarter, in some of America's wildest places. It slashes royalties, strips the managing agencies of their discretion, and narrows the public's ability to challenge any of it in court. The cleanup costs, which could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, are left to the taxpayers. Because it is now written into law, no future administration can simply reverse it.
In this first episode, host Bill Hedden traces how the fight we were allowed to win concealed the one we lost. Bill has spent half a century defending the public lands in southeastern Utah. He is joined by co-host John Leshy, former Solicitor of the Department of the Interior and our foremost scholar of public-lands law and history, along with voices from across the political spectrum. Together, "The Theft" lays out what was taken, how it happened, and why you weren't supposed to notice until it was too late.
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. That fight isn't over yet.
All six episodes arrive 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. 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?