Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Paul Anderson):

August 8, 2025

“The house of America is founded upon our land, and if we keep that whole, then the storm can rage, but the house will stand forever.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson

Editor’s note: This story is part one of a three-part series examining the notion of public lands, both in the United States and in our region. Part one looks at the earliest expressions of the commons in territories that would become the United States. Parts two and three, which will run Sunday and Monday, look at the history and legacy of what is now the White River National Forest. 

In April, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., held a public gathering in Eagle to discuss the future of public lands under the Trump Administration. Will Roush, director of Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop, stated a chief concern: Not only should public lands be protected — they must be maintained.

“Part of this work to make sure that we protect our public lands is just to keep our public land,” Roush said, as quoted in The Aspen Times on April 16. “If we can have a conversation about protecting public lands, then we’re not having a conversation about selling public lands.”

Roush’s reference was to the proposed sale of public lands that had been floated by Republican lawmakers as part of the budget reconciliation process. Hickenlooper said that any such large sales of public land would happen “over my dead body.” Since then, the sale of public lands advanced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was removed from the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” due to pushback from bipartisan public lands advocates.

“Some things just shouldn’t be for sale,” Hickenlooper said, “and selling our public lands, which is one of the greatest assets we have as a country, is unthinkable. Selling broad tracks of BLM land or national forest, that’s unconscionable. So, yeah, I’ll do everything humanly possible to block that. And I’ve talked to enough Republican senators that I can’t imagine that’s ever going to happen — famous last words.”

Exploiting veterans for cheap land

The idea of selling off lands held in public trust throughout the United States is grounds for national reflection on the significance of these very lands. Collectively referred to as the commons, these public lands are defined, according to an artificial intelligence search, as “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water and a habitable Earth.” 

Historically, the privatization of land across the continental United States has been, in large part, a protracted scandal of greed, corruption, exploitation and opportunism. The foundation of what President Lyndon B. Johnson called the “house of America” is established upon countless examples of feckless manipulation, starting in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War that opened the doors to America’s nascent continental empire.

Unable to pay Revolutionary War soldiers with cash in the fight against British domination, the necessarily frugal Continental Congress of this fledgling nation issued scrip, a cash substitute that could be redeemed with land grants on the expanding Western frontier. This complied with Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a landed citizenry — so-called philosopher farmers — who would furnish America with an independent, homespun, land-based community of engaged citizens able to guide the nation toward an enlightened future by “possessing a chosen country with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”

But the plan went awry when cash-strapped veterans of the War of Independence traded their hard-earned scrip for pennies on the dollar to unscrupulous speculators who then cashed in the ill-gotten scrip to acquire millions of acres of Western land. These acts of greedy acquisition squandered the Jeffersonian promise of opening the country to those who had heroically served, often at great sacrifice. Land exploitation was condoned by those who would capitalize on the plight of veterans and the speculation of rising property values as the frontier moved west.

To retiring Gen. George Washington, this represented an irreparable moral failure to make good on a “debt of honor,” which he warned of in his Letter to the Governors at the successful culmination of the Revolutionary War in 1783: “In what part of the continent shall we find any man or body of men who would not blush to stand up and propose measures purposely calculated to rob the soldier of his stipend? And were it possible that such a flagrant instance of injustice could ever happen, would it not excite the general indignation and tend to bring down upon the authors of such measures the aggravated vengeance of Heaven?”

It may be hard to imagine a time in American history when land was so egregiously exploited — or that frontier land could be owned before it was even accurately measured. In “The Measuring of America,” Andro Linklater described the evolution of the earliest measuring instruments necessary for assessing land values: “Measuring out the wilderness made it possible for someone to buy and own it. This was a revolutionary concept. For centuries, the land had been lived in by the Delaware and passed through by the Miami and occupied by the Iroquois, but no one had ever owned it. No one had ever even thought of owning it. The idea of one person owning land did not yet exist on the west bank of the Ohio.”

Puritan colonist John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Company reported in the 1600s, “As for the natives of New England, they enclose no land.” His reference to the enclosure echoed back to England in the 1100s when the public commons had been enclosed by the ruling aristocracy, banishing the people from their native landscapes. In America, where religious freedom had been a primary inspiration for colonial settlement in the new land, the acquisition of property soon predominated as a means for prosperity and personal gain.

Whereas Spanish and French New World settlements were owned strictly by the kings, the British colonies allowed individual ownership, which became a compelling reason for a dramatic swell in migration across the Atlantic. The resultant land hunger made a stark contrast to Native American concepts of the land as sacred common ground.

“What is this you call property?” asked a Massasoit chief in the 1620s of Plymouth colonists whom he had befriended. “It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all of us. How can one man say it belongs only to him?”

Commoditizing the land

As land ownership evolved, the word “property” had to be redefined to include land. That is why the Virginia Constitution of 1776 — which was a prelude to the U.S. Constitution — stated “life, liberty and property” to be fundamental rights. The right to “the pursuit of happiness” came in a later iteration. It was land that defined a legitimate human pursuit.

Jefferson, America’s third president, assumed, according to Linklater, “the possession of land was the Newtonian principle that made democracy work. It guaranteed the independence of the individual and gave each one an interest in building a law-abiding community. All that was needed was education to teach them how best to use their freedom.”

