At the Cosmos Club, Tracy Stone-Manning charts bold vision for America’s public lands and waters

The people who gathered here in 1935 were clear-eyed about what was happening around them.

The country was expanding rapidly into wild places. Roads, dams, mines...the ambitions of a growing nation were reaching farther and farther into lands that had once seemed beyond reach.

And those founders believed something radical for their time. They believed there should be places where rivers could still run wild...where wildlife could move freely...where human beings could encounter the natural world not as conquerors, but as visitors.

In our founding charter, they wrote: “All we desire to save from invasion is that extremely minor fraction of outdoor America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smells.”

That phrase is nearly a century old.
And yet, sitting here today, it does not feel old. It feels urgent.

Because the central questions our founders wrestled with are still with us: What do we owe the lands and waters that sustain us? What do we owe one another? And what do we owe the generations who will come after us?

The answers are different now, because the country is different now.

When The Wilderness Society was founded, there were about 127 million people living in the United States. Today, there are more than 340 million of us. All with needs. All with dreams. All with pressures. All with demands on land, water, energy, housing, food, access and opportunity.

When The Wilderness Society was founded, climate change was not part of the public imagination. Today, it is reshaping forests, rivers, deserts, coastlines and communities in real time.

When The Wilderness Society was founded, the laws governing grazing, hard rock mining and oil and gas leasing were already on the books. They are still on the books today. The modern laws governing other facets of public land management were written fifty years ago. All of this was built for a different era, under different assumptions, facing different realities.

And our time demands a broader, more inclusive, more durable vision for America’s public lands and waters.

That vision begins with a simple idea: public lands are our common ground. They belong to all of us.

They are where people exercise the freedom to hike, hunt, fish, camp, paddle, gather, roam and simply be outside.

They protect clean water, wildlife habitat, healthy forests, intact deserts, living rivers and the natural systems communities depend on.

And they are an inheritance that we are obligated to pass on, whole and healthy, to future generations.

For 91 years, The Wilderness Society has worked from that belief: that public lands are not just scenery, not just resources, but a shared inheritance with real consequences for people, communities and the future.

Ground Shift begins from that same belief.

Ground Shift is a new cross-partisan initiative, launched and sponsored by The Wilderness Society, that asks a simple but profound question: What are our public lands and waters for now?

Not what were they for before we understood climate change, before recreation 
numbers skyrocketed, before the scale of renewable energy and transmission 
needs we see today, before today’s biodiversity crisis, before the current pressures 
on rural economies, public access and trust in government.

But now.

What do we want from and for these lands and waters in the decades to come?
That is the question.

Ground Shift offers a venue in which to step back. To listen. To test assumptions. To 
invite people who do not usually sit at the same table to ask hard questions 
together.

Scholars. Tribal leaders. Ranchers. Former agency officials. Local leaders. 
Scientists. Policy thinkers...Cosmos-Club-Members. People from different political 
traditions and different lived experiences who share a basic understanding: the 
systems we inherited brought us this far, but the world they were built for no longer 
exists.

Ground Shift begins with the belief that public lands and waters are still vital common ground.

Literal common ground, because these lands belong to all of us.

And figurative common ground, because they remind us that we share something 
real and tangible: rivers and forests, deserts and grasslands, wildlife and 
watersheds, places where people hike and camp, hunt and fish, pass down 
traditions, build livelihoods and experience wonder.

In a divided country, that is no small thing. It may be one of the most important 
things we have.

At The Wilderness Society, we believe the future should deliver more from our public lands and waters, not less. That “more, not less” idea is central to Ground Shift’s vision.

More freedom to experience the outdoors. More clean air, clean water and healthy 
ecosystems. More Americans engaged in deciding what these places become.

That word “more” matters. Because too often, public lands debates are framed in 
scarcity. As tradeoffs. As one side winning and another side losing. As protection 
versus use. Conservation versus community. Energy versus wildlife. Access versus 
stewardship.

Sometimes there are real conflicts. We should not pretend otherwise.

But the promise of public lands has always been bigger than those binaries.

