As part of the Salazar Center’s celebration of National Public Lands Day, we asked a few of our friends and partners to reflect on the power of public lands to inspire hope, foster unity, and strengthen communities.  This reflection is part of that series. 

 

In my role at the Salazar Center, public lands come up in conversations around things like conservation targets (like America the Beautiful), landscape connectivity, and Indigenous co-management, and I would eagerly engage on any of these topics on National Public Lands Day, especially given this year’s theme of “Together for Tomorrow.” But there’s another angle from which I can consider this theme, and a much more personal one. 

Outside of work, I’m a hunter, and I’ve also volunteered in a variety of roles for my state’s parks and wildlife agency. Participating in these activities means I spend a good bit of time on public lands, often in ways that 90+ percent of the public isn’t experiencing. It’s sitting in the dark at 4:oo am on an October morning, cold and silent, hiding behind a shrub or a rise on the landscape. It’s bushwacking through (and as a short person, getting very tangled in) tall grass and tumbleweeds on the plains. It’s wandering off-trail, meandering slowly and head down, marking on a mapping app where I see droppings or wallows or signs of grazing. It’s harvesting my food from the land, with deep respect and reverence and usually a few tears of gratitude. Rather than seeking out mountain-top vistas or pristine alpine lakes or even just trying to log a few miles in the name of exercise—all of which I also do regularly—these experiences on public lands are about reading and understanding the terrain, the habitat, the animals and the signs they leave behind. 

I have only been hunting for a few years (“adult-onset,” some folks like to call it)—less time than I’ve been recreating in other ways, and less time than I’ve spent in my career in conservation. I took up hunting because it was introduced to me in grad school as “one tool in the conservation toolbox,” because I wanted to feel closer to my food, and because for the first time in my life, I was living in a place where vast public lands were minutes from my home, rather than hours. Hunting also felt like a real opportunity to financially support public lands, by buying annual licenses and paying excise taxes on firearms and ammunition—money that goes back into public land coffers regardless of whether my hunt is successful. 

Reflecting today on public lands, I feel immensely privileged to be able to consider their importance from so many perspectives. Public lands safeguard ecosystems and habitats and provide clean air and water. They provide access to nature and opportunities to run, climb, ride, paddle, and escape in wild and beautiful places. They provide food. Everyone who enjoys these things has a connection to nature and an interest in protecting public lands, even if not everyone shares an interest in how they enjoy public lands. In this way, and as many have opined before me, public lands and conservation can be a great unifier across political identities and cultures. With so many threats facing our public lands, the best way to ensure they are thriving and accessible now and for future generations is to continue to find ways to come together, not reasons to divide ourselves.

 

Catie Boehmer is the Assistant Director of Engagement and Operations for the Salazar Center for North American Conservation. 

As part of the Salazar Center’s celebration of National Public Lands Day, we asked a few of our friends and partners to reflect on the power of public lands to inspire hope, foster unity, and strengthen communities.  This reflection is part of that series. 

 

In our work, every day is Public Lands Day, but recently, we have had the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of public lands, particularly national parks, through the mid-twentieth-century writings of Western historian and conservationist Wallace Stegner. We decided to reexamine two famous phrases Stegner offered American readers: the “geography of hope” as the concluding phrase of the Wilderness Letter, which advocated for the establishment of the wilderness preservation system and America’s “best idea” as a reflection of the nation’s democratic process and its best self.  

Stegner contended with the phrase he penned in 1961 throughout his entire career. To him, the geography of hope represented the wilderness idea, the region we call the American West, and public lands in all their forms across the country. Rather than merely pinning the meaning of the phrase to a single geography, he infused the idea of these lands, largely contained within the American West and embodied by wilderness, with a hope for a future in which Americans created a society to match our scenery. Adam M. Sowards has highlighted the aspirational quality of these landscapes, in how they draw us forward into them and into the future. He also has emphasized how this hope is inherently relational. These lands are the metaphorical table around which all Americans gather. The geography of hope is a social ethos even more than it is a landscape. 

