On Common Ground: An American Inheritance is a documentary podcast series about the fight over America's public lands — the parks, forests, and refuges that belong to all of us.
Recent headlines look like separate stories: Bears Ears cut, the roadless rule under threat, agencies hollowed out before fire season. The series reveals they're one — a years-in-the-making effort to move public land out of public hands, much of it now written into law and, by design, hard to reverse.
It's hosted by two people with rare authority on the subject: Bill Hedden, who spent fifty years defending Utah's redrock country, and John Leshy, former top lawyer at the Department of the Interior and author of the definitive history of America's public lands. Rigorously reported but built like a story — and, in the end, a hopeful one.
Episode 1: The Theft
Last summer, millions of Americans — hunters and anglers, climbers, veterans, tribal nations — rose up and defeated Senator Mike Lee's plan to sell off 3.5 million acres of public land. It felt like a victory. It was a diversion.
While the country celebrated, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, forcing open more than 200 million acres of America's public lands to industrial development — sixty times what the Lee amendment ever proposed. There was no sale this time, and no hearings, no debate. Instead: mandatory oil and gas lease sales every quarter, royalties slashed, the managing agencies stripped of discretion, the courthouse doors narrowed, and cleanup costs that could reach three-quarters of a trillion dollars left to the public. Because it's now written into statute, no future administration can simply reverse it.
In this first episode, host Bill Hedden — who has spent half a century fighting for the public lands around his home in southeastern Utah — and co-host John Leshy, former Solicitor of the Department of the Interior and our foremost scholar of public-lands law and history, trace how the fight we were allowed to win concealed the one we were quietly losing. With voices from across the political spectrum — Land Tawney, Teal Lehto, Rep. Gabe Vasquez, David Jenkins, Ryan Callaghan, Sarah Krakoff, Ty Cobb, and Alaska's Fran Ulmer — "The Theft" lays out what was taken, how, and why you weren't supposed to notice until it was too late.
Episode 2: The Land
Episode two, "The Land," is the origin story: how the United States came to hold 640 million acres in trust for the public, how concentrated wealth plundered and privatized much of it in the 1800s, and how the nation pulled back from the brink to build a system of parks, forests, and monuments that became the model for the rest of the world. But it's happening again: the richest Americans now command a share of the nation's wealth outstripping even the Gilded Age barons who plundered these lands the first time.
For most of the 1800s, the playbook was simple: barter with other countries, or take the land from Native nations who had lived on it for millennia, and then give it away — to settlers, to railroads, to mining companies, to states — to build a nation. But after the Civil War, the wealthy came to dominate the system, privatizing and pillaging more and more of the public estate. Rivers were poisoned, hillsides stripped bare, whole towns buried in the mudslides that followed. This country lost much of its public land before we understood what it was worth.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the constitutional bargain that created public lands in the first place, schemes like the 1872 Mining Law that let fortunes be dug out of common ground for pennies an acre, and the turn, around 1890, when Americans decided to stop giving the land away and start protecting it — above all, for the water and the other natural values it provided.
Along the way: Sarah Krakoff on what the Constitution says about public lands; Walt Dabney on the myth that the states were promised the land; Land Tawney and Ryan Callaghan on what it means that these places belong to everyone; and Zuni farmer Jim Enote on the Indigenous idea that land asks us not to be romantic, but responsible.
At the center of the conversation, and of the current news cycle, is Bears Ears: the first national monument in the country's history where Indigenous nations were a primary force behind its protection, and, as of July 2026, a monument the administration has cut by ninety percent. The fight over these lands is not new—it runs the length of American history—but nothing before has done this much damage this quickly.
Episode 3: The Plunderers
Who really owns America's public lands, and who is trying to take them away?
Episode three, "The Plunderers," follows the money. It opens with four hunters from Missouri who crossed from one corner of public land to another without ever touching a wealthy landowner's ranch — and were sued for eight million dollars for it. That case is the small version of a much larger story: how enormous private wealth is converting what belongs to all of us into what belongs to them.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the pattern across the country. In Minnesota, a Chilean mining magnate who was once landlord to the president's daughter is pressing to dig at the doorstep of the Boundary Waters — the most visited wilderness in America. In Alaska, the federal government has taken an ownership stake in a mining company while approving a 211-mile industrial road through wilderness and a national park to reach it, making itself regulator and investor at once. And in Washington, fossil fuel interests that gave hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2024 election received, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, almost precisely the leasing, royalty cuts, and permitting they had asked for.
