I was recently on a podcast where I was asked a simple question: How do we best protect our public lands? Easy, by remembering that everyone, and I do mean everyone, loves these wild places.
For too long, public land users have siloed ourselves off from one another. There are the off-roaders, the hunters, the anglers, the climbers, the campers, the through-hikers, the rafters, and so on and so on. All public lands users, but deliberately walled off from everyone else, and done so by our own accord under the guise of "My recreation is more important than everyone else's."
But that's horseshit, and puts public land advocates on our heels against the concerted block of villains—Senator Mike Lee, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, etc—attempting to do away with our most cherished spaces. Everyone loves the outdoors. Everyone loves public lands. And everyone, and I mean everyone, supports public land recreation in real, tangible ways, as evidenced by the recent report by the US's own Bureau of Economic Analysis.