Stegner returned to his theme of hope in penning his now-famous essay “The Best Idea We Ever Had: An Overview.” In it, he argued that our national parks were America’s best idea, reflecting us at our best rather than our worst. But at the moment he penned the article extolling the virtues of our national parks, they were under siege. The attack did not come from the much-decried former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, as many environmentalists of the time believed, but from visitors and from a Congress that refused to fund them appropriately. National Park visitation has only ever increased since the mid-twentieth century and the budgets that maintain them have only decreased. Titling national parks our “best idea” was more than a celebration of these landscapes, it was a call to arms to protect and manage them for future generations. Our public lands are our legacy, our source of hope for our future, our best idea.  

The lessons of the past in these powerful phrases written by Stegner still hold true for us now. Public lands are not a policy priority for politicians. But they should be a priority for each of us. They are the landscapes that give us hope for the future, they bring us together and give us joy, and we must intentionally invest in them for that future. We are the ones who must help land managers do the work. The next time you visit a national park or any public land, try to remember to see not just the landscape itself, but also the people with whom you share the view.  

  

Leisl Carr Childers is Associate Professor at Colorado State University 

Michael W. Childers is Associate Professor at Colorado State University and a National Humanities Center Fellow for 2024-2025 

Their essays, alongside that of other contributors, are published in the anthology Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2024). 

As part of the Salazar Center’s celebration of National Public Lands Day, we asked a few of our friends and partners to reflect on the power of public lands to inspire hope, foster unity, and strengthen communities.  This reflection is part of that series. 

 

As summer turns to fall, Americans naturally turn from beaches and lakeshores to parks and woods. There, they may trace a familiar footpath to take in the foliage or join a pickup game of soccer. But parks offer something more profound than a sensory escape or venue for physical activity, as important as those things are. They are an opportunity to deepen friendships and make new ones, to strengthen community, and even, perhaps, to heal our democracy. 

As Americans’ sense of community is being tested by political polarization, racial and economic division, and loneliness, parks and green spaces are neutral gathering places. On National Public Lands Day, we at Trust for Public Land (TPL) know how effective parks are in bringing people together and bridging divides. In fact, building community is a key pillar of our work, from brainstorming with residents at the start of a park project to ensuring they have the power to shape programs and form partnerships to realize a park’s potential. 

A recent survey by TPL found that great parks yield strong communities. Each year, our ParkScore® index ranks the park systems of the 100 most populous cities in the United States, based on metrics like investment, equity, amenities, access, and acreage. This year, we also surveyed those cities about their efforts to bolster community through parks.  

In a special TPL report, “The Power of Parks to Strengthen Community,” we revealed that residents of cities with the highest park rankings were more socially connected and engaged with their neighbors than residents of cities with lower-ranked park systems. In the top 25 cities, there were, on average, 26 percent more social connections between low- and high-income individuals than in lower-ranked cities. People were also 60 percent more likely to volunteer than those living in lower-ranked cities. (These patterns held after controlling for race/ethnicity, education, poverty, urbanicity, family structure, and transiency.) 

Social connections lead to social capital, the somewhat fuzzy but proven concept that neighborly ties empower communities. Social capital is associated with significant community benefits, including improved health, social resilience, civic participation, and economic well-being. Communities with more social connections see other positive outcomes, from lower mortality and reduced depression to resiliency to disasters. 

Whether through baseball leagues, senior walks, community picnics or volunteer days, people come together in parks and public lands. They share news and gossip, complain and organize, and ultimately, advocate for better and more parks, as well as other services. But in order for Americans to convene in parks, local green spaces must be attractive and widely accessible, and not just in affluent suburbs and cities, but everywhere. 

At the federal level, we are championing legislation that would greatly strengthen local parks. The bill, called the Outdoors for All Act (O4A), would improve the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership, a grant program that provides funding for communities that need parks the most. The new legislation would make that program permanent, avoiding the need for annual renewal. It would also let federally recognized tribes apply to the funding program for the first time. It would also lower the population requirement to 25,000, meaning that towns and smaller cities would be eligible.  

National Public Lands Day is a time to reflect on the wonder of parks—whether the magic of sunlight filtering through a tree canopy or the social alchemy of a chance encounter. But it’s also an opportunity to demand that everyone have access to their health-inducing, community-building superpowers.  

 

Luis Benitez is the chief impact officer at Trust for Public Land. He is also the author of “Higher Ground: How the Outdoor Recreation Industry Can Save the World.”