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On Common Ground: An American InheritanceAuthor: Eleven Dollar Bill
America holds hundreds of millions of acres of land in trust for the public national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and the waters off our coasts. Right now, that inheritance is being taken, not in secret, but in plain sight, while the country's attention is elsewhere.On Common Ground: An American Inheritance is a six-part documentary podcast about the immediate threats to America's public lands. In 2025, a proposal to sell three million acres of public land set off a national uproar and was defeated. It felt like a victory. But while the country fought that sale, something far more damaging passed into law in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: a mandate to open more than 200 million acres of public land to industrial development many times the size of the sale that was defeated.The fight we won mattered less than the fight we lost.Across six episodes, the series follows an unlikely and unusually broad coalition: hunters and anglers, Tribal leaders, climbers, scientists, poets, public servants, and local communities. They don't agree on everything, but they share a conviction that some places are worth protecting and passing on to the next generation.At its heart, the series asks a simple question: What does it mean to share common ground as Americans and what would it mean to lose it?The series is hosted by Bill Hedden, former Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust, with co-host John Leshy former Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior and one of the foremost authorities on the history and law of America's public lands.All episodes of this limited series will be available in August.Follow along:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/on_common_ground_TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@on.common.groundYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnCommon_GroundOn Common Ground: An American Inheritance is hosted by Bill Hedden and John Leshy. Produced by Sarah Hedden, Dagny Scott, and Del Feltz. Sound engineering by Joe Flood. Additional sound editing Language: en Genres: News, Politics, Sports, Wilderness Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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Bonus: The People
Episode 7
Monday, 19 October, 2026
In this bonus episode of On Common Ground: An American Inheritance, we find inspiration in people who saw the places they love threatened and took action.The first six episodes of this series laid out how America’s public lands are being taken — the theft, the lies, the cost. This episode turns its attention to the people who refuse to let them be destroyed without a fight.We don’t know how this dark chapter ends, and that’s exactly why what we do now matters. We set out to understand how we can all find our agency on this issue.The first portrait is Becky Rom, who grew up in Ely, Minnesota, at the edge of the Boundary Waters, and has spent some fifty years fighting to protect that wilderness. This past April, Congress used an obscure procedure, the Congressional Review Act, to strip away the twenty-year mining ban that shielded the Boundary Waters watershed. They had come within a hair of permanent protection.From there the episode turns to Gillian Fitzgerald, a young organizer who first came to the Boundary Waters as a wilderness guide. She talks about how you keep going when the grief is constant: how you work with loss and try and turn it into something good for the world. Tracy Stone-Manning, president of The Wilderness Society and former director of the Bureau of Land Management, explains how these fights are actually won — slowly, over careers, by the old hands and the new ones together. The final voice in the series is Matt Lee-Ashley, Executive Director of Ground Shift — a cross-partisan initiative to promote bold new thinking about the future of America’s public lands. He leaves us with the big idea at its heart.On Common Ground: An American Inheritance tells the story of the lands that belong to all of us, and of the fight to protect them.A bonus coda to the six-part series. All episodes available now.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/on_common_ground_ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@on.common.groundYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnCommon_GroundOn Common Ground: An American Inheritance is hosted by Bill Hedden and John Leshy. Writing, story editing, and production by Sarah Hedden and Dagny Scott. Sound engineering by Tom Hedden. Digital strategy by Hallie Richie. On Common Ground is a program of the Mediators Foundation and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