The question is whether we can build systems that are sophisticated enough, 
honest enough and durable enough to deliver more public benefit at once.

Ground Shift is our effort to create space for that kind of thinking. 

We’ve created an advisory council to help guide us that is bipartisan. 

The home of the initiative is on a website, Groundshift.US

There you will find essays that take time to think. And constructively perhaps 
disagree with one another. 

We’re also hosting convenings of people to take deep dives on our current set of 
laws – folks who have implemented those laws and folks who have been governed 
by them. 

We’re working with state innovation labs to tease out ideas that have worked in 
state government.

And we’ll be hosting general conversations with the public. 

From all of this, we expect the answers to: what our public lands and waters are for to 
take real shape. To offer answers for the future. 

I want to say something important here, especially to this audience, given the 
history we share together.

The Wilderness Society was born because a small group of people saw that the 
systems of their time were not protecting what needed to be protected.

They did not simply ask for a better road policy or a better timber policy or a better 
dam policy. They asked a more basic question: What kind of country are we, if we 
leave no room for wilderness?

What kind of country are we, if we fail to hand down to our children and grandchildren the places that were handed to us?

Those questions helped give rise to one of the most important conservation 
achievements in American history: the Wilderness Act of 1964.

Howard Zahniser, who led The Wilderness Society in the early days, authored the 
act. But before that, Zahniser and TWS led a fight against dams in Dinosaur National 
Monument. 

That fight mattered not only because it protected one place, though it did. It 
mattered because it awakened the American public to a larger truth: that some 
places should not be sacrificed.

The backlash to that dam proposal helped create the momentum for something 
bigger. Zahniser started to write the Wilderness Act six days after the bill passed to 
protect Dinosaur from a dam. Because he understood the public understood. 

That is how history moves sometimes: A defensive fight becomes a generational 
opening. A moment of threat becomes a moment of imagination. A public backlash 
becomes a public vision.

We need that kind of imagination again.

And we need it at a moment when The Wilderness Society is and all of us who care 
about public lands conservation are also very much in the fight of our lives.
There is no way to sugarcoat what is happening right now.

The Trump administration is advancing an agenda that threatens the very idea of 
public lands as a shared public good. In a word, it is unprecedented. 

We are seeing efforts to open more public lands to drilling, mining, logging and 
industrial development, even in places that should be treated with extraordinary 
care.

We are seeing agencies hollowed out, budgets slashed, expertise dismissed and 
career public servants pushed out or undermined. 

We are seeing efforts to treat public lands less like a shared inheritance and more 
like an inventory of assets to be sold off, leased out or handed over to the highest 
bidder.

And let me be clear: The Wilderness Society will fight that with everything we have.
Because some things, once lost, cannot simply be restored in the next political 
cycle.

But defense alone is not enough. And that’s why we launched Ground Shift – an 
independent initiative with a scope greater than just The Wilderness Society.
It is necessary. It is urgent. But it is not enough.

Because if all we do is fight to preserve the status quo, we will fail to meet the scale 
of this century’s challenges.

So yes, we fight. And yes, we must build. 

We have always had to do both. Resist the damage and build the future.
That is especially true now.

And addressing you, the Cosmos Club, now – the place of The Wilderness Society’s 
legal founding, I feel the weight of that history. But I also feel its encouragement.

The Wilderness Society is 91 years old: My mother’s lifetime.

That fact stays with me, because it makes the work feel both enormous and 
immediate.

In one lifetime, this organization grew from a small group of people gathered here at the Cosmos Club into a national force that helped protect nearly 112 million acres of public lands and wilderness.

In one lifetime, ideas that once seemed radical became law.

In one lifetime, places that could have been dammed, mined, drilled, or sold off were instead handed down.

Now we are responsible for the next lifetime.

All of us. Which is why I invite you to join us in the work. Contribute your ideas—by 
joining convenings, by helping us find good thinkers who we should be in touch with. 

And if you can contribute financially, we’d welcome that, too. 

This is our country’s common ground. It’s one of the most important things we can 
pass on to the future.

Thanks for your time today. I look forward to the discussion.