One of my brightest childhood memories was experiencing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for the first time. My mom spent a few summers working in a cafeteria at Mammoth Hot Springs by the north entrance, so she knew the park well enough to have me and my brother look down at our feet through the short hike to the observation platform. She knew that the experience of all that empty air and angry water was one worth having as suddenly and forcefully as possible. I remember distinctly how small it made me feel, how awestruck I was that it was merely a grand canyon, not even one to merit the definite article. It is important to feel small, overjoyed, or fascinated by the outdoors, and to learn about the world and one's place in it through those feelings.
Eight decades into the gradual privatization of once-public postwar spoils, and despite climate change frenzying the competition for land, more than a third of the land in the United States is administered by federal agencies, mostly the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. The vast majority of this land is west of the Rockies, in areas of low population density on the old American frontier. That includes almost two-thirds of Nevada (and my namesake I-80 exit); the second-largest desert preserve in the world; and the highest and lowest points in the continental United States, which are separated by less than 100 miles' worth of one of the most beautiful regions of California. These lands are the only parts of the country that both are for everyone and whose chief utility is, well, nothing. You can camp for 14 nights without a permit on most BLM land. There are economies built around them—tourism and all manner of gear companies—though the land itself is only faintly capitalized by private industry. Logging companies do harvest a bit of timber from Forest Service land, and there's some agriculture, but only enough to underscore how much of it is just kind of sitting there. That is to say: Most of the land is administered as if it's useless.
In a country whose national project could be thought of as an experiment in extraction and resource concentration carried out at an unprecedented scale, the existence and administration of public land is itself contradictory. An obsession with productive capacity and the competition therein pervades the American psyche; the highest virtue is to be "hard-working," a kinder way to say "willing to overexploit oneself." This partly explains why many people who should know better are willing suckers in supporting at least the fiction undergirding the corporate-gangster desovietization of the American state overseen by Elon Musk and his clutch of zoomer bigots: Who could oppose something as self-evidently desirable and beneficial as "government efficiency"? Unsurprisingly, public lands are currently on the chopping block.
Over 1,000 National Park Service employees and at least 3,400 National Forest Service workers have been axed (if you are one or know one, I would love to talk). New Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's previous relationship with the agency he now runs involved repeatedly suing it on behalf of drilling interests, and the first thing he did after being appointed was start dismantling regulations on drilling and mining. Donald Trump's BLM appointee, Kathleen Sgamma, works for an oil and gas lobbying firm. Trump's pick to lead the Forest Service, Michael Boren, is mostly known for his involvement in a series of bizarre lawsuits related to his private airstrip.
Those officials will make it harder for the remaining public lands workers to do their jobs. NPS workers have warned that their agencies were understaffed even before the cuts; even as the administration approved the hiring of several thousand seasonal workers, it's worth spelling out the ways people's lives will get worse because of DOGE. When fire season roars to life this summer, firefighting crews will have neither the resources nor manpower to meet the challenge. Snowpack is right around seasonal average in much of the Sierra Nevadas and northern Rockies, but the mountains of northern Arizona and New Mexico are alarmingly dry. "There’s going to be firefighters that die because of this," USFS vet and union official Steve Gutierrez told Stateline. "There will be communities that burn."
Wetland ecologists who performed critical scientific research were unceremoniously axed. Yosemite's only locksmith was fired. The firing of maintenance crews leaves hundreds of national monuments understaffed and forced to stay closed several days of the week. The people who keep our lands safe are going to be stretched so thin that rescue operations will be hard to perform. Keeping public lands operational requires workers to clean and manage access, and without them, popular parks will degrade rapidly. Huge swaths of the country will be left effectively untended: Cuts to the Forest Service in the Cascades, for example, have left one single person to manage and patrol 340,000 acres of wilderness. Look at how bad the state of the parks is, the administration and their corporate backers will say once things degrade further. Let us handle this crisis.
