Common Ground

The line is not subtle. In the West, the federal government owns the majority of entire states. More than 60 percent of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. In the East it is a rounding error. Connecticut and Iowa sit at three tenths of one percent.

The reason is history, not landscape. As the United States pushed west, the federal government took enormous territories from the Native nations who already lived on them, by treaty, by purchase, and by force, including treaties it then went on to break. The arid, mountainous, hard-to-farm parts were never claimed by homesteaders or handed off to states, so they stayed federal, and over time became the national forests, parks, and BLM country that define the western map. The East had been carved into private hands long before that machinery existed. Texas, which kept its own public lands as a condition of joining the Union, is the exception that proves the rule, western in geography and eastern in ownership.

This is why the map has more than one layer. Switch it from federal to state & local and the East stops looking empty. States hold vast commons of their own, state forests, state parks, and wildlife and game lands, and that is often how the East assembles its public realm. Pennsylvania is barely two percent federal, yet it holds some 2.2 million acres of state forest and another 1.5 million of state game lands, many times its federal footprint. New York manages around 4.9 million acres of state land, including the roughly three-million-acre Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve, constitutionally "forever wild." Set the map to both and the real shape of the commons comes through, just differently owned and differently reached on each coast.

I have lived on both sides of this line, and the difference is real even where the map oversimplifies it. In Washington the commons is vast federal backcountry, where the backcountry starts more or less at the edge of town. Around Philadelphia it is a patchwork you stitch together yourself: A state park here, a county trail there, the riverfront path I lived on, every piece of it public, none of it the endless federal expanse of the West. Flip the view to acres per resident and the federal gap turns almost comic, fifty acres a head in Wyoming against a sliver of one in most of the East. The daily experience is gentler than that. Both places have a commons. They just hand it to you in different shapes.

In Scotland, the Land Reform Act of 2003 gives you a right of responsible access to almost all land and inland water. Behave well, avoid gardens, growing crops, and people's privacy, and otherwise walk where you like. The Nordic countries have an even older version, allemansrätten, the everyman's right, a custom so deep it barely needs a statute: You may walk, camp a night, and pick berries on uncultivated land you do not own.

England and Wales went partway. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 opened mapped mountain, moor, heath, and down, plus a dense web of ancient public footpaths, but left most of the countryside closed. An active "right to roam" movement is still pushing to widen it.

The United States went the other way entirely. Here, land is private by default and access is the exception. "Posted: No Trespassing" is the background condition; your right to walk runs out at the property line. What rescues it is precisely the public land on the map above, plus the hard-won easements and trails that let you reach it. It is a different bargain, and it puts more weight on the public land we do have.

And all four of these are versions of one fairly Northern European argument about ownership and access. Step outside that frame and the question changes shape. Across much of the world land has been held in common or by custom rather than by deed, governed by communities instead of titles. For Indigenous peoples on every continent, here included, land has been less a thing to be owned than a relationship to be kept, a way of belonging that the language of property barely touches. "Where am I allowed to walk" is a modern, Western way of asking something much older, which is how a people and a place come to belong to each other.