James Madison, co-author of the Federalist Papers and the fourth president of the United States, differed with Jefferson’s land ethic. Madison regarded land ownership as restrictive and limiting to the need for a “commons” — the joint ownership and stewardship of the land. “Whenever there are uncultivated lands and unemployed poor,” wrote Madison, “it is clear that the laws of property violate natural right.” In an echo of the Native American view, Madison concluded, “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.”

As the land became a transactional commodity, it was no longer valued solely for its production potential, but was valued for the raw land itself and what it might bring in speculative appreciation. “More than in any other economy of the time,” wrote Linklater, “American land was the prime producer of wealth … mostly from the increase in its value.”

Once a means of measuring the land was accomplished with a chain-link device called Gunter’s Chain, named for its inventor, land could be more accurately quantified, with metes and bounds better determined. This facilitated ownership assurances that could be defended by law. Gunter’s Chain preceded, by more than a century, the more widely used theodolite, a precise optical type of transit.

In the hands of savvy capitalists, measuring the land became a fever utilized by land corporations such as the Ohio Company, which used devalued currency that it had acquired to effect the most advantageous land purchases. “In the 1780s,” wrote Linklater, “most [state currencies] could be bought on the street for twenty cents on the dollar. When the states began to put their own public lands on sale, the holders of such notes could use them to pay for land at the currency’s full value.”

Speculation rewarded those who held the land as it escalated in price commensurate with demand from, as Linklater describes, “land-hungry, timber-yearning, field-dreaming squatters in Kentucky and Virginia” who sought land-owning opportunities. These opportunists saw the frontier as something more tangible than a romantic vision. “The adventure of taming the frontier was certainly there,” wrote Linklater, “but what drew people from eastern states and from around the world was the desire of this soil magically transformed from wilderness to property by the act of measurement and mapping. … The ease with which it made land available to anyone who went west in search of it had an almost incalculable influence on the development of the American psyche and the American economy.”

In his seminal 1782 essay, “What Is an American?,” French immigrant farmer Jean de Crevecoeur issued a paean to the land and what it meant to America then. “I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman when he first lands on this continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled. He must necessarily feel a share of national pride when he views the chain of settlements which embellishes these extended shores.”

Equality and independence, wrote Crevecoeur, were the values the land gave to its new legal owners. “We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power, because they are equitable. … We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained because each person works for himself.”

The American landscape became an asylum for the landless poor of Europe who had no opportunity to own land where they were born because of feudal controls that held the land for the aristocracy. “Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury — can that man call any other kingdom his country?” asked Crevecoeur. “A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments, who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet?”

Is it any wonder that land hunger was pervasive and drove hard men and women onto the rapidly expanding frontier of a continent that felt ripe for the plucking? America’s first president was exuberant in his depiction of just this manner of thought when he wrote his Letter to the Governors in 1783, as the Revolutionary War came to an end.

“The citizens of America,” Washington wrote, “placed in a most enviable condition, as the sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now, by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and independency, are to be considered as the actors on a most conspicuous theatre which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”

Manifest Destiny

Such effulgent prose prompted John O’Sullivan to declare, a century later, “Manifest Destiny” as the divine right of America to possess an entire continent as its just reward without moral scrutiny or remorse, but simply as a preordained right through the grace of God and the happenstance of history.

“Our Manifest Destiny is to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us,” O’Sullivan, a noted editor and diplomat, wrote in an 1845 essay about annexing vast areas of Western U.S. lands, including Texas.

This utilitarian affirmation of a right to possess paved the way to exploit all that the land could provide in a sometimes misbegotten destiny that would include the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Manifest Destiny became a national entitlement of unlimited scope that remains an imperialistic rationale today.

Although individual and corporate land acquisitions of the 1700s ceded control of millions of acres from the public trust to private holdings, they were small potatoes compared with national acquisitions such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 as governments entered into the land market with astronomical acreages that amalgamated landscapes as mere abstractions.

“The sale of an empire,” wrote Linklater of Jefferson’s enormous real estate deal with the French, “was not an issue; it was simply a land deal.” The now-seemingly paltry sum of $15 million was deemed high at the time and raised eyebrows for profligacy. Yet, the French holdings of the purchase were acquired for 5 cents per acre — one of the most astounding real estate deals in history.

In Steven Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” account of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the extent of the newly acquired Western lands and a constant sense of the unknown in their vast scale affected every member of the team and its captains. After reaching the Pacific coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, Lewis and Clark called for a vote that would decide a conundrum as to where the Corps would winter over. That vote was the first time in an official U.S. government capacity that a woman, a Native American and a Black African cast ballots with equal weight to their white counterparts. Sacajawea filled two roles, as both a woman and a Native American; and Clark’s slave, York, was the Black man. The captains granted them a say because their shared travails during the 18 months it took to reach the coast across the wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase had bonded them as equals.

And yet, what of the natives who had no vote and no say at other crossroads? They became collateral damage in the rapaciously acquisitive westward march across their former homelands. “Almost every Indian war from Fallen Timbers in 1794 to the final massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 had its origin in the hunger for land,” wrote Linklater. Defeated, coerced and compromised, the natives often had no choice but to sign land-granting treaties that exploited their plight under rule by opportunistic whites. “The United States was making an offer that could not be refused,” wrote Linklater.

