Public Lands

As sunrise illuminates the corrugated badlands of Death Valley, Zabriskie Point hangs for a moment in transition from the vast emptiness of a desert night to the white-hot light of day.

National Parks are a relatively modern invention, but the lands they preserve are millions of years old.

Under the canopy of a coast redwood forest, the rapidly changing light moves at a wildly different pace to the growth of the ancient trees.

As the first cold, pink light of morning appeared in the sky, and when the sun peaked above the ocean of clouds below, we got the opportunity to see and photograph something extraordinary.

As winter howled through the Sierras, I hunkered down, waiting for a chance to photograph this scene. When this moment of pure serenity briefly settled between passing storms, I rushed to set up my tripod.

For each of us lucky enough to witness the power of an Old Faithful eruption, it forces us to live in the present.

Arched Rock Beach on the Sonoma coast is a testament to both the beauty and destructive power of our natural elements.

In Joshua Tree National Park, two distinct desert ecosystems meet, the Mojave and the Colorado, to produce a singularly iconic landscape.

Hazy shades of pink and purple poured into the canyon as the sun completed its arc toward the horizon. Scattered peaks nursed an orange glow, like embers in a dying campfire, until the heat dissipated, and they seemed ready to crumble into shady ash. When darkness fell, lightning appeared as brief scaffolding between the North Rim and the storm clouds above. It was my first time visiting Grand Canyon National Park, and Mother Nature was putting on a show. 

The following morning, I hiked part of the South Kaibab Trail. The fleeting displays of light from the previous evening sharply contrasted the enduring scene before me. Far below, the Colorado River continued its millennia-long occupation, carving a colossal scar into the landscape. Evidence of its labor could be seen in the canyon wall above, where bright Coconino Sandstone lay on red Hermit Shale as neatly as a rug on a hardwood floor. The story unfolding before me wasn’t simply one of topography but immense chronology.

That summer, on a road trip around the American West, our public lands made a deep impression on me. While I raced from one location to the next, filling my senses with momentary light and fragrance, a more gradual passing of time seeped into my consciousness. Glacial erratics at Olmsted Point in Yosemite were scattered evidence of the slow-moving ice that once shaped the landscape. In Utah’s Bryce Canyon, precarious-looking hoodoos were the slowly-sculpted product of erosive weather. And the salt flats of Death Valley’s Badwater Basin were made possible by movements in the earth’s crust that raised the mountains and the slow washing of minerals down their sides.

National Parks are a relatively modern invention, but the lands they preserve are millions of years old. In comparing the U.S. to Europe, someone once told me that America had no history. Apart from the massive lack of respect that perspective has for the first people of the land—for even without the presence of medieval castles, human history is rich here—the land itself is a testament to the monumental power of time. Look for evidence of the natural forces that have acted upon it, and you’ll see that history—vast history—is visible everywhere. Without public lands and the wild spaces they preserve, it might be easy to forget that.

Since Yellowstone National Park was established as the world’s first national park in 1872, we’ve been setting aside diverse ecosystems, including deserts, forests, grasslands, wetlands, and alpine regions, for conservation, economic, and recreational reasons. Today, the National Park system currently consists of over 400 units, including monuments, historical sites, and seashores. In each case, they’re collectively owned by U.S. citizens and managed by government agencies, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

The U.S. manages over 640 million acres of public lands, and when you add local wildlife refuges, state parks, and regional parks, they add up to well over a quarter of our total land mass. These spaces offer protection for places of scientific, historical, or cultural significance. They provide a safe harbor for iconic wildlife, including endangered species like the gray wolf (Canis lupus). They give people opportunities to recreate outdoors, and they play a crucial role in the natural regulation of our climate. Wallace Stegner famously called our National Parks “the best idea we ever had.” I think he might have been right, but not everyone agrees.

The management of public lands is an ongoing debate, and there are many opposing perspectives on conservation, resource extraction, public access, and competing interests. In Parks, Lyz-Nagan Powell writes, “For every person who loves one of the parks like it’s their own home, there is another who resents the federal government for owning it. Even before Yellowstone became the first national park, park history was fraught with tension. Tension between preservation and use, between indigenous people and white explorers, between local rights and federal oversight, between wild freedom and human control, between park purists and park recreationists, and between commercial exploitation and historic value.”

