Last month, just before Thanksgiving, my cousin’s youngest son and a friend stopped by to spend the night on their way out west—toward the wide-open lands beyond the Mississippi. They’re from the rolling hills around Asheville, North Carolina, a region known for its craft breweries, art, and the Biltmore Estate.
The Biltmore, using the wealth of Gilded Age industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, has long symbolized American privilege. The Vanderbilt family were wealthy industrialists who amassed their fortune in the shipping and railroad business in the late 1800s.
But the Biltmore estate also represents something else: the origins of our public lands. In 1914, Edith Vanderbilt sold 86,000 acres of the Biltmore estate to the U.S. government, helping create Pisgah National Forest—one of the first national forests east of the Mississippi. It was an act of stewardship, a gift to the American people that still shapes the landscape today.
These two young travelers told me how stunned they were by the quiet and openness surrounding Macomb. I tried to prepare them for the vastness they were about to encounter: highways without rush-hour bottlenecks and horizons that seem endless.
I remember my own journey out west after college, just before I left for the Peace Corps, when a friend from Germany and I drove my trusty Toyota Tercel to Yellowstone. The scent of the wildfire that had happened a year prior hung in the air long before the blackened trees came into view.
Years later, when our daughters were small, our little family of four piled into a minivan and made our own pilgrimage beyond the Mississippi. Devils Tower, Crazy Horse, and the national parks that we visited took our breath away. We camped under stars that seemed close enough to touch, grateful for the public lands that belong to all of us.
That is the America I wanted these young humans to discover. But today, it is no longer a given that our public lands will be there for future generations.
In September, the Trump administration’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” proposed selling millions of acres of public lands to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Public outrage forced Sen. Mike Lee to drop the idea. But the administration hasn’t slowed down. Instead, it has quietly advanced a series of executive orders that would open more than 88 million acres to drilling, mining, and logging—stripping protections from national forests, the Arctic wildlife reserve, and some of the most ecologically sensitive places left on the planet.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made it clear that he sees extractive industries—not the American public—as his department’s “customer.” The administration is accelerating land sales that transfer control of public lands to private corporations. It’s a seismic
shift away from more than a century of conservation.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the administration’s push to expand the already heavily subsidized public-lands grazing program. Federal officials insist that making grazing cheaper will “fuel the economy” and chip away at the national debt. The reality is the polar opposite.
Ranchers who use federal lands pay far below market rates to graze livestock. Many also qualify for cut-rate crop insurance and drought assistance. And the benefits disproportionately flow upward: about two-thirds of all grazing on BLM land is controlled by just 10% of ranchers.
This is not family ranching—it’s corporate welfare.
Take billionaire Stan Kroenke, who by the way is married to Ann Walton, one of the Walmart heirs. He is worth an estimated $20 billion. As owner of the sprawling Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada, he can graze cattle on public lands for less than 15% of the cost of private land. Kroenke owns major sports franchises and vast real estate holdings. He doesn’t need government assistance. Yet the federal government subsidizes him anyway.
The grazing program was created in the 1930s to stop the overuse that contributed to the Dust Bowl. Over time, it has quietly been transformed into a subsidy system for mining interests, energy companies, corporate ranchers, and billionaire hobbyists. Instead of reforming it, the Trump administration wants to expand it—opening even more of the 240 million acres managed by the BLM and Forest Service while weakening oversight of environmental damage.
And all of this is happening while public employees—including the park rangers who protect these lands—went unpaid during the government shutdown.
The young people driving west deserve to see America’s public lands the way I did—wide, wild, and accessible to all. These places are part of our shared inheritance, a legacy born not of extraction but of foresight and generosity.
We can’t allow that to be sold off piece by piece. If we don’t act, the next generation might discover not boundless horizons, but fenced-off land, closed gates, and a nation that chose billionaires over its own birthright.
As Mollie Beattie, the first female director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote, “What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.”
Heather McIlvaine-Newsad is a Professor of Anthropology at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on collaborative action for sustainability.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the university or TSPR.
Diverse viewpoints are welcomed and encouraged.