The treatment of the Cherokee was among the most brutal when settlement pressures divided their nation and later expelled its Eastern half, even though the tribe had settled to legitimately tend the land with white man’s ways, as had been stipulated. Removed by force to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838 by edict of President Andrew Jackson, the Trail of Tears claimed the lives of 4,000 of the dispossessed 16,000 from disease, starvation and bitter cold on this notorious death march.

His calloused treatment of the Cherokees in shameless pursuit of land reflected a deeper set of character flaws regarding Jackson’s presidency (1829-37), flaws that appear to crop up now and again in America’s top political figures, as a newspaper editorial of the day made clear:

“The language of Jackson has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. Ambition is his crime, and it will be his punishment too: intrigue is his native element, and intrigue will confound his tricks, and will deprive him of his power; he governs by means of corruption, and his immoral practices will redound to his shame and confusion. His conduct in the political arena has been that of a shameless and lawless gamester. He succeeded at the time, but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings, to throw aside his false dice, and to end his days in some retirement, where he may curse his madness at his leisure; for repentance is a virtue with which his heart is likely to remain forever unacquainted.”

This treaty-breaking policy became a pattern that repeated itself again and again as Linklater describes: “Incursion by small groups of settlers, growing tension, Indian violence, American retaliation and the intervention of the U.S. Army.”

Such would be the fate of the Northern Utes in 1881, when this same progression fomented what was known as the Meeker Massacre and the expulsion of the Utes to two reservations after Colorado Gov. Frederick Pitkin’s decree that “The Utes must go!” Pitkin proclaimed that the “Ute problem” would be resolved either by moving them to reservations or eliminating them by extermination. Thus, 12 million acres of land, including Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley, were opened to white settlement.

Love of the land

As egregious as this historical progression sounds, all of us in western Colorado now call Ute lands our home. And so it has gone for generations of Americans whose acquisition of these once Native American lands has been a blessing overlaying a curse to those who were ruthlessly dispossessed. Many an author has described with rapture a sense of discovery, enchantment and enrichment from contact with these fought-over lands from which whole peoples were vanquished.

“When I strike the open plains, something happens,” wrote author Willa Cather (1873-1947), whose writings exude a deep appreciation for the Western landscapes of America. “I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea, it’s the grand passion of my life.”

In 1850, long before Cather found her identity with the land, an Oregon Trail pioneer from Indiana, Margaret Frink, wrote a florid description of a junction of Midwestern wagon routes upon crossing Cottonwood Creek in Nebraska. Her praises as a witness to history are quoted in Rinker Buck’s “The Oregon Trail”:

“In the afternoon we came to the junction of the emigrant road from St. Joseph with our road. … Both roads were thickly crowded with emigrants. It was a grand spectacle to view the vast migration slowly winding its way westward over the broad plain. The country was so level we could see the long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles. It seemed to me that I had never seen so many human beings in all my life.”

Buck, who traveled the 2,150-mile Oregon Trail in four months by mule-drawn wagon in 2011, also quoted journalist George Law Curry, who crossed the trail in 1846 and was among 400,000 who had done so in the 15 years before the Civil War. Curry’s reflection was published in a St. Louis newspaper:

“Life on the plains far surpasses my expectation; there is a freedom and a nobleness about it that tend to bring forth the full manhood. A man upon the horizon-bound prairie feels his own strength and estimates his own weaknesses. He is alive to everything around him. For him there is a joy in the ‘lone elm’ grandeur on the mounds, beauty in the grassy and flower-besprinkled couch on which he rests, and a glory forever round him that stretches his spirit to its fullest tension.”

There were other reasons for the migration that made the West attractive, such as the growth of industrializing cities and the impending conflict over the spread of slavery, both repellant to those sensitive, bucolic souls seeking a peaceful little spread far from the madding crowd. The 1862 Homestead Act was the inducement where 160 acres could be claimed, worked and owned outright after living on it and improving it for five years. A small filing fee was required, as well as enough savings to get through until the land proved up.

“The idea behind the Homestead Act,” wrote Ian Frazer in “Great Plains,” “was that a nation of small, independent farmers would make the best foundation for democracy. It was an idea as old as the United States where politicians from the North wanted to fill the West with farmers to stop the spread of slavery.”

There was a political motive for offering free land, and an economic motive for those who sought it. Yet, the gift of land was not always fruitful for those who acquired it because of what all real estate brokers know about location, location, location. Bottomland near railroads was hard to get, so most homesteads were located on less-than-optimal plots. The homestead promise often failed to match up to the reality on the ground on what was a minimal portion of land, which rarely was enough to subsist on in pursuit of the evasive and intangible American dream.

Frazer wrote that the invention of barbed wire was necessary for any farm settlements to be possible and that the rates of success were marginalized by climate and aridity. Promotions by the U.S. Geological Survey and the serving railroads attempted to whitewash this harsh reality with “the meteorological theory that ‘rain follows the plow’ … that cultivation of the soil, human activity, steam from railroad engines — all the developments that accompany settlement — produced increased rainfall.” A so-called “rainline” was declared as an enticement by the Santa Fe Railroad to advance frontier settlements by 18 miles per year across the naturally arid West.

