Show Notes
Who really owns America's public lands, and who is trying to take them away?
Episode three, "The Plunderers," follows the money. It opens with four hunters from Missouri who crossed from one corner of public land to another without ever touching a wealthy landowner's ranch — and were sued for eight million dollars for it. That case is the small version of a much larger story: how enormous private wealth is converting what belongs to all of us into what belongs to them.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the pattern across the country. In Minnesota, a Chilean mining magnate who was once landlord to the president's daughter is pressing to dig at the doorstep of the Boundary Waters — the most visited wilderness in America. In Alaska, the federal government has taken an ownership stake in a mining company while approving a 211-mile industrial road through wilderness and a national park to reach it, making itself regulator and investor at once. And in Washington, fossil fuel interests that gave hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2024 election received, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, almost precisely the leasing, royalty cuts, and permitting they had asked for.
Underneath these deals lies the decay that made them possible: decades of spending to reshape the federal courts, the Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate money, and the donor network behind Project 2025, whose blueprint the OBBBA follows closely.
You will hear from Land Tawney on the "Missouri Four"; from lifelong Republicans Ty Cobb and David Jenkins, who describe a level of corruption they say they have never seen from their own party's leadership; from former Alaska Lieutenant Governor Fran Ulmer on a state treated as an "opportunity zone"; from journalist Nick Mott on who is buying up the West; and from Zuni farmer Jim Enote on "the resource curse."
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 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. 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?
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.