Photo above: bison in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley (photo by Jacob W. Frank/NPS).
On National Public Lands Day, take a few minutes to consider this.
Without federal public lands, there would be:
No Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks
No "Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem"
No National Park Service and its 423 individual parks, cultural and historic areas
No healthy, migratory public wildlife populations that transcend boundaries
No ready, free public access to public lands for hunting and fishing
No BLM and Forest Service on which millions of private livestock graze and important to keep mom and pop ranchers viable
No environmental laws that guarantee citizens a strong voice in public land management
No reliable eco-tourism or outdoor recreation economies as we know them today
No promise that citizens in the future will have at least some notion of all of the above
No notion of “the American West” or of wildness as it currently exists in our imagination and thinking about what is still possible
