VIDEO: In Love with the Wild: Thoughts About Public Lands in the 21st Century

VIDEO (1:12:52): Welcome and Introduction of Speaker: Charles Wilkinson, Distinguished University Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School Speaker: Bill Hedden, Executive Director, Grand Canyon Trust Lecture delivered at the University of Colorado, Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom, Thursday, April 21st, 2016 at 5:30 p.m. Bill Hedden is the Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust. Under his leadership, the Trust has helped clean up emissions from the region’s coal fired power plants and remove radioactive wastes from the bank of the Colorado River. Hedden developed a leading program for reducing grazing damage on public lands, including purchasing two ranches covering 850,000 acres on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. The organization has led in developing ecologically sensible forest restoration programs and is partnering with Colorado Plateau tribes to win designation of the first-ever Native American national monument at the Bears Ears in southeast Utah. Hedden has a B.A. and Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. Bill Hedden will provide a report from the field, a description from an activist and stakeholder of what it\u27s like to live surrounded by deep, wild public lands. The lecture will include a personal description of what the public lands can mean to an individual life. Followed by a broader scope and look ahead related to public lands issues, asking how our societal relationships with these lands must evolve in the 21st century. Hedden believes it is necessary to speak in new ways about these matters at a time when the very concept of public lands is once again under assault from the Congress and from state legislatures, attacked through well-funded disinformation campaigns, and, if all the rest isn\u27t clear enough, the land itself occupied by armed militias--our inheritance under threat from people who have not felt lucky to earn a living off of lands and resources belonging to all of us, but who feel resentful and determined to take the lands for themselves. Hedden notes the American people are in danger of losing something of inestimable value without really knowing what it is and, more importantly, without having a vision of what role this globally unique endowment might play in helping us find a way to live in harmony with our ever more stressed planet