rewrite this title The Case for Returning U.S. Public Lands to Indigenous People

After serving 12 years as a backcountry wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, I’m convinced there is an alternative: the U.S. needs to return its public lands to Native Americans. In fact, I believe that might be the only way to save our parks and forests from corporate privatization and destruction, as well as preserve public access to them. If the U.S. won’t properly care for its public lands, why not return them to their original caretakers?

This isn’t a new idea. Native Americans argued that treaty law required “abandoned” federal land to be returned to tribes during the occupation of Alcatraz Island by the American Indian Movement in the 1960s. In more recent years, the Landback Movement has given rise to increased calls for the return of territorial land to Indigenous Nations, and the return of land management based in Traditional Ecological Knowledge—expertise gathered from thousands of years of having deep relationships with specific environments. There’s a strong legal argument that land return is constitutionally required as damages due for hundreds of treaty violations. However, there’s also a lot of data showing Indigenous land management is more ecologically sound than government or industrially managed land. For instance, Project Drawdown, a global leader in science-based climate change solutions, estimates that returning 1,000 million hectares of land to Indigenous tenureship by 2050 would sequester over 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide.