- Just ahead on "This American Land"... - Protecting our public lands is absolutely essential to our economy.

- The future of our public lands.

What's ahead for recreation, energy, and development on these treasured open spaces?

You've never seen a barge like this before.

- We just knew there could be something better done with it.

- Transforming trash and bringing opportunity to a new generation.

- I didn't even know barges were really, like, a thing.

- We've got a thing or two to show you right now on "This American Land."

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to a new season of "This American Land."

I'm your host, Ed Arnett.

And in every episode, we bring you stories about the dedicated people who are protecting our natural resources, our landscapes, waters, and wildlife.

Our nation's system of public lands is vast and uniquely American.

All of us, you, me, every citizen, own these public lands and the resources they provide our nation.

But there's a long history of desires to sell off the federal estate, and that threat continues today.

What could this mean for outdoor recreation, ranching, clean water, and local economies across the country?

Let's go to the Rocky Mountain West and hear from some of the people who care deeply about our public lands, and work to safeguard the hundreds of millions of acres of these vast, cherished spaces.

[uplifting music] You know, you could be driving anywhere across America, anywhere, and be on public land.

I think what a lot of people relate to when they hear public lands, they think of national parks.

They think of monuments.

But we own 640 million acres in the federal estate, and that includes Bureau of Land Management lands, sagebrush habitats that look like next to nothing, but they're filled with lots of wildlife, our national forests, but also Department of Defense lands-- [water rushing] --everything around dams that's under Bureau of Reclamation.

And we extract minerals, oil, and gas, all of these trust resources that are held by the federal government as trustees for us, the American people.

♪ ♪ [traffic whooshing] - I'm on my quest to tour all 50 states.

And I just want to, you know, make sure that I view America in its true beauty.

- Just seeing the cattle, the horses, the beautiful land.

You can't look at it on film.

You have to be here.

[vehicles rumbling] - There's some things you cannot put a price tag on.

And some of the people who are, you know, trying to buy and sell these types of lands, they're only able to do it because someone preserved this land in the first place hundreds of years ago.

- Dave, there's a long history of the establishment of our public lands.

There's also a long history of the divestiture of those public lands, isn't there?

- Yeah, actually, it goes all the way back to the founding of our country.

You know, we were in a place when the country was founded that we were really looking to get rid of federal lands.

[melancholic music] You know, right after the Revolutionary War, we were giving lands away or selling lands to pay off national debts.

And then as the country expanded, we were looking at opportunities to encourage movement west through giving land to build transcontinental railroads.

And really, the idea was to have economic development everywhere.

And that started to change a little bit in, you know, the 1870s.

1872, Yellowstone National Park is created.

National forests are created, and wildlife refuges are created.

Then, the Antiquities Act comes online in the early 20th century, and national monuments are created.

And you're slowly-- we're talking hundreds of millions of acres that are now set aside from being sold or developed.

And this all really comes to a head in 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

Congress declared it to be the policy of the federal government to stop selling lands, to really hold on to what we have left.

And that was the springboard to controversy, because you had a lot of people that wanted to see lands either in the hands of states or in the hands of private citizens.

I'd say right now, we're seeing where it's really ramping back up again.

[pensive music] - Ever since the establishment of our public lands, there have always been those who have wanted to sell them or turn management over to the states.

And it's never been more in play than contemporary times.

We have a huge national debt, more energy needs.

But the people that we've talked to that really are passionate about public lands realize the economics really don't add up.

- Being candid, I think it's greed.

[engine rumbling] To forsake the collective American ownership at the expense of corporate interests would be truly an American tragedy.

- Some argue that maybe we just transfer the management of public lands to the states.

Is that even practical?

- It isn't a practical reality.

With the transfer and management from the federal government to the states also comes the price tag to the states.

And the states are fundamentally ill-equipped.

[water rushing] [tranquil music] - Jasper, you and I both use public lands extensively.

Why are they so important to you?

- I mean, look, I grew up on public lands, whether it was catching trout on a high mountain stream or chasing elk to feed the family, they are fundamental to who I am as a person.

But that's not to overlook the value that they provide to commerce.

♪ ♪ - Local economies benefit from outdoor recreation and a consistent input of money that comes in from people that are visiting our public lands.

I hunt, I fish on our public lands.

And I also go down to the local cafe and have a meal.

I buy gas.

I spend money in those local economies that's vital to their existence.

- Most recent comprehensive study of the outdoor recreation industry in Colorado marks the overall economic output at about $65 billion a year, so about 1 in 8 Coloradans working in or around the outdoor industry.

- It's not just a Western thing.

Nationwide, over $1 trillion estimated now.

- It's larger than farming.

It's larger than the automotive industry, all these major industries.

