In the 1970s, Bill Hedden took a job at the Atlas uranium mill on the banks of the Colorado River in Moab. He was lucky: a spot on the construction crew kept him away from the mill's most lethal work — the acid tanks, the yellowcake hearth, the men spreading fiberglass resin with their bare hands, who'd been told nothing about what it would do to them. Those jobs went to people without the education to know the danger, many of them Native laborers who commuted hours for the work, and many of them died young. When the federal subsidy ended, the company declared bankruptcy and walked away — leaving sixteen million tons of radioactive tailings on the bank of a river that supplies drinking water to forty million people. The cleanup has since taken twenty-five years and more than a billion taxpayer dollars, and it is still not finished.

What happened at Atlas was not an exception. It is how extraction on public land has worked for well over a century. In this episode, hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace the fiscal cost first: the decades-old bonding rules that leave roughly 130,000 orphaned wells for taxpayers to plug, the royalty rates the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled back to 1920 levels, and a total public liability that conservative advocate David Jenkins and Leshy put in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Then they turn to the cost that no budget captures: uranium mining at the doorstep of the Grand Canyon's aquifer and the Havasupai homeland, the contamination that still scars the Navajo Nation, and the disappearing water itself, as gutted agencies leave forests unmanaged and western rivers run dry.

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.

All six episodes are available in August.

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On 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 by Grace Wiley. This series is a production of Eleven Dollar Bill, and a project of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.