One of the goals here is obvious: to privatize what is public and strip the land for profit. That is what solving a crisis of their own making looks like. Imagine southern Utah torn to shreds by uranium miners, or a billionaire buying the Grand Tetons. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for the Palantir Yosemite Valley Experience. This sort of privatization can be cleanly understood in the immediate term, though I also think it is worth orienting DOGE-era rapacity within the higher-order project by capital to discipline labor, and think about how public land fits into that schema. Consider Matt Yglesias—a representative of capital whose job it is to tell you not to worry, that everything's fine—looking at the firing of federal workers in academia, parks, and non-profits and guilelessly wondering whether Parks employees "are key institutional bulwarks of the left."
What makes public land special is not just that it is largely free from corporate min-maxing, but that people go there to hang out, not work. That's essential not only as a stress release valve for the indignities of wage labor, but also as a shard of possibility that inspires people to imagine a better world—or, barring that, the preservation of this one. How can anyone go somewhere as beautiful as Yosemite, where fired employees hung an upside-down American flag off El Capitan in protest on Tuesday, and not feel physical pain at the idea of attending a Zoom meeting to talk about quarterly budgeting? How could you experience the Everglades, learn about the threat of salination and destruction, and not have your feelings about climate change, well, changed?
Last year, I stared at a glacier slowly inscribing its bulk onto a foreboding mountain, shrinking yet ripping away massive blocks of granite with it. I felt, oddly, a pang of hope. It is a horrible thing to know that we are acting on our specieswide capacity to destroy, yet I saw the glacier and was reminded that human civilization, let alone petroleum capitalism, is a relative blip in the lifespan of the planet.
The aesthetic and conceptual beauty of unexploited public land that anyone can freely enjoy stands as an object lesson in what's possible when the public commits to managing society's resources with intention and planning, rather than just hoping "the market" will do something good with them. As Yglesias asks it, the answer to his rhetorical question is "No," though his error here is failing to take the argument to its logical endpoint, where the answer is more like "Yes." The parks are institutional bulwarks of the left in the sense that they offer a sense of possibility of how much better life could be with resources collectively managed.
This argument is not as blunt as Going outside makes you a better person with good politics, and there are centuries of smart arguments against the rhetorical tendency to describe non-built environments as virginal and, critically, empty. That is the most foundational contradiction to American public land: It is only public, under the purview of the United States government, because of the violent dispossession of Native American people. There's no rationalizing that away.
Do you know where I learned a good deal about that violent dispossession and grim history? On those very public lands, through issues like the Yosemite hotel name change saga. Admissions like those don't paper over the trauma and loss, but rather force you to hold contradictory notions in your head. Introspection like that, of painful confrontation between past horrors and present joy, can be extremely powerful. A hypothetically privatized land management regime would not honor indigenous history, nor work with local tribes to preserve access to sacred sites and other areas of importance. It would govern those lands along the alienating logic of private property, a logic which has no capacity for verbs like "honor" or "preserve." This is the soil part of "blood and soil."
History and all, public lands are still for everyone, which makes them worth protecting, and not just from DOGE. Remember, Trump was sharpening his knives for American public land the first time around. His first-term highlight reel includes then–Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke trying to sell a huge swath of Bears Ears National Monument to mining interests; the administration attempting to sell off single the most ecologically vital chunk of National Forest land to loggers; and then–BLM chief William Perry Pendley (who was ordered to step down by a federal judge, because the Senate never confirmed him, but then just kept doing his job anyway) falling short in his scheme to move the BLM headquarters into the same building as Chevron.
If you chalked that up to mere venality, you'd be mostly correct, but hacking away at the amount of land we all own together serves the capital project in other ways too, by exacerbating income inequality and all the pain that comes with it. If you want to see how the class war is going, land privatization is a pretty useful index. If private capital wins—if Trump and Musk can execute their vision—some of the most beautiful and scientifically significant parts of the planet will be destroyed. Others will essentially be held hostage by interests whose goal is not preservation, but monetization. The imaginable and yearned-for horror of a hyper-productive future requires disciplined labor and precarious living. It requires that horizons be diminished and obscured. In both content and form, public land has the opposite effect.
