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).