Underneath these deals lies the decay that made them possible: decades of spending to reshape the federal courts, the Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate money, and the donor network behind Project 2025, whose blueprint the OBBBA follows closely.
You will hear from Land Tawney on the "Missouri Four"; from lifelong Republicans Ty Cobb and David Jenkins, who describe a level of corruption they say they have never seen from their own party's leadership; from former Alaska Lieutenant Governor Fran Ulmer on a state treated as an "opportunity zone"; from journalist Nick Mott on who is buying up the West; and from Zuni farmer Jim Enote on "the resource curse."
Episode 4: The Lies
Every argument for dismantling America's public lands is built to sound reasonable: we need affordable housing; the West shouldn't be run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington; public lands represent a broken promise to the states. Episode four, "The Lies," pulls those arguments apart, and asks a more consequential question: who profits when we believe them?
The episode opens with Scott Fitzwilliams, who spent his career in the U.S. Forest Service and rose to supervise Colorado's White River National Forest — the most visited in the country. He and his deputy carried more than sixty years of combined wildfire experience — knowledge that takes a career to build and cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Then came the DOGE firings: probationary employees terminated by form letter for "performance," a claim Fitzwilliams calls a bald-faced lie, just before fire season.
Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace how the hollowing-out of federal agencies is not an accident but a deliberate strategy. Land Tawney names the playbook — defund, dismantle, divest — and the episode follows it through Project 2025 and the budget starvation of agencies that together amount to less than a third of one percent of the federal budget. The decay that follows is easy to see: unmaintained trails, closed restrooms, expertise walking out the door for good. As Teal Lehto, Sarah Krakoff, and Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance Tania Lown-Hecht explain, an agency starved of people and funding becomes the argument for getting rid of public lands altogether.
Episode 5: The Cost
In the 1970s, Bill Hedden took a job at the Atlas uranium mill on the banks of the Colorado River in Moab. He was lucky: a spot on the construction crew kept him away from the mill's most lethal work — the acid tanks, the yellowcake hearth, the men spreading fiberglass resin with their bare hands, who'd been told nothing about what it would do to them. Those jobs went to people without the education to know the danger, many of them Native laborers who commuted hours for the work, and many of them died young. When the federal subsidy ended, the company declared bankruptcy and walked away — leaving sixteen million tons of radioactive tailings on the bank of a river that supplies drinking water to forty million people. The cleanup has since taken twenty-five years and more than a billion taxpayer dollars, and it is still not finished.
What happened at Atlas was not an exception. It is how extraction on public land has worked for well over a century. In this episode, hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the fiscal cost first: the decades-old bonding rules that leave roughly 130,000 orphaned wells for taxpayers to plug, the royalty rates the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled back to 1920 levels, and a total public liability that conservative advocate David Jenkins and Leshy put in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Then they turn to the cost that no budget captures: uranium mining at the doorstep of the Grand Canyon's aquifer and the Havasupai homeland, the contamination that still scars the Navajo Nation, and the disappearing water itself, as gutted agencies leave forests unmanaged and western rivers run dry.
Episode 6: The Inheritance
The finale of this 6-part documentary series offers hope and a vision of what public lands could still become if people are willing to stand up for the places they love.
"The Inheritance" opens with Ada Limón, the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, who spent her tenure installing poems in national parks. Beauty, she says, is what makes us brave — and we need our bravery now. In a country where so much can be bought, public land remains one of the few places the promise of equality still holds.
Bill Hedden and John Leshy make the case through the people and coalitions who have defended these places: the hunters and anglers; local elected officials; a Havasupai teenager who helped a president create a monument her family had fought generations to protect; a band of Navajo grandmothers who took on a billion-dollar Grand Canyon resort and won; a fiscal conservative protecting taxpayers. What connects these stories are the long odds they faced and the love that motivated them — ordinary people defeating those with connections, access and extreme wealth.
From there, the episode turns to what getting it right would actually require. If extraction is allowed, companies should pay real royalties and restore the sites completely when they leave. The lands should be managed for the long term— the watersheds, the wildlife, the climate they help hold in balance. And we have to let the people who cared for this ground for thousands of years — long before the rest of us arrived — teach the rest of us how to do the same.
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