The nation’s public lands and waters are not an abstraction. They are the places where we hunt and hike, where cattle graze and rivers rise, where tribes connect with ancient and sacred places, where families escape on weekends and where children learn the wonders of the sea.

But these places are also where the limits of our current public lands and waters system are becoming impossible to ignore.

Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development — often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.

The systems meant to manage all of this are showing their age.

Between the two of us, we have spent decades working inside those systems, leading agencies under Democratic and Republican administrations, shaping policy at national conservation and environmental policy organizations, and trying to make public land management work better from within. We have seen the commitment of land managers, scientists and wildland firefighters. We have also seen how often they are constrained by outdated laws, fragmented authorities, limited funding and bureaucratic processes that make even common-sense solutions painfully slow.

What’s increasingly clear is that many of today’s challenges are not just technical or financial. They are baked in and structural. They reflect institutions and policies built for a different time, under different assumptions, facing different realities.

Which leads us to a question that feels both simple and urgent: What do we want from and for our public lands and waters now?

Not in the mid-20th century, when most of our modern land laws were written. Not in a world before climate change, before mass recreation, before large-scale renewable energy, before today’s biodiversity crisis. But now — in a nation that is hotter, more crowded, and more economically and culturally complex than ever.

Read the full article about public lands and waters by Tracy Stone-Manning and Lynn Scarlett at High Country News.