When Bernie Sanders unveiled his “Medicare for All bill” last month, it sent bolts of electric excitement through a rising generation of progressive young people who crave an end to the austerity consensus that has dominated this country for at least a decade. The senator from Vermont offered a bold vision that has the potential to improve the wellbeing of millions and an army of millennials, with our affinity for social democracy and social media, loved him for it.

Healthcare, though, is just one realm of public life that needs an urgent infusion of idealism. From housing policy to public education, from police reform to environmental issues, the youth of the US are desperate for ambitious and populist ideas that can help revitalize this republic we’re inheriting. We are bent on upending the status quo, because the status quo, as we know, is all wrong.

Consider, for instance, America’s public lands – they offer a compelling case in point. The national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and more make up one of our country’s most beloved and iconic social institutions. Together they represent perhaps the greatest accumulation of collective wealth and beauty in the world. Yet our political leaders neglect these lands with shocking recklessness.



At the present moment the trails and roads, the bridges and buildings and other infrastructure on our national parks are crumbling. The Park Service reports a deferred maintenance backlog of roughly $12bn. The Forest Service, for its part, is grappling with mounting maintenance needs estimated at about $5bn. All this as public land visitation rates continue their steep and constant climb.

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Power-wielding Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, don’t even pretend to care about the problem. Indeed, if it gets its way, the Republican party would only exacerbate the decline and disrepair of the public domain. As Congress enters into fiscal negotiations this month, the president’s proposed budget would cut the Park Service’s discretionary budget by 13% and reduce agency staff by 1,200 people, further enfeebling an already under-resourced agency. The Forest Service would fare no better, with its meager capital improvement and maintenance budget slashed by a startling 73%.

Things cannot continue in this manner. Just as this country needs an aspirational vision for healthcare policy, so it needs new ideas for the roughly 600m acres of publicly owned forest and mountain and desert and stream. It needs political leaders who will care for these treasures in a manner befitting their enormous import. It needs a national parks populism that can eclipse completely the tired conservative dogma of endless austerity, deregulation and privatization.

But what would a populist agenda for our public lands look like?

Above all, it would put people to work. Riffing on Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed millions on the national lands during the New Deal era, our country could create an improved and fully public Civilian Conservation Corps for the 21st century. It could hire hundreds of thousands of people each year to repair trails, fix facilities, eradicate invasive weeds, rehabilitate damaged habitat and otherwise conduct crucial maintenance and restoration on the federal domain.

A national parks populism would also seek to make our public lands accessible to all.

We could, for instance, put an end to the creeping spread of user fees at parks and campsites across the country. These fees, which are favored by conservative and libertarian policymakers, create an unnecessary barrier to entry and undermine the open-access ethos that should be the core of the public lands experience.

We could fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a pool of money drawn from offshore oil and gas royalties that is meant to finance acquisition and improvement projects on America’s lands. Though it is supposed to be renewed with $900m each year, Congress regularly diverts its funding and uses the money for unrelated purposes. Let’s put an end to that practice and go on a land conservation spree, one that would create new national parks, wildlife refuges and recreation areas, or expand old ones, in communities that currently have little proximity to open space.

Why not develop a free shuttle service to transport people from dense urban areas to nearby national parks?

We could also let loose our imaginations and experiment a little: why not develop a free shuttle service that provides transportation from dense urban areas to nearby national parks and recreation areas? Why not create a publicly funded program in the style of Outward Bound that offers young people the opportunity to travel into the back-country and learn leadership and outdoor skills? Why not devise more programs like the one at Cuyahoga Valley national park, where local farmers are invited to lease parcels and practise sustainable agricultural methods in order to conserve the rural landscape? The possibilities are boundless.

We possess the resources to pursue ambitious domestic programs of this sort, no matter what the deficit hawks say. Just last month, after all, the Senate passed a $700bn defense policy bill in the blink of an eye and without any serious debate. That kind of money could fund a 21st-century Civilian Conservation Corps or a park construction spree many times over. And if we need more cash our country has at least 540 billionaires who could do with some heavier taxation.

Our parks, our public lands, our pine groves and canyons and towering peaks, have never been so popular. It’s fitting, then, that we should fulfill their true populist potential and use them to restore social democracy and provide for the health, enjoyment and general welfare of all our people. If the parks are America’s best idea, then idealism should shape their future.