Part of the debate is centered on the question of whether public lands should be kept wild, but the truth is, we can’t even agree on the definition of wilderness. The Wilderness Act, which established the National Wilderness Preservation System and protects designated areas from most forms of human development, defines wilderness as areas where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man. However, in an episode of The Wild with Chris Morgan, I was reminded that almost nothing is untouched by human hands. Sam Kreling, a Quantitative Wildlife Sciences Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, said, “I don’t believe in wilderness … I think wilderness is kind of a dichotomy that doesn’t really exist. It inherently says things are wild or not wild; things are animal or human.”

For context, Kreling’s quote was about the importance of sharing our urban environments with wildlife. Still, many would argue that it cuts both ways: public lands should support people’s interests, with the infrastructure to support recreation, hospitality, and commerce. It’s a tricky balance, but while it’s impossible to separate the subject of public lands from the human experience, they clearly represent something larger than any individual or moment in time. 

The second half of Wallace Stegnar’s famous “best idea” quote describes National Parks as “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Compared to some of our more symbolic man-made landmarks—the castles and cathedrals of Europe, which embody wealth and privilege—our public lands represent something shared. We can never truly own the land nor separate ourselves from it. There’s an intangible connection there; ultimately, I believe you need a degree of selflessness to appreciate it. 

Terry Tempest Williams said in The Hour of Land, “Our national parks receive more than 300 million visitations a year. What are we searching for, and what do we find? … perhaps it’s not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species.” I’ve never felt that more acutely than at Haleakalā National Park in Hawai’i.

On the second day of our visit to Maui, we rose at 2:30 a.m. with a particular objective. We drove to Haleakalā in the dark, winding our way through villages, farmland, and finally, open space to watch the sunrise from the top of the volcano. It was all worth it, though, as the first cold, pink light of morning appeared in the sky, and when the sun peaked above the ocean of clouds below, we got the opportunity to see and photograph something extraordinary.

By the time the sun was entirely over the horizon, I expected a sense of exhaustion to rise with it, but I was energized. Over the next few hours, we continued to explore, and I watched native honeycreepers in Hosmer Grove. Despite having never been to Hawai’i before, I couldn’t escape the connection I felt to a world beyond myself. The island was living and breathing along with us, and it felt good to be awake.

Sunrise at Haleakalā National Park was a special moment in time, but I’ve had powerful experiences during a dust storm at Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, seeing the desert under a blank of snow at Joshua Tree, and feeling the spray of epic waves at Ruby Beach in Washington’s Olympic National Park too. On each occasion, the world seemed to stretch far beyond me in both space and time, but even in moments that felt, for want of a better word, big, I didn’t feel insignificant; I felt connected. 

Terry Tempest Williams called our National Parks “portals and thresholds of wonder, an open door that swings back and forth from our past to our future.” I couldn’t agree more, but if you’re still unconvinced, consider the park that started it all; Yellowstone.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson describes a Nebraskan fossil bed where paleontologists discovered the mass grave for Miocene animals. “The event that killed the plains animals of Nebraska was a volcanic explosion on a scale previously unimagined—but big enough to leave an ash layer ten feet deep almost a thousand miles away in eastern Nebraska,” said Bryson. “It turned out that under the western United States, there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park.”

Like so many other National Parks, Yellowstone reveals our planet’s history to us. Equally, for each of us lucky enough to witness the power of an Old Faithful eruption, it forces us to live in the present. But, as Bryson suggested, it might also provide a striking vision of our potential future. 

I began these notes by discussing history, but public lands are our past, present, and future. They protect our diverse ecosystems. They provide a haven for endangered species. They help to regulate our climate. And they allow us to experience a deep connection with our place in time and space. We will, and should, continue to debate their management and use, but the significance of America’s public lands cannot be understated.

It seems only fitting to conclude this article with another Wallace Stegner quote: “It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, uncrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs.” Indeed, we live on an entirely better planet with public lands of all kinds and the shared spaces they protect.

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