“Keep public lands, now, 
in public hands, now
That’s our demand, now
Better understand, now
This land is your land
This land is my land
Keep public lands in public hands!”

SANTA FE – The Raging Grannies did Woody Guthrie proud Monday afternoon in the New Mexico capital with their spirited take on This Land is Your Land.

They didn’t know it yet, but it was the start of a pretty good week.

For months, the question on many minds was just how long the West’s majestic public lands would remain in public hands.

Outside the earshot of the attendees of the Western Governors’ Association conference, where Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had already given his speech and avoided the heat of citizen critics, a crowd of more than 1,000 rallied in opposition to the Trump administration’s plan to sell off approximately 3 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and other public lands, including hundreds of thousands of acres in Nevada, ostensibly to help carve out a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the nation’s wealthiest people.

The plan has been marketed as a response to the affordable housing crisis and as a boon to mining and the oil and gas industry at a time of unprecedented competition for minerals. But the bottom line is the same. The tax cut is at the heart of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and many people see through the political façade.

With the self-imposed July 4 deadline approaching, by Monday the public lands sell-off plan had become more unpopular than Trump might have imagined. And not just in liberal Santa Fe.

Pushback came not just from the tree huggers, but from the meat eaters as well. As anyone who knows anything about public lands will tell you, a broad cross section of Americans enjoy access to the West’s great commons. When it comes to public lands issues, campers, hikers and rock climbers unite with hunters and anglers on the issue. In the West, the economic impact of outdoor recreation of all sorts is enormous and essential for the survival of many rural communities.

On Monday, as speakers shouted about the shortsightedness and rapaciousness of the sell-off plan, defenders of public lands had many of their own reasons for standing shoulder to shoulder in a common cause.

“We’re fighting for our homeland,” conservationist and author William deBuys says. “It encompasses all the things the speakers said. It is our heritage, our sense of place, the resources we depend on, our open space, wandering space, water to irrigate with places to be peaceful in, places that are sacred to us. Whether we’re native or Hispano or gringo, everyone has these feelings for the marvelous land that we live in. Most of the people who are here are either here because they were born here, or because they moved here for the open space.”

Longtime resident Nancy Cook and partner Ed Breitinger hunt, fish, hike and camp on public lands. Cook also finds the intangible in nature, a sense of peace in troubled times.

“Having access to public lands means everything to us,” Cook says. “We know that being out in nature is the best medicine for everyone, for everything, mentally, physically, everything. For me personally, if I lost access to our public lands, I would lose the most fundamentally important part of my good health and well-being.”

“And the great thing,” Santa Fe resident and book designer Joanna Hurley says, “is that New Mexico has so much of it. I wouldn’t know what to do if there wasn’t public land to walk on with my dog, public land to go relax in and be quiet in. The great thing about New Mexico is that there’s so much of it. You don’t have to bump into a million people when you’re going out and enjoying nature.”

Back in Nevada, Patrick Donnelly roams the range as the Center for Biological Diversity’s state director. He senses that the exposure of the audacious public-lands sell-off plan has more than backfired on its promoters, including Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV). It has brought politically diverse groups together as few issues have in a polarized nation.

“People are freaked out, and it’s not just the radical environmentalists,” Donnelly says. “Certainly, the hunting community has responded in force” along with many who identify with the MAGA movement. “Now maybe they have different motivations for that than I do, but the sentiment that this is a bad thing is extremely widespread right now.”

Perhaps, he says, the issue of public lands is no longer an ideological battle, but in this case a question of corruption.

By late Monday, the storm over the big public lands giveaway began to lift after Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determined Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) effort to impose the mandatory sale of millions of acres didn’t qualify for the Republican-backed bill.

With growing numbers of conservatives expressing staunch opposition to Lee’s plan, even a last-minute revision won’t likely make a difference. At least, this time. But when Republican elected officials from Idaho and Montana find themselves joining environmentalists and hunters in a chorus of discontent, it ought to be taken seriously.

Those Raging Grannies are right on. Public lands belong in public hands.

But given the political players involved in this fight, I suspect the protests are just beginning.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.