The finale of this 6-part documentary series offers hope and a vision of what public lands could still become if people are willing to stand up for the places they love.

"The Inheritance" opens with Ada Limón, the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, who spent her tenure installing poems in national parks. Beauty, she says, is what makes us brave — and we need our bravery now. In a country where so much can be bought, public land remains one of the few places the promise of equality still holds.

Bill Hedden and John Leshy make the case through the people and coalitions who have defended these places: the hunters and anglers; local elected officials; a Havasupai teenager who helped a president create a monument her family had fought generations to protect; a band of Navajo grandmothers who took on a billion-dollar Grand Canyon resort and won; a fiscal conservative protecting taxpayers. What connects these stories are the long odds they faced and the love that motivated them — ordinary people defeating those with connections, access and extreme wealth.

From there, the episode turns to what getting it right would actually require. If extraction is allowed, companies should pay real royalties and restore the sites completely when they leave. The lands should be managed for the long term— the watersheds, the wildlife, the climate they help hold in balance. And we have to let the people who cared for this ground for thousands of years — long before the rest of us arrived — teach the rest of us how to do the same.

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.

Correction: Episode 6 names Tania Lown-Hecht as a USFS Planner, instead of Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance. The Episode also uses a shortened version of her name "Tania Hecht," instead of her full name, "Tania Lown-Hecht."

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.

Follow now so the next episode lands in your feed automatically.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/on_common_ground_

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@on.common.ground

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnCommon_Ground

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.

Every argument for dismantling America's public lands is built to sound reasonable: we need affordable housing; the West shouldn't be run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington; public lands represent a broken promise to the states. Episode four, "The Lies," pulls those arguments apart, and asks a more consequential question: who profits when we believe them?

The episode opens with Scott Fitzwilliams, who spent his career in the U.S. Forest Service and rose to supervise Colorado's White River National Forest — the most visited in the country. He and his deputy carried more than sixty years of combined wildfire experience — knowledge that takes a career to build and cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Then came the DOGE firings: probationary employees terminated by form letter for "performance," a claim Fitzwilliams calls a bald-faced lie, just before fire season.

Hosts Bill Hedden and John Leshy trace how the hollowing-out of federal agencies is not an accident but a deliberate strategy. Land Tawney names the playbook — defund, dismantle, divest — and the episode follows it through Project 2025 and the budget starvation of agencies that together amount to less than a third of one percent of the federal budget. The decay that follows is easy to see: unmaintained trails, closed restrooms, expertise walking out the door for good. As Teal Lehto, Sarah Krakoff, and Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance Tania Lown-Hecht explain, an agency starved of people and funding becomes the argument for getting rid of public lands altogether.

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 available in August.

Follow now so the next episode lands in your feed automatically.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/on_common_ground_

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@on.common.ground

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnCommon_Ground

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.

Correction: Episode 4 names Tania Lown-Hecht as a USFS Planner, instead of Vice President of Communications & Strategy at Outdoor Alliance. The Episode also uses a shortened version of her name "Tania Hecht," instead of her full name, "Tania Lown-Hecht."