If you want to appreciate the prairie landscape that inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to set aside 230m acres as national land, you have to pull off the interstate somewhere in the Dakotas, or in the eastern third of Montana, Wyoming, or Colorado. Follow a dirt road for a few miles, roll down your windows, and shut off your engine. Do this almost any time of day, preferably in springtime. Above and below ground, the prairies are humming with life: birds, rodents, snakes, pronghorn, badgers and coyotes, rioting amid a landscape of grass and sagebrush.

A patchwork of public land comprises large blocs of this splendid and sparsely populated terrain, and while much public ground has the appearance of a nature preserve, it is mostly a working landscape. Public forage, timber, and water resources sustain thriving wildlife populations, along with millions of livestock and thousands of agricultural producers. For these people and their communities, public land isn’t a destination on a bucket list, a recreational playground, or a studio for Instagrammers – it’s a source of life to which they’re intimately connected. That’s why many ranchers are unnerved by the Republican party’s land transfer agenda, which aims to give away as much federal public land as possible to the states. While the movement gains traction among the Republican cadre, its attractiveness to rural westerners is less certain, and if it ever succeeds, it will mean a radical restructuring of the foundations of the economy and the culture of the west.