Cultivation was also thought to enhance dryland agriculture, but it proved yet another frontier fallacy as the sod was broken by the steel plow, resulting in destructive erosion. “Many thousands of homesteaders ended up owning farms on the Great Plains,” wrote Frazer. “But an even larger number went broke, lost their crops to grasshoppers, saw their fields dry up and blow away, went into debt, went crazy with loneliness, sold out, left, and never came back.”

Still, a deep-seated affection and affinity existed for the land as a romantic sense of place that was captured in verse by Katherine Lee Bates when she wrote “America the Beautiful” in 1895, five years after the closing of the American frontier. Her inspiration was a vision of Colorado’s Pikes Peak, for which the song was originally named:

O beautiful for spacious skies, 
For amber waves of grain, 
For purple mountain majesties 
Above the fruited plain! 
America! America! 
God shed his grace on thee 
And crown thy good with brotherhood 
From sea to shining sea!

Settlers in the Roaring Fork Valley, specifically Missouri Heights, raised similar paeans to the blessings of the land they acquired in the late 1800s and early 1900s as described by settler David Kapp in Anita McCune Witt’s “They Came From Missouri: The History of Missouri Heights, Colorado”:

I’ve got a hundred-sixty acres in the valley
I’ve got a hundred-sixty acres of the best
Got an old stove there
That’ll cook three square
And a bunk where I can lay me down to rest.
I’ve got a hundred-sixty acres full of sunshine
I’ve got a hundred-sixty million stars above
Got an old paint hoss
I’m the guy who’s boss
On a hundred-sixty acres that I love.

Witt wrote: “They came by ship, by foot, by horse, and mule and oxen, by covered wagon and railroad box car, from all over the world, ultimately to settle on the high mesa above the Roaring Fork Valley.”

The land forged the America character

The frontier experience was best described by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In that vaunted text, Turner credits the varied landscapes of the American frontier with deeply influencing the American character.

“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development,” wrote Turner. “Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. … The changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.”

Turner’s thesis underscores the critical importance of the land — the commons — as a formative influence to national characteristics of individualism, risk-taking, innovation and the constant refreshing of democratic institutions on the ever-advancing frontier as manifest in new communities far beyond the reach of established institutions. Against that demanding, sometimes fatal, character-building crucible, the American spirit was forged.

“American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” wrote Turner. “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West.”

Turner described a de facto evolution across the landscape: First came the pioneer, who provisioned himself from the land with the rudiments of shelter, food and clothing, but never ownership. As the pioneers moved to new ground, they were replaced by emigrants who sought a longer tenure with land ownership, farming and establishing more permanence with their dwellings through the social institutions that platted towns and birthed cities. Finally came the developers, mercantile agents and entrepreneurs who converted the land to commercial purposes and ushered in urbanity.

The frontier landscapes also played a role in social diversity, as Turner posited: “In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race.” The frontier also influenced politics: “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier.” The frontier also set a tone for a particular American personality: “The American intellect owes its striking characteristics to the frontier,” wrote Turner, “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good or for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are the traits of the frontier.”

Author Wallace Stegner recognized that the frontier had mostly been a wilderness bereft of human influence, which attributed the frontier with the power to “shape our history as a people.” Wilderness, the most protected landscape of U.S. public lands, was changed by those who pushed against it while they, too, were changed by coming in contact with it.

“While we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history,” wrote Stegner, “and slashing and burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land.” Americans, he added, were “in subdued ways, subdued by what we conquered,” making us a nation of “civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.”

Our wild lands — the untamed commons — continue to provide “spiritual refreshment,” wrote Stegner, “where the fun houses, the bulldozers, and the pavement of our civilization are shut out.” Stegner quoted author Sherwood Anderson, who suggested that men working in the outdoors “got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost. Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.” Available here was  a “deep, semi-religious influence” where men lost their “shrillness” and “learned the trick of quiet.”

Within his inspiring essay on wilderness, written in 1960 as a letter of comment to a federal lands manager, Stegner offered a manifesto for the conservation of a landscape that exists thanks to enlightened visionaries who recognized its lasting value for future generations, a landscape that can never be re-created:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

“Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in 10 years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there — important, that is, simply as an idea.”

Wilderness historian Roderick Nash detailed the evolution of wilderness ideology in his 1965 book “Wilderness and the American Mind,” quoting Aldo Leopold, America’s first conservation biologist: “Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country,” Leopold observed in 1938, “but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind,” which lacked, in Leopold’s view, the wherewithal to “embrace, love, respect and admire the land.”

As a soundbite for conservation, Nash coined this rhetorical question: “Doesn’t the present owe the future a chance to know the past?”

Still, the utilitarian counterpoint has played a strong hand in land management and was made clear when vast acreages in Alaska were earmarked for wilderness during some of the most passionate conservation years in American history in the 1970s as the nation awoke to emergent wilderness values. “I believe,” said Robert Dilger of the Washington State Construction Trades Council, “that it is unwise to lock up for the future 146 million acres of land that has hardly been surveyed, let alone thoroughly analyzed for its resources.”

