Tracy Stone-Manning is the president of The Wilderness Society and former director of the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden.
Lynn Scarlett is the former global chief external affairs officer at The Nature Conservancy and former United States deputy secretary of the Interior under President George W. Bush.
Both are advisory board members of Ground Shift, a new initiative that is supporting cross-partisan conversations about the future of public lands and waters.
The nation’s public lands and waters are not an abstraction. They are the places where we hunt and hike, where cattle graze and rivers rise, where tribes connect with ancient and sacred places, where families escape on weekends and where children learn the wonders of the sea.
But these places are also where the limits of our current public lands and waters system are becoming impossible to ignore.
Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development — often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.
The systems meant to manage all of this are showing their age.
Between the two of us, we have spent decades working inside those systems, leading agencies under Democratic and Republican administrations, shaping policy at national conservation and environmental policy organizations, and trying to make public land management work better from within. We have seen the commitment of land managers, scientists and wildland firefighters. We have also seen how often they are constrained by outdated laws, fragmented authorities, limited funding and bureaucratic processes that make even common-sense solutions painfully slow.
What’s increasingly clear is that many of today’s challenges are not just technical or financial. They are baked in and structural. They reflect institutions and policies built for a different time, under different assumptions, facing different realities.
Which leads us to a question that feels both simple and urgent: What do we want from and for our public lands and waters now?
Not in the mid-20th century, when most of our modern land laws were written. Not in a world before climate change, before mass recreation, before large-scale renewable energy, before today’s biodiversity crisis. But now — in a nation that is hotter, more crowded, and more economically and culturally complex than ever.
This moment calls for something more than incremental fixes. It calls for fresh thinking and for many more voices at the table.
That reflection cannot be confined to any one ideology, constituency or region. Our public lands and waters are shared by everyone: ranchers and recreationists, Indigenous peoples and urban families, energy workers and wildlife biologists.
To meet the challenges of this century, we need to draw on the diversity of Americans’ experiences and perspectives to forge a durable vision that delivers more — not less — from our shared lands and waters.
More accessible parks and outdoor opportunities.
More clean water and resilient watersheds.
More abundant wildlife and connected habitat.
More healthy forests and restored rivers.
More collaboration with tribal nations in stewarding their ancestral homelands.
More voice for local communities.
More clean energy and responsibly sourced minerals.
More equitable access to the benefits of nature.
And ultimately, more Americans engaged in deciding what these places become.
But achieving that vision requires stepping outside familiar silos.
For too long, conversations about public lands have tended to happen in narrow circles: agency experts talking mainly to other agency experts, conservation groups speaking to their own supporters, rural communities feeling left out of decisions that affect their livelihoods, tribal nations still fighting for meaningful recognition of sovereignty and stewardship.
For too long, conversations about public lands have tended to happen in narrow circles.
If we are honest, even well-intentioned reform efforts often remain bounded by the same institutional habits and political divides that created today’s gridlock.
The status quo is not neutral. It produces real consequences on the ground: for communities waiting years for restoration projects, for tribes seeking co-management authority, for firefighters stretched past capacity, for families navigating overcrowded parks, for species slipping closer to extinction.
If we want a different future, we have to ask different questions.
Historically, when public land policy reached an inflection point, the country responded with periods of deep reflection and institutional reinvention. The most influential example came in the 1960s, when Congress convened a bipartisan group of leaders and experts to rethink how public lands should be managed.
That effort produced One-Third of Our Nation’s Lands, a landmark report that laid the groundwork for modern federal land policy.
Sixty years later, we are again at an inflection point. But today, that kind of big-picture rethinking is unlikely to emerge from within government alone. Agencies are stretched thin. Congress is polarized. Political cycles reward short-term wins, not long-term system design.
That does not mean the work should wait. It means it must broaden.
The civic space — universities, tribes, local governments, land managers, ranchers, conservationists, industry leaders and community organizers — can and should play a larger role in shaping the next chapter of governance of our public lands and waters. Not to replace public institutions but to help them evolve.
We need spaces where unconventional ideas can be tested without immediate partisan framing; where people who disagree on specific policies can still grapple with shared realities like megafires, prolonged drought and biodiversity loss; where reform is understood not as a threat, but as means to better stewardship.
In a divided country, our shared lands and waters provide some of our strongest points of connection. They are where many Americans still encounter something larger than themselves: a river system, a fire-adapted forest, a desert ecosystem, a wildlife migration corridor. They remind us that beyond our differences, we still share a physical and ecological commons.
How we manage that commons in the decades ahead will shape our communities, economies, cultures and ecosystems in profound ways.
The systems we inherited brought us this far. But the world they were built for no longer exists.
Are we willing to step back, listen more widely and create space for new ideas to take root — not as a branding exercise or a political maneuver, but as a necessary act of stewardship for a changing nation?