This land and the outdoor recreation industry manifests in ways that you don't always think.

♪ ♪ - Our public land has multiple use values that include grazing, which allows our Western ranchers to be able to operate on these huge landscapes.

[gravel crunching] - Well, welcome to the Little Snake River Valley.

We run cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, and children.

And we make a living from about 400,000 acres, maybe more.

[hooves pounding, cattle mooing] - A lot of these family ranches utilize both their private deeded property, but it's critical that they have the opportunity to graze on public lands.

[car honking] [lambs bleating] So Sharon, tell us a little bit about the operation here.

What's going on?

- Well, we are docking lambs.

[sheep bleating] It's for the health and hygiene of the sheep itself.

We castrate the young males, and then we put a paint brand on them, and we vaccinate them.

- And this is all part of your public land grazing permit.

Is that right?

- Yes, it is.

[pensive music] - You guys have deeded property, of course, but you really couldn't run that many livestock without these permits on federal land, could you?

- Oh, we could not run our operation on our private land alone at all, partly because there wouldn't be enough grass and partly because of the seasons.

- If these lands were to be sold, what would that mean for your ranch?

- We'd have to sell to the highest bidder, and it would go to a rich guy, probably the rich guy that bought all the stuff around it.

And then, nobody would have any access to anything.

- You know, for most of these Western ranchers, the sale of public lands and the potential loss of their leases is just one hurdle in a big race.

And for the average person or hunter like myself, it's a different layer of anxiety.

But don't just take my word for it, listen to those that have been fighting this battle for their entire careers.

- Our public lands are a vital part of our tourist industry as well as our agriculture industry as well.

So protecting our public lands is absolutely essential to our economy.

- We stand on the shoulders of our forefathers, the Theodore Roosevelts of the world, who understood the importance of setting aside some piece of our landscape.

And I think it's our generation's responsibility to ensure that they're properly stewarded.

- Even if you're a person that's never set foot on public lands, if you live in Las Vegas, or you live in Phoenix, or you live in Los Angeles, and you turn on your faucet in your kitchen and water comes out, that almost certainly came from public lands.

95% of this entire country's winter vegetables are grown by water that largely comes from public lands.

These lands belong to every single American.

Public lands aren't red.

Public lands aren't blue.

Public lands are red, white, and blue.

[mellow music] - Now to America's biggest river basin, which also has some big problems.

The Mississippi River watershed reaches 32 states and drains about 40% of the country, where agriculture and industry rely heavily on this river highway.

Our correspondent Brad Hicks takes you on a river barge where one man is on a mission to fix what is perhaps the river system's biggest problem, and to turn the mighty Mississippi into 2,000 miles of opportunity.

[uplifting music] - As the morning mist lifts over the Ohio River-- - It's going to be a cold ride.

- --on a barge 50 miles downstream from Cincinnati-- - But you're going to be hot as hell within 10 minutes.

- --along the bank between Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, and Rising Sun, Indiana-- - Yeah, we can park on the sides and all that stuff.

- --the garbage gang is getting ready.

- Considering the fog, we stay close to shore within eyesight of each other.

[metal clinking] - The barge is like no barge you've ever seen before.

Whimsical, welcoming, with accommodations for a dozen, and decor-- - But this was sticking in the mud.

- --produced with trash pulled from the rivers.

- I love these awnings, all made from-- - Yep.

- --license plates you found?

- Yep, just kind of went with the recycled theme.

- --and a collection of castaways that could give you nightmares-- [eerie vocalizing] [clapping] - Whoo!

- --if the crew wasn't so friendly and fun.

[cheering] The barge is the brainchild of Chad Pregracke, and the cleanup on which they're about to embark is his life's calling.

- Just growing up on the Mississippi River, diving for mussel shells, and kept seeing all this trash.

And it's just such a beautiful place.

And, you know, there had been no one going out there to clean stuff up.

- So he started tackling the big problem with a small boat.

A quarter century later, he is still at it now on a massive scale, even extending into the tributaries of the Mississippi.

[engine roaring] On this day, Chad and the dedicated crew from his organization, Living Lands and Waters, is leading a group of volunteers from food giant Archer Daniels Midland on a cleanup along the Ohio.

- CrossFit.

[rock music] ♪ ♪ - I grew up going to lakes, so it's important that our water is clean.

- There are so many stuff here, like tires, drums.

- Surprisingly, the heaviest thing is cooler lids.

♪ ♪ - And for the really heavy stuff, Chad and the crew have another barge with a big claw.

♪ ♪ The excavator had just come back from the Allegheny near Pittsburgh, where they pulled more than 50 cars from the river.

♪ ♪ - Well, let's clap it out for that crew.

Unbelievable!

[cheers and applause] - Back at the barge, it's time to unload today's bounty.