Dilger’s views echoed the “Wise Use” mindset that swept through many Western states in the 1980s and ‘90s, an idea that originated with Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service under President Theodore Roosevelt. “Pinchot’s devotion to the forest,” states a Facebook site honoring Pinchot, “went far beyond beauty and spiritual admiration. He saw protecting the national parks as a ‘social good’ and recognized that national forests had value not only because of their beauty but also because of the resources they provided to citizens.”

The outcome of innumerable debates, contentions and often-conflicting policies over public lands has resulted in a cumulative de facto division of enormous reaches of the commons across the continent. In a little over a century, the parceling of the great American landscape represents an intractable set of manipulations to control and own the commons by those who have often sought none other than personal gain. 

Linklater wrote: “Since 1785 the landmass of the United States has grown to 2.3 billion acres, and of that total, 1.8 billion acres spread across 32 states have been at one time in the public domain. More than 1 billion acres have been transferred to individual ownership. In economic terms alone, it has represented the greatest orderly transfer of public resources to the private sector in history.”

Given the current trends in Washington, D.C., the proposed dispersal of public lands to which Hickenlooper speaks may surge again in historic proportions in acts that may make a strange mockery of a traditional and well-known Woody Guthrie song that has a crucial meaning to most Americans.

“This Land is Your Land”

This land is your land, this land is my land 
From California to the New York Island 
From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters 
This land was made for you and me. 

As I went walking that ribbon of highway 
I saw above me that endless skyway 
I saw below me that golden valley 
This land was made for you and me. 

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps 
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts 
While all around me a voice was sounding 
This land was made for you and me. 

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling 
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling 
A voice was chanting as the fog was lifting, 
This land was made for you and me. 

This land is your land, this land is my land 
From California to the New York Island 
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters 
This land was made for you and me.

***

This story, and Aspen Journalism’s ongoing coverage of challenges facing local public lands, is supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Click the link to read the release on the University of Colorado website (Daniel Katz, Ellie Browne, and Stephanie Maltarich):

June 9, 2025

Once in a while, scientific research resembles detective work. Researchers head into the field with a hypothesis and high hopes of finding specific results, but sometimes, there’s a twist in the story that requires a deeper dive into the data.

That was the case for CU Boulder researchers who led a field campaign in an agricultural region of Oklahoma. Using a high-tech instrument to measure how aerosol particles form and grow in the atmosphere, they stumbled upon something unexpected: the first-ever airborne measurements of Medium Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (MCCPs), a kind of toxic organic pollutant, in the Western Hemisphere. Their results published today in ACS Environmental Au.

“It’s very exciting as a scientist to find something unexpected like this that we weren’t looking for,” said Daniel Katz, CU Boulder chemistry PhD student and lead author of the study. “We’re starting to learn more about this toxic, organic pollutant that we know is out there, and which we need to understand better.” 

MCCPs are currently under consideration for regulation by the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty to protect human health from long-standing and widespread chemicals. While the toxic pollutants have been measured in Antarctica and Asia, researchers haven’t been sure how to document them in the Western Hemisphere’s atmosphere until now. 

MCCPs are used in fluids for metal working and in the construction of PVC and textiles. They are often found in wastewater and as a result, can end up in biosolid fertilizer, also called sewage sludge, which is created when liquid is removed from wastewater in a treatment plant. In Oklahoma, researchers suspect the MCCPs they identified came from biosolid fertilizer in the fields near where they set up their instrument.

“When sewage sludges are spread across the fields, those toxic compounds could be released into the air,” Katz said. “We can’t show directly that that’s happening, but we think it’s a reasonable way that they could be winding up in the air. Sewage sludge fertilizers have been shown to release similar compounds.”

MCCPs little cousins, Short Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (SCCPs), are currently regulated by the Stockholm Convention, and since 2009, by the EPA here in the United States. Regulation came after studies found the toxic pollutants, which travel far and last a long time in the atmosphere, were harmful to human health. But researchers hypothesize that the regulation of SCCPs may have increased MCCPs in the environment. 

“We always have these unintended consequences of regulation, where you regulate something, and then there’s still a need for the products that those were in,” said Ellie Browne, CU Boulder chemistry professor, CIRES Fellow, and co-author of the study. “So they get replaced by something.” 

Using a nitrate chemical ionization mass spectrometer, which allows scientists to identify chemical compounds in the air, the team measured air at the agricultural site 24 hours a day for one month. As Katz cataloged the data, he documented the different isotopic patterns in the compounds. The compounds measured by the team had distinct patterns, and he noticed new patterns that he immediately identified as different from the known chemical compounds. With some additional research, he identified them as chlorinated paraffins found in MCCPs.

Katz says the makeup of MCCPs are similar to PFAS, long-lasting toxic chemicals that break down slowly over time. Known as “forever chemicals,” their presence in soils recently led the Oklahoma Senate to ban biosolid fertilizer. 

Now that researchers know how to measure MCCPs, the next step might be to measure the pollutants at different times throughout the year to understand how levels change each season. Many unknowns surrounding MCCPs remain, and there’s much more to learn about their environmental impacts. 

“We identified them, but we still don’t know exactly what they do when they are in the atmosphere, and they need to be investigated further,” Katz said. “I think it’s important that we continue to have governmental agencies that are capable of evaluating the science and regulating these chemicals as necessary for public health and safety.”

Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Barry Singer). Here’s an excerpt:

July 24, 2025

Chuck Mangione, whose limpid fluegelhorn ruled the upper reaches of Billboard’s adult contemporary charts in the 1970s and ’80s with a culture-permeating lilt that helped create the genre known as “smooth jazz,” died on Tuesday at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 84. His death was confirmed by his family in a statement, which did not specify a cause. Mr. Mangione was a true pop star with an instantly recognizable signature silhouette: bewhiskered, his long hair crowned by a turned-down felt fedora. He was nominated 14 times for Grammy Awards and won twice: in 1976 for best instrumental composition, “Bellavia,” and in 1979 for best pop instrumental performance, for the title track from his score to the film “The Children of Sanchez.” Mangione hits could be grandiose, like “Land of Make Believe,” or lightly funky, like the aptly named “Feels So Good,” a Top 10 hit in 1978. Always melodic, his cotton-candy hooks could bore into listeners’ senses with a mood-elevating rush…

Mr. Mangione’s smooth jazz borrowed extensively from fusion — the infusion of electronic instruments into the jazz mainstream that Miles Davis had spearheaded in the late 1960s — dosing it with gossamer Flamenco-ish guitar and a disco backbeat, the perfect sonic pillow for his lyrical fluegelhorn. The result was a pop-jazz hybrid with enormous commercial appeal…“Feels So Good,” released in October 1977 as the title track off what quickly became a double-platinum album, made Mr. Mangione a superstar and cemented his style. It was infused with jazzlike licks but light on true jazz improvisation. Still, it brought the notion of jazz to a vast music-buying public that, for at least a decade, had been focused almost exclusively on rock ’n’ roll and its offshoots.

Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Gavin Edwards). Here’s an excerpt:

July 22, 2025

Ozzy Osbourne, who achieved enormous success as a pioneer of two wildly popular entertainment genres, heavy metal music and reality television, died on Tuesday. He was 76. His family announced the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause. He had been treated in recent years for a variant of Parkinson’s disease that he identified as Parkinsonism or Parkin 2, a condition exacerbated by his chronic drug abuse. Although Mr. Osbourne repeatedly announced his retirement over the years — he called a series of live dates in 1992 the “No More Tours” tour and a 2018 series “No More Tours II” — he gave his final concert this month, at a festival in his hometown, Birmingham, England, in his honor. Seated on a black throne, visibly moved by the enthusiasm of the crowd, he closed out his career by reuniting the original lineup of his heavy metal group Black Sabbath…As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Mr. Osbourne was one of the inventors of heavy metal. As a solo artist, he became a remarkably durable star, with 13 platinum albums and the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” But he achieved even wider fame for his rock ’n’ roll excess, including an onstage incident in which he bit the head off a bat…

“All the stuff onstage, the craziness, it’s all just a role that I play, my work,” Mr. Osbourne insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”

[…]

Born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham on Dec. 3, 1948, he was the fourth of six children of John Thomas Osbourne, a toolmaker who worked the night shift at a power plant, and Lillian (Levy) Osbourne, who worked the day shift at an auto-parts factory. The Osbournes were crammed into a small working-class home; when Ozzy was young, it had no indoor plumbing. An indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, Ozzy dropped out of school at age 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse. After he was fired from that job (for fighting), he had a brief career as a burglar; when he was arrested, his father declined to pay the fine, and Ozzy spent three months in prison, which led him to abandon his criminal ambitions.

Click the link to read the article on the New Mexico Magazine website (Jim O’Donnell). Here’s an excerpt:

July 9, 2025

IN JULY 2020, Squeaks left Santa Ana Pueblo. Fitted with a GPS tracking collar by the pueblo’s Department of Natural Resources, the subadult male mountain lion made an extraordinary 558-mile journey to Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Squeaks crossed the rugged mesa and canyon country of northwestern New Mexico, skirted towns, swam Navajo Lake—twice—and struggled to navigate a maze of highways. Eventually, in late September, Squeaks made his way under US 550 near Cuba and continued north.  The epic journey highlights a critical issue facing wildlife in New Mexico. Highways effectively work as deadly walls, impeding wildlife movement and decimating animal populations.  In New Mexico, more than 1,200 wildlife-automobile collisions are reported across the state each year, although the number is considered a serious undercount.  While firm wildlife-impact numbers are hard to come by, the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) reported an average of 671 deer and 3,041 elk involved in crashes each year from 2002 to 2018…

To address this, New Mexico is implementing a Wildlife Corridors Action Plan to guide NMDOT and the Department of Game & Fish to protect areas vital for wildlife movement and create fresh infrastructure that helps animals safely cross heavily trafficked highways…Over the past decade, the state has built 10 wildlife crossings, including one in Tijeras Canyon east of Albuquerque and at Ratón Pass near the Colorado border. Legislators also allocated an additional $50 million for construction of new passages in early 2025. The Wildlife Corridors Action Plan pinpointed 30 collision hot spots across the state with 11 in need of urgent action, including stretches near Silver City, Ruidoso, Glorieta Pass, and in the Sacramento Mountains. Santa Ana Pueblo is working with the state to construct wildlife passages along 19 miles of I-25 and nearly eight miles of US 550…

The current top priority is a $45 million project on US 550, north of Cuba, to construct underpasses and overpasses with eight-foot-high fencing meant to both keep wildlife from highways and funnel them into the passages. That’s because different species have different needs when it comes to wildlife passages. Elk and pronghorn do not like underpasses, preferring a vegetated bridge over the highway. Deer, bear, mountain lions, coyotes, and bobcat are more comfortable with underpasses, provided they are at least 25 feet wide, 12 to 14 feet high, with a length less than 100 feet.

