'Made for you and me' – to do what with?

When Woody Guthrie wrote "This land is your land," the legendary folksinger and activist was speaking both lyrically and literally – extolling the natural beauty of the United States while asserting the right of all Americans, rich and poor, to declare "this land was made for you and me."

A half-century later, those public lands "owned" by everyone – parks, forests, rangeland, wildlife refuges – reflect heart-deep feelings, even among those who never get to see them except perhaps on the Discovery Channel. For many foreign visitors, these are the US equivalent of European cathedrals.

As millions of families spend this Independence Day weekend hiking, boating, and driving through such lands, the political wrangle between those who want to preserve this treasured landscape as pristine as possible and the "wise-use" advocates pushing for more development is becoming fiercer.

Part of this is political: a shift from the Clinton administration, whose policies were crafted by appointees with backgrounds in the environmental movement, to a Bush administration that includes many officials who have worked in the oil, gas, and timber industries – including Vice President Dick Cheney and the president himself.

But the conflict in values goes deeper than partisan politics.

It involves both love of nature – what Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson calls "biophilia," or mankind's innate affection for the natural world – and the strong American independent streak that resists government regulation. For many people, in other words, the feeling of awe that grizzly bears evoke combines paradoxically with the thrill of blasting through bear country on a Yamaha "Grizzly" model all-terrain vehicle with a 600 cc engine.

Uncle Sam oversees more than 500 million acres of land around the United States, most of it here in the West. In some Western states, the federal government – either the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior – controls more than half the land within state borders.

This means that not only the nation's "crown jewels" – parks such as Yellowstone and Glacier – but timber-rich forests and rangeland for cattle grazing belong just as much to New Jersey urbanites as they do to Montana ranchers and Oregon loggers.

When Keith and Carol Pritchard of Richmond, Va., spent their recent vacation thrilling at giant redwoods, rafting the Rogue River, and hiking at Oregon's Crater Lake National Park, they redeemed a bit of their stake in public land.

Ever since the first wagon trains left Independence, Mo., for Oregon's rich Willamette Valley 159 years ago, the fact that easterners should have a legitimate claim on large tracts of the West has rankled traditional Westerners – particularly when they're reminded of taxpayer-supported federal land policies (massive water projects and rail lines, below-cost timber sales, grazing subsidies, cheap mining claims, etc.) that go against the myth of Western independence.

Right up to the present, as Stanford University historian Richard White has observed, Westerners "usually regarded the federal government much as they would regard a particularly scratchy wool shirt in winter.... It was all that was keeping them warm, but it still irritated them."

Page: 1 | 2