Living Lands and Waters has an armada, two tow boats, and four barges, the excavator, a sorting barge for smaller stuff, a hopper.

- And that's right now, we've got about 800 tires.

- And the whimsical, welcoming home barge, which really is home.

- We're out here about seven to nine months out of the year, on and off.

- Mike Coyne-Logan has been cleaning rivers with Living Lands and Waters for 18 years.

In that time, they've worked on 30 rivers in 23 states.

- Freshwater is one of those, like, resources I think a lot of us, on a day-to-day basis, take for granted, you know, the importance of our freshwater ecosystems.

- So what do you do with all the trash that you collect once you have it?

- Yeah, so this acts as the floating recycling center.

And so we kind of sort that we know cannot be recycled, like these big chunks of Styrofoam.

- Callie Schaser is another one of the full-time crew.

- This is stuff that, unfortunately, has to go to the landfill.

- Elmo will likely be spared the landfill and get to join the cast of river castaways.

But what to do with all of the plastic has long been a problem.

Plastic makes up about 2/3 of the tonnage they collect.

- We just knew there could be something better done with it.

So it's like, what can that be?

- Tammy Becker, who lived on the barge, came up with the answer.

- It was my job to figure out what to do with all the garbage that we collect.

A lot of the stuff was easy to recycle, tires, scrap metal, even pop bottles and water bottles.

But we were left with all these, like, other bulky, rigid plastics that no one would take.

We were spending all this money as a not-for-profit organization to take it out of the river and then pay to put it in a landfill.

And we just knew there had to be a better solution.

And after some time, decided, hey, let's make pallets out of them.

[machine starting] [upbeat music] - The bulky river plastics are ground up-- --melted in a molding machine-- - Right now, the machine is actually injecting the hot plastic.

--and, presto, pallets.

[hydraulic hissing] And I noticed there are little happy faces all over.

- Yeah, they actually serve a purpose.

So some pallets, you'll see, have grip dots on them to help create friction, to help keep things from sliding off.

- Uh-huh.

- I said, why don't we make ours happy?

You know, it's a happy pallet.

It's fully recycled and good for the planet.

- The pallets not only provide a use for the tons of river plastic, they also save trees.

all: [chanting] Save our trees!

- --which fits Living Lands and Waters' mission perfectly.

Over the past two decades, in addition to cleaning the waterways, they have planted more than 2 million oak trees on islands in the Mississippi.

- We're trying to save plastics from entering our rivers and oceans and landfills, save trees from being cut down, and just do what we can to help make the planet a little bit more livable for everybody.

- Back on the barge, they've finished unloading, adding to the more than 14 million pounds of trash Living Lands and Waters has collected since it started.

- It's not just the tonnage, it's also the number of people we've worked with, like 132,000 volunteers.

And what a cool opportunity to do something good for the country.

But if you want to get the river clean, you want to keep it clean, you need to mix education into it.

- This is Living Lands and Waters Mississippi River Institute.

- Nice day out, eh?

- It's a floating classroom barge that travels between the Twin Cities and Memphis each season, exposing students along the way to opportunities on the river.

- A lot of people know this river, but they don't know what happens out here.

- Today, these students from a small town about three hours away are learning about careers on the commercial barges.

- So you're only working six months out of the year, but you are making a full-year salary.

- And they're getting hands-on experience with environmental occupations on the river.

- So this is an invasive silver carp.

- The highlight of the day-- - This is what steers the boat.

- --a tour of a river tug.

- I didn't even know barges were really, like, a thing.

- I didn't know that there were so many jobs on one of these boats.

- Like the home barge, the classroom barge is also a work of recycled art, the ceiling made with wood collected from the river and paneling salvaged from an old tractor repair shop.

It's all meant to inspire.

- I truly think that it will change lives.

- Indeed, the barges do have a way of changing lives and bringing people together.

- And you see where they put forks in that, and they push all the stuff up.

- That's awesome.

You've got quite the eye.

- You're being facetious.

- Mm-hmm.

- The Living Lands and Waters home barge could just as well be called The Love Boat.

There have been more than a dozen successful marriages for couples who've met there.

- We make a good team.

- Yeah, we do.

- We make a good team.

Our skill sets complement each other well.

- Yeah, I have no skills, and she's got a lot of skills.

♪ ♪ [mellow music] - Some other modern explorers don't even have to be near the waterways they study to make important discoveries.

Students at a small college in Minnesota are using satellites to discover liquid treasures hundreds of miles away in the Colorado River Basin.

And that's helping scientists on the ground make better decisions about how to protect these crucial resources.

[birds chirping] - Wetlands are important because they're a unique habitat type.

They have lots of animals that rely on them.

