In a part of Italy where chestnut trees are thick in the Apennine foothills, I once asked a neighbor in the little community where we lived how I might kill a wild boar. This impulse was driven by appetite, mostly — glimpses of those feral beasts on my morning runs that had me dreaming of a blood-red ragu made of local cinghiale.

The answer was, dream on. If you want to hunt in Italy, or most of Europe for that matter, you’d better belong to a private club, with access to a rich man’s estate.

It struck me then, in the kind of epiphany that takes living in another country to appreciate, that the public land endowment of the United States is one of the greatest perks of this democracy. Rich or poor, every citizen of the United States of America has title to an area almost the size of Italy.

This ticket to roam free in the American backyard is no constitutional guarantee. The great, unfenced public domain, much of it forested or hidebound in sage and mesquite, is the envy of the rest of the world only because a few visionary souls bucked the powers of their day.

But now the powers of this day are trying to tear away at that inheritance. The election could determine whether big sections of our shared setting continue to be held by the general public. A radical plan to overhaul a century of sensible balance has been embraced by the Republican presidential ticket.

Read the rest HERE from Timothy Egan in the New York Times. 

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