LAWRENCE, Kan. (TNS) — Drive west on Interstate 70 from the Mississippi River at St. Louis. As you cross Missouri and Kansas, you’ll traverse 750 miles of privately owned land.

The only public property is the road beneath your wheels.

Not until sighting the Front Range in Colorado, 900 miles west of St. Louis, do you near America’s public lands, our natural heritage and now a threatened national legacy.

Public lands are the 640 million acres — nearly one-third of the United States — owned by all the American people. Federal agencies manage them for our use and enjoyment: the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.

Growing up in Boise, Idaho, public lands beckoned just a short jaunt uphill from my front door. Lawrence, my home in Kansas for most of the past 30 years, couldn’t be more different.

Ninety-eight percent of Kansas land is privately owned, the highest proportion in America, along with 97% of Nebraska and Iowa, and 89% of Missouri.

Thomas Jefferson dreamed an agrarian commonwealth. It came to life here in the heartland.

Isolated from our national forests, grasslands and parks, why should we care about the threats targeting America’s public lands? Because it’s our fight, too. And has been for a long time.

Bills are moving in Congress to sell public lands to the highest bidder. Western governors demand our public lands be surrendered to their states. The think-tank philosophers who brought you Project 2025 and unleashed the Department of Government Efficiency are peddling plans to transfer your public lands to wealthy buyers.

The fight to conserve our nation’s landed heritage does concern us. Our bipartisan heartland history of public land conservation and appreciation demands we care.

Take Kansas, for example. Keith Sebelius, the late Republican congressman from our western plains, prized public lands even though his constituents owned more than 99% of the land in his district.

Rep. Sebelius worked with Democratic colleagues on the House Interior Committee for two decades to designate new national recreation areas, expand national parks and manage our diverse public land portfolio.

He understood public lands include not only natural wonders that draw tourists the world over — and my Kansas neighbors who vacation in Colorado — but the less spectacular working grasslands used by ranchers as well as hunters, hikers, rock hounds, off-road enthusiasts and folks who just like open skies and broad vistas. Sebelius appreciated America’s public land history made us special: No other nation has guaranteed every one of its residents legal access to one-third of its land mass. America invented land management ideas that set us apart from the world: national parks, wilderness areas and wild rivers.

Sebelius even helped pioneer a new way to manage public lands: the national recreation area, a blend of land and water conservation, productive private use, and guaranteed public access. He brokered bipartisan compromises designating two national recreation areas in Idaho, a fact I learned researching a recent history lecture for folks “back home” in Boise.

In 1975 Sebelius persuaded Republican President Gerald Ford of Michigan and a Congress controlled by Democrats to designate Hells Canyon, bordering Idaho and Oregon, a national recreation area conserving America’s deepest canyon, along with the wild Snake River and the lofty Seven Devils Wilderness.

We heartlanders may not enjoy “out the front door” access to mountains and whitewater as I did growing up. But we better speak up for public lands now, or we’ll find ourselves asking a millionaire tech bro permission to ramble Colorado’s peaks or savor New Mexico’s spicy blend of redrock desert and blackrock canyons.

( Karl Brooks is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. He was EPA regional administrator in the Heartland from 2010 to 2015, then EPA national operations manager from 2015 to 2016.)