If they're riparian wetlands, they protect the rivers adjacent to them.

You know, we've had these large forest fires recently.

Wetlands provide an escape route for animals.

They provide refugia for animals because they stay wet.

We're looking at different wetlands to see if they're actually going to survive during a changing climate.

The big challenge in New Mexico is that only 1% of our land area is made of wetlands.

The problem is because they are a rare habitat, it's much more important to find out where they are.

But mapping those wetlands is difficult.

- So the river is flowing down this way.

- And so we need to know where these things are so that we can protect them.

- You're looking at our primary student work area.

So they're all interacting with aerial imagery or satellite imagery.

And they're trying to make determinations of what's a wetland and what isn't a wetland.

I'm Andy Robertson, Executive Director of Geospatial Services at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

GIS has been around for about 40 years now.

And basically, it's a set of software tools that allow you to replicate what traditional cartographers would have done with pen and ink.

Picture Google Maps on steroids.

[upbeat music] We teach our students how to use that software and how to develop products, data products, that our clients will utilize in their business.

- What I'm doing is what they call linear delineation.

It's really just mapping rivers and streams.

It makes me feel cool.

I look at this and I'm like, wow, I feel so smart.

- Yeah, further up that way.

Anything with water, we map.

But if you're in New Mexico, you'll notice that 96% of the wetlands there don't have water year-round.

So we are mapping a lot of dry stream beds and wetlands that don't always look like wetlands.

Think about wetland jewels.

It's how they classified wetlands that have high-functioning properties.

So they hold a whole bunch of fish species, different invertebrates.

They are a waterfowl habitat.

They capture carbon, nitrogen fixation.

We want to be able to identify them.

And then from there, they can take our mapping and they can go out in the field and see if what we've mapped is what they see on the ground.

- Amigos Bravo saw that mapping capability.

And we thought, wow, this is a super powerful tool, but we need to localize it.

We need to focus it on specific watersheds.

♪ ♪ This is Canyon Largo.

This is considered one of the jewels.

It's dry most of the year.

We call this an ephemeral stream.

But as you can see with these grasses and the mud that we're standing in, this is wet.

And so as precipitation comes in from these mountains, it's soaking in here.

And so these wetlands here are so important to this channel because it's collecting here and fooling the ground charge, but it's also providing habitat for all these birds.

Amigos Bravos work with the land managers.

So right now, we're in the BLM to protect these areas and also restore them.

And so it's a way for us to prioritize our restoration.

- We want to be able to identify wetlands that have the ability to become better ecosystems.

Because wetlands do so much, it's really important that we are finding ways to protect them.

And our work here can really help their environment.

[mellow music] - Now to a disturbing but little-known chapter of Black History and American farmlands.

African Americans have lost hundreds of billions of dollars in family wealth because they never got the proper paperwork for the land they owned.

Brad Hicks takes us to Mississippi, where one organization is trying to make things right for the health of these lands across the South and the generations of farmers who worked on them.

- When Larry King walks the levee along his Mississippi land, the difference on either side is black and white.

- I come from a long tradition of family farmers.

- His dream of following in their footsteps was drowned when the government built this levee along the Yazoo River.

It protected the white-owned farm on the left from floods, but pinned his property between the levee and the river.

- We were this Black family on this side of the levee.

And, you know, they just totally disregarded us.

- The spring floods turned his farmland into wetland.

His idle tractors now harvest rust.

- In 1910, 14% of all agricultural production land in this country belonged to African Americans.

That was somewhere around 19 to 20 million acres of land.

Now we own less than 3 million acres of land.

- Much of the land loss was because of loan discrimination and laws that allowed land to be usurped by squatters, speculators, and fraudulent deeds.

- And some of it had to do with our own lack of ability to understand the need to do proper estate planning.

- Without an estate plan, legal ownership for a lot of Black-owned land has become as muddy as the Yazoo.

- Most of the people that we meet don't have a clear title to the land, and many of them don't even know what a clear title to the land is.

- Larry King's farm is now forest because he enrolled in federal conservation programs that pay landowners to preserve the land and plant trees.

- You get near the fair market value of the land, and you still own the title to the land.

- But without clear title, landowners can't enroll in those programs, which is why KKAC's work helping establish estate plans and a clear title is key for preserving generational wealth.

- When I walked down these country roads, I'm just so grateful and thankful to my great-grandfather.

[mellow music] - Now, here's a look at stories coming up in our next show.

[water rushing] - It's a really neat thing happening, and it's one that the community really cherishes.

- Reviving a river in Arizona in a most unexpected way.

- There's no question that there is a strong demand for our product.

- And the challenges of aquaculture, the fastest-growing food production in the world.

- Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "This American Land."

- And you can always watch our show on PBS Passport.