The Lands Belong to Us

Letter to the editor published in the Daily Inter-Lake, October 15, 2018

In the 1400s English commoners fought battles and staged riots protesting the loss of their grazing and farming commons to wealthy landowners. The commons had been part of the public domain until the nobility started fencing them off for their own private use. It’s taken the British people six hundred years since those battles just to earn back the right to walk on that land. Not even to forage or hunt on it, just to walk on it. 

If politicians like Jennifer Fielder (Montana) and Mike Lee (Utah), and the people who support them, achieved their goals and forced all public lands out of federal control, it wouldn’t be long before the only people who would be able to ranch, farm, hunt, or fish in America would be private landowning billionaires. Every loss of the commons, whether it’s the loss of a stream access law or the shrinking of a national monument, brings us closer to losing some of the greatest freedoms we have.

I can’t imagine fishing in the Missouri River Breaks, or going hiking in the Great Bear Wilderness, and not feeling gratitude for the foresight it took to keep these places in public hands. Those lands don’t belong to the federal government in the way we usually think of ownership. The government is simply a trustee; the lands belong to us, the American people. I feel sorry for anyone who is unable to understand what a gift they are, and how much we would lose by giving them up.