Note: Re-upping this oldie but goodie from 2019.

Zach Ruffert on trumpet.

Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Ben Sisario). Here’s an excerpt:

June 11, 2025

Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock’s poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence, but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82…On mid-1960s hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise — a soundtrack of cheerful harmonies and a boogie beat to accompany a lifestyle of youthful leisure. Cars, sex and rolling waves were the only cares. That vision, manifested in Mr. Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”…At the same time, the round-faced, soft-spoken Mr. Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs, crafting complex and innovative productions that awed his peers.

“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”

Mr. Wilson’s masterpiece was the 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” a wistful song cycle that he directed in elaborate recording sessions, blending the sound of a rock band with classical instrumentation and oddities like the Electro-Theremin, whose otherworldly whistle Mr. Wilson would use again on “Good Vibrations.” “Pet Sounds” was a commercial disappointment upon its release, but the technical sophistication and melancholic depth of tracks like “God Only Knows” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”eventually led critics and fellow musicians to honor it as an epochal achievement. In both 2003 and 2020, Rolling Stone ranked “Pet Sounds” No. 2 on its list of the greatest albums of all time. (No. 1 was the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 2003, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” in 2020.)

We travelled from Amsterdam to Paris via the train. What a great way to travel. The train was fast, smooth, and much quieter than an airplane. I have taken the train in the U.S. and Europe is way ahead.

We enjoyed a delicious dinner at Bistrot de Chare Charenton, great ending to the day.

I believe all of Paris was watching the match between Paris St. Germain and Inter where PSG thumped the competition 5-0.

From The New York Times (Ed Mackey): “Paris Saint-Germain thrashed Inter Milan 5-0 in Munich to win the Champions League for the first time. Former Inter player Achraf Hakimi opened the scoring for PSG, but it was the 19-year-old French forward Desire Doue who stole the show. He doubled PSG’s lead with a deflected effort before scoring a wonderful second goal after the half-time break. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia added a fourth and the 19-year-old substitute Senny Mayulu smashed home another to complete the rout.

Tomorrow it’s back to Barcelona and the flight (ugh!) back to Denver where Mrs. Gulch’s landscape is waiting.

Photos via my son May 31,2025. He said that the flowers are loving the rain in Denver.

We visited the Rijks Museum yesterday to take in the works of Dutch Golden Age painting, particularly Vermeer and Rembrandt, painters that I’ve heard about. At the Salvador Dali Museum the other day Vermeer was named as an influence. What a treat to be able to view so many beautiful and inspiring works of art in one location.

We rented electric bicycles for the journey from out hotel to the museum. Of course I had read about bicycle-friendly Amsterdam but seeing the sheer number of folks on bicycles was fantastic. Moms with children on their bicycles and riding beside them, a seemingly endless stream of bicycles up and down the bikes lanes that lined nearly every thoroughfare, along with a good number of electric bicycles of all types.

We capped off the day at the Petit-Restaurant De Rozenboom for Stamppot, a traditional Dutch comfort food.

We’re in Amsterdam. Day 6 was a travel day from Linz to Amsterdam via Vienna in the Danube Valley. Low hills and farms dominated the view. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the restaurant Ali Ocakbaşı in Amsterdam.

Wednesday morning in Innsbruck we had the good fortune to go the the “Top of Innsbruck“. I’ve lived my entire life within sight of the Rocky Mountains and climbed many of them so today was a real treat. You take three separate cable cars to get to the last bit of a walk to the summit. Mountains show up in every direction from the top with the City of Innsbruck down below.

We then drove to Linz to meet up with Bob Berwyn (Inside Climate News) and his wife Uta. From Wikipedia: “Linz (Pronunciation: /lints/ LEE-NTS, Austrian German: [ˈlints]; Czech: Linec [ˈlɪnɛt͡s]) is the capital of Upper Austria and third-largest city in Austria. Located on the river Danube, the city is in the far north of Austria, 30 km (19 mi) south of the border with the Czech Republic. As of 1 January 2024, the city has a population of 212,538. It is the seventh-largest of all cities on the river Danube…Johannes Kepler spent several years of his life in the city teaching mathematics. On 15 May 1618 he discovered Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. The local public university Johannes Kepler University Linz is named for him…Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn (an Austrian town near the German border) and moved to Linz during his childhood. The notorious Holocaust bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann also spent his youth in Linz. Until the end of his life, Hitler considered Linz to be his hometown. On the agenda this morning is quest for a Linzertorte and photos of the Danube River.

