Show Notes
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 first six episodes of this series laid out how America’s public lands are being taken — the theft, the lies, the cost. This episode turns its attention to the people who refuse to let them be destroyed without a fight.
We don’t know how this dark chapter ends, and that’s exactly why what we do now matters. We set out to understand how we can all find our agency on this issue.
The first portrait is Becky Rom, who grew up in Ely, Minnesota, at the edge of the Boundary Waters, and has spent some fifty years fighting to protect that wilderness. This past April, Congress used an obscure procedure, the Congressional Review Act, to strip away the twenty-year mining ban that shielded the Boundary Waters watershed. They had come within a hair of permanent protection.
From there the episode turns to Gillian Fitzgerald, a young organizer who first came to the Boundary Waters as a wilderness guide. She talks about how you keep going when the grief is constant: how you work with loss and try and turn it into something good for the world. Tracy Stone-Manning, president of The Wilderness Society and former director of the Bureau of Land Management, explains how these fights are actually won — slowly, over careers, by the old hands and the new ones together. The final voice in the series is Matt Lee-Ashley, Executive Director of Ground Shift — a cross-partisan initiative to promote bold new thinking about the future of America’s public lands. He leaves us with the big idea at its heart.
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.
A bonus coda to the six-part series. All episodes available now.
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On Common Ground: An American Inheritance is hosted by Bill Hedden and John Leshy. Writing, story editing, and production by Sarah Hedden and Dagny Scott. Sound engineering by Tom Hedden. Digital strategy by Hallie Richie. On Common Ground is a program of the Mediators Foundation and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
More from On Common Ground: An American Inheritance
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?
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.