Jeff Bezos may have a 417-foot yacht and multiple private jets and mansions, but here’s something very special about America: I have a couple of summer retreats that he could never buy.
One is a spot beside a glacier-fed creek high on the slopes of the vast Mount Hood Wilderness in Oregon, in an area called Paradise Park. Another is in a flower-filled meadow in Goat Rocks Wilderness in Washington state, with mountain goats frolicking above.
My retreats aren’t mansions or even homes, except in the most temporary sense. They are overnight camp spots on our glorious public lands. I lay out my ground sheet and sleeping pad, unfurl my sleeping bag and, when darkness comes, drowsily watch for shooting stars above. (I don’t believe in tents.) Nobody can pull rank on me, except a bear.
Elon Musk and Bezos cannot buy these spots because some of our visionary ancestors battled successfully to preserve this legacy for future generations. For us.
About 40% of the United States is publicly owned, and that fraction is much larger in Western states. The stars in the firmament may be Yosemite and Yellowstone, but there are countless others. My favorite beach spot in the United States is a little place you’ve never heard of called Strawberry Hill. It’s a magical wayside hidden below the highway on the Oregon coast. But it abounds with harbor seals basking on the rocks, stray agates sparkling in the sand, and tide pools with starfish and sea anemones.
America’s wild places seem among our last bastions of democracy and inclusion. Any given meeting place from a bar to a public square tends to be tinted red or blue, catering to this group or that. Yet the wilderness is just plain green, a meeting spot for people of all backgrounds and political views, from deer hunters to biologists, bass fishermen to poets. Wild spaces used to be disproportionately male, but now, partly because of the influence of the book and movie “Wild,” women fill the trails.
Speaking of which, my daughter and I backpacked the entire Pacific Crest Trail, 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, and we found it a rare safe place from the kind of judgments we make about one another every day. On a trail there is no hierarchy or aristocracy, for we all stink and are filthy. So we mix and empathize – Trumpers and never-Trumpers, young and old, rich and poor, bonding over blisters.
America’s bounty of wilderness is mostly the result of shrewd policy decisions that preserved these lands for all of us to cherish today. Otherwise, they could have gone the way of other elements of our heritage, such as buffalo and passenger pigeons.
Lord Bryce, a British ambassador to Washington, is said to have observed something to the effect that public lands are “the best idea America ever had.” What was important, though, was not the hatching of the idea but its execution.
We enjoy this inheritance only because some great Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries fought for it. The heroes were those like Gifford Pinchot, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s who became the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. In less than eight years, Pinchot and Roosevelt set aside roughly 230 million acres as national forests and other public preserves – an area bigger than the three West Coast states put together. Congress tried to stop them in 1907 from setting aside more national forests, so they swung into action and preserved 16 million acres in a single week. President Donald Trump has whittled away at this and tried to sell off some of our natural inheritance, but the overall edifice of public lands seems reasonably secure.
America’s best idea survives. Because of Pinchot and Roosevelt and others like them, I’m reasonably confident that in another 250 years, wilderness will still awe my descendants. I imagine my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren camping on the side of Mount Hood much as I do, drinking from the same creek and dazzled by the same lupine flowers, all while thanking our forebears for their vision and determination that make this possible.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.