Epiphany. Sometimes I think it’s the most important word in the English language.
I teach for a living. College journalism. One of my students is set to graduate at the end of the semester. Saturday she has an interview and, if it goes well, she just might have a job waiting for her in May.
I gave her some advice. Describe an epiphany, a moment when the lightning bolt of insight struck like a blinding, Slurpee headache. Tell your prospective boss about a story, nearly finished, upended by the discovery of new information revealing what you’d believed with absolute certainty was in fact, false.
If she describes a moment or two like that, how epiphanies helped her become a better, more accurate reporter, she’ll have gone a long way toward landing that job.
An epiphany is a great thing. We talk about them a lot in my classroom. Epiphanies of the individual, as well as collective revelations, when society, confronted by new facts, understands the old way is dust.
I have a lifetime of epiphanies. The one most important here, in this finale of a three-column series examining public land and access, is that a sizable chunk of society reviles both. I had long assumed, since teaching myself to hunt and fish in the 1980s, that everyone shared my appreciation for our wild-land commons.
But America has changed a great deal since then. In his 1981 inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared “government is the problem.” Then, in his 1996 inaugural, President Bill Clinton told us the “era of big government is over.”
The intervening decades proved both men wrong.
Government isn’t the problem if you like to hunt and fish. Vast tracts of public land are to outdoor types what butter is to bread. You can still hunt without public land, if you know someone or can pay your way past a locked gate, but the experience is a little dry and flavorless in comparison.
On public land, in places where the resources of government have been marshaled to protect and expand access, citizens are free to go where they wish, hunting, fishing, skiing, whatever suits them. It’s their land — our land — after all. There’s no right of the lord to appease.
In states like Montana, everyone is landed gentry. We’ve learned the hard way privatization isn’t magic fairy dust enhancing the flavor of everything it’s sprinkled over.
We’re still operating under the rules of the North American Model — otherwise known as the best system for managing wildlife in the known universe — but these days it seems just barely. The North American Model requires strong, effective governance held accountable by its citizenry and, dare I say, the press.
We’re losing both.
There’s a hint of blood on the wind. Those who covet wildlife for privatization, who wish to again block access to Montana’s rivers, who fantasize about a West where the riffraff spend their days laboring in factories, their nights stocking shelves just to pay rent, while only the wealthy have time and access to the gift of Montana’s wild places — that crowd thinks they have a chance to make their dream a reality.
Just to the south in Wyoming, a landowner is suing four hunters, claiming $7 million in damages because they hunted public land next to his. The Crazy Mountains. Ruby River. Mitchell Slough. Every illegally signed forest road from here to where the U.S. Forest Service ends reminds us war has been declared on our birthright to hunt, fish or just walk out on an empty chunk of the finest land on the planet to take in its majesty.
That’s my epiphany. A powerful minority has seen the freedom Montana’s public land, easy access and plentiful native wildlife incubate, and decided they’d rather have Texas.