We’re in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria tonight after a beautiful drive over the Jura Mountains from Saint Claude. We stopped for souvenirs and had a nice conversation with a couple who had just re-opened the store. Hellchild scored a bottle of wine that the owner said required an educated taste and that he didn’t like when he first tried it at 18. His wife said, “Then he married a country girl!” Later we ate lunch in Bern (Quiche Lorraine) and stretched our legs with a walk around the University of Bern Botanical Garden and a little “botanizing”.

Heading east towards Zurich we got our first glimpse of the northern Alps.

We’re in Saint-Claude, Bourgonne-Franche-comté, France after the drive from Avignon.

We drove around Avignon this morning checking out the walls of the Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes). From Wikipedia: “The walls of Avignon (French: Les Remparts d’Avignon) are a series of defensive stone walls that surround the city of Avignon in the south of France. They were built in the 14th century during the Avignon papacy and have been continually rebuilt and repaired throughout their subsequent history…From the 1350s during the Hundred Years’ War the town became vulnerable to pillage by marauding bands of mercenaries and in 1357 under Innocent VI, the fifth Avignon pope, work began on the construction of a new set of city walls to enclose the expanded town. The walls took nearly 20 years to complete. The walls stretch for 4.3 km (2.7 mi) and enclose an area of 150 ha (370 acres). There were originally twelve gates controlling access to the city but this number was reduced to seven when the fortifications were modified between 1481 and 1487 during the French Wars of Religion. There are now 15 vehicular entrances and 11 pedestrian entrances…The town had always been subject to flooding by the Rhône. In November 1840 the river reached a height of 8.32 metres (27.3 ft), the highest that has ever been recorded. It caused severe flooding in the town with most streets under water. In some areas the water reached the first floor level of the houses. The flooding lasted for over three weeks and deposited large quantities of mud in the streets. Following this event the town decided to make better use of the town walls as a flood barrier and to install sluice gates on all the canals and drains. Each of the city gates was modified to facilitate the construction of a temporary cofferdam to prevent the river water entering the town. A pair of vertical slots were cut into the limestone blocks on either side of the opening. The slots were separated by a distance of between 0.5 m to 1 m and were designed to accommodate wooden planks which could be placed across the gate entrance. The gap between the sets of planks was filled with a mixture of earth and straw to create a dam.

From Wikipedia: “The Palais des Papes (English: Palace of the Popes; lo Palais dei Papas in Occitan) in Avignon, Southern France, is one of the largest and most important medieval Gothic buildings in Europe. Once a fortress and palace, the papal residence was a seat of Western Christianity during the 14th century. Six papal conclaves were held in the Palais, leading to the elections of Benedict XII in 1334, Clement VI in 1342, Innocent VI in 1352, Urban V in 1362, Gregory XI in 1370 and Benedict XIII in 1394. The older area of Avignon is inside the walls and our hotel was located there.

The drive to Saint-Claude is up the Rhone Valley most of the way. Farms are everywhere, mountains in the distance most of the time. We stopped for lunch Vienne. From Wikipedia: “Vienne (French: [vjɛn]; Arpitan: Vièna) is a town in southeastern France, located 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Lyon, at the confluence of the Gère and the Rhône. It is the fourth-largest commune in the Isère department, of which it is a subprefecture alongside La Tour-du-Pin. Vienne was a major centre of the Roman Empire under the Latin name Vienna. Vienne was the capital of the Allobroges, a Gallic people, before its conquest by the Romans. Transformed into a Roman colony in 47 BC under Julius Caesar, it became a major urban centre, ideally located along the Rhône, then a major axis of communication. Emperor Augustus banished Herod the Great‘s son, the ethnarch Herod Archelaus to Vienne in 6 AD.

From Wikipedia: “Saint-Claude (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ klod]) is a commune and a sous-préfecture of the Jura department in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in eastern France. It lies on the river Bienne…The town was originally named Saint-Oyand after Saint Eugendus. However, when St. Claudius had, in 690, resigned his Diocese of Besançon and died in 696 as twelfth abbot, the number of pilgrims who visited his grave was so great that, since the 13th century, the name “Saint-Claude” came more and more into use and has today superseded the other. It was the world capital of wooden smoking pipes crafted by hand from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century. During WWII the town came under German occupation, yet still remained a haven for Jews escaping to Switzerland due to its proximity to it (about 8 km away, as the crow flies). As a punishment to the locals for consistently assisting and harbouring the fleeing Jews, the Nazis executed all of the town’s males of service age in the town centre.”

Thank you veterans for your sacrifices.

Crossed the Rhone River and now we’re in Avignon, Vaucluse, France for the night in a cool hotel in the old part of the city. It looked like we were driving into a castle on the way here. I’ll know better tomorrow when it is light out. The hotel is very old school, including steep winding steps up two floors to the rooms ,with no parking, so the vehicle in on the street a couple of blocks away.

We spent some time this morning and into the afternoon in Barcelona checking out La Sagrada Família Cathedral, purchasing some souvenirs (I got an FC Barcelona hat), and dining on paella. As we approached Figueres Hellchild noticed a sign for the Salvador Dali Museum. While not on the official Coyote Gulch travel plan she insisted on stopping and a few hours later we were back on the road. What a fine experience.

“It’s so imspirational and hopeful knowing that someone can create so much beauty” — Hellchild

I’m in Barcelona about to head out on the road towards Central Europe.

And here’s to our children that you loved so much.