The American West is known around the globe for its great mountains and deserts, its sprawling national parks, its vast ranches and ghost towns. In recent years, though, it’s also become known for the war being fought over whether those Western forests, grasslands, minerals, wilderness, and rivers should be used or preserved.
For anyone who lives outside the region, it’s easy to forget that more than 50 percent of the West — and as much as 82 percent of some individual Western states — is the property, not of those states and the industries that consume their resources, but of all 270 million Americans. So when politicians open Western lands to mining and timber corporations, they’re offering up for destruction something that belongs to all of us, thus raising the question of true ownership.
