Show Notes
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.
For most of the 1800s, the playbook was simple: barter with other countries, or take the land from Native nations who had lived on it for millennia, and then give it away — to settlers, to railroads, to mining companies, to states — to build a nation. But after the Civil War, the wealthy came to dominate the system, privatizing and pillaging more and more of the public estate. Rivers were poisoned, hillsides stripped bare, whole towns buried in the mudslides that followed. This country lost much of its public land before we understood what it was worth.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the constitutional bargain that created public lands in the first place, schemes like the 1872 Mining Law that let fortunes be dug out of common ground for pennies an acre, and the turn, around 1890, when Americans decided to stop giving the land away and start protecting it — above all, for the water and the other natural values it provided.
Along the way: Sarah Krakoff on what the Constitution says about public lands; Walt Dabney on the myth that the states were promised the land; Land Tawney and Ryan Callaghan on what it means that these places belong to everyone; and Zuni farmer Jim Enote on the Indigenous idea that land asks us not to be romantic, but responsible.
At the center of the conversation, and of the current news cycle, is Bears Ears: the first national monument in the country's history where Indigenous nations were a primary force behind its protection, and, as of July 2026, a monument the administration has cut by ninety percent. The fight over these lands is not new—it runs the length of American history—but nothing before has done this much damage this quickly.
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.
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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?