It’s easy to become smug and believe the great outdoors exists only west of the 100th meridian.
As a child growing up in Salt Lake City, I was half a day’s drive from America’s Red Rock Wilderness and Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches national parks. We camped in Utah’s national forests — from the Wasatch Mountains to the Uintas.
But my Western land bias was shattered this spring, when I made a pilgrimage to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Known by some as the “People’s Wilderness,” these 1.1 million acres of lakes framed by boreal forests and wetlands is a liquid landscape unlike any other, wild with wolves, lynx, loons, moose and an astonishing variety of warblers.
To a desert dweller, the Boundary Waters are dizzying and blinding with a brilliance of light that I have not encountered elsewhere. When it rains, water bodies appear as a book’s marbled end sheets with swirls of gunmetal gray, indigo and silver.
With Becky Rom, the 76-year-old founder of Save the Boundary Waters, an environmental advocacy group, as my guide, the wild bounty offered solace to my weary soul in these wrought times. The locals’ love of these lands inspired me in a way I hadn’t been since my days as a young activist in the American West. What I knew then and feel more deeply now is that open lands inspire open minds. This is the open space of democracy.
America’s public lands are safe — for now. A provision proposed by Senator Mike Lee of Utah in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill that would have required the Bureau of Land Management to sell as much as 1.225 million acres of public lands is dead. It died when Mr. Lee raised a white flag in defeat. It died because, in addition to Democrats, four Republican senators from Montana and Idaho refused to vote for it. It died because five Republican House representatives from Western states said it was a “poison pill.” And it died because over 100 conservation groups and public lands advocates, as well as hunters, anglers, ranchers, recreationists and right-wing influencers said no.
Mr. Lee claimed in each of his many revisions of the proposal that disposing of our public lands was a way to address the housing crisis. But that was a ruse; housing experts have said it wouldn’t have made a dent in the problem. What the senator wanted was to establish a precedent — to normalize selling off our public lands to generate cash to pay for tax cuts. Open that door, and the open space of democracy closes. That is what conservation groups, such as Save the Boundary Waters and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, understand and have been fighting for decades.
In the outpouring of opposition, members of Congress learned once again that if they don’t support public lands, they risk being voted out of office, especially in the American West. What we saw was collective outrage fueled by love — energy we must nurture and draw on in the months and years to come.
Mr. Lee shared on X that his plan for the Bureau of Land Management land sales would create “Freedom Zones” for families to live, but many of the places he targeted, and will target again in future legislation, are largely desert lands and range lands. What they lack in green foliage they have in bare-boned austerity necessary when seeking the long view, wild and unobstructed.
These lands are an inheritance of all Americans that is shared with the world. They are ancestral lands of tribal nations that have been prayed over for eons.
When Mr. Lee was planning to put these lands up for sale, he disregarded Native people who were not offered first right of refusal to bid on them. Public lands house many of their cultural sacred sites and hold their medicines for ceremonies, lands where the songs of their ancestors can still be heard on the wind.
As we consider the future of our public lands, and when they again come under threat from hellbent leaders such as Mr. Lee, we cannot forget that they are intertwined with the wild lives that inhabit them, from the mule deer herds inside Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah to the porcupine caribou herds inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska that have sustained the Inupiat and Gwich’in people through time.
We have a history of bravery in our country and we must call it forward now. If we allow Mr. Lee’s vision to take root, we will risk losing the ecological integrity of these wild lands and their wildlife.
On June 14, over five million people took to the streets to participate in “No Kings” rallies across the country. In Utah, a red state, about 10 percent of the population of my hometown Moab was marching down Main Street. This county has 1.8 million acres of public lands, many of which Mr. Lee had eyed for development. They are loved for their countless hiking, biking and horseback riding trails, for the river running and the off-road-vehicle roads. What I felt at that protest was the passion that has been protecting these sacred lands through the generations.
Public lands are our public commons, breathing spaces in a country that is increasingly holding its breath. There we are free to roam and wander and believe in what we see: rock, water, sky; pronghorn in sagebrush, eagles in flight, a night sky of stars above a silhouette of mountains. These are places of peace and renewal, where landscapes of beauty become landscapes of our imaginations. We stand before a giant sequoia and remember the size of our hearts instead of the weight of our egos.
If we allow these lands to be developed in the name of profits, we will lose the wide open spaces that define us as Americans.
Over the next year, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, we can honor what unites us: the beauty of the places we call home. Our wealth as a nation is held in these wild lands. They are worthy of our protection and patriotism and must remain free as we choose to sing to, not desecrate, America the beautiful.
Terry Tempest Williams’s forthcoming book is “The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary.”
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