“Public lands have helped me through difficult times in my life”

Tony Arnold chairs the Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

When I was growing up in Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s, I spent a lot of time roaming around tallgrass-prairie ranch lands in the Kansas Flint Hills, a place of exceptional beauty and meaning to me. By the 1990s, I had grown up and moved away for work but I went back as often as I could. I was thrilled when in 1996, Congress created the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve out of these ranch lands, preserving one of the remaining remnants of native tallgrass prairies that once covered 170 million acres in North America. Most of these prairies are now lost to development or agricultural practices. This keeps our tallgrass prairies from disappearing forever and provides abundant opportunities for the public to enjoy these lands, just as I did.

Public lands have helped me through difficult times in my life. In particular, when I was going through a divorce that was both surprising and very painful, I went hiking nearly every day in Medicine Bow National Forest. While hiking among the mountains, forests, and alpine lakes, I experienced a great sense of peace and solitude in which to pray and re-center. Both my physical and mental health was invigorated from extensive hiking in the clean air amid the reassurance that God gives us through nature. To say that it was therapeutic is both accurate and inadequate — hiking in Medicine Bow was life-affirming and restorative.

So many of our country’s parks and public lands written about in these love notes would not exist but for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It’s why Congress should fund the program permanently. Follow the movement along at #FundLWCF. Learn more here.…………………………………………………………………………………….

Would you like to write about public lands that you cherish? Please email Mary Jo Brooks at brooksm@nwf.org for guidelines.