This is the last episode of our Save Public Lands series — and we are four days from National Public Lands Day.

Tania Lown-Hecht — VP of Communications and Strategy for Outdoor Alliance — joins me to close out the campaign. Outdoor Alliance is a coalition of 10 outdoor recreation organizations representing climbers, paddlers, surfers, backcountry skiers, mountain bikers, and trail runners. As we recorded this, their entire team was on Capitol Hill — 60 people in DC meeting with lawmakers on behalf of the outdoor community.

Tania talks about what they’re telling lawmakers, why the Save Public Lands campaign was born out of last summer’s sell-off fight, and what it means to bring hundreds of thousands of signatures to Washington in person. And then she shares something I wasn’t expecting — a personal story about cancer, the mountains, and why she’s dedicated her life to this work.

 

A note from Missy: I’ve asked you five times over the past five weeks to sign this petition. This is the last time I’m asking. Four days. savepubliclands.us. First name, last name, zip code, submit. Then share it with one person you haven’t told yet. Let’s get to a million.

E87 - Website

Episode Guest

Tania Lown Hecht — VP of Communications and Strategy
Outdoor Alliance

Sign the Petition — Take Action Now

→ savepubliclands.us

Four fields: first name, last name, zip code, email. Submit. Then share it with five people — or, if you’re a business, put the link in your bio and tell your customers.

Three demands:

  • No sell-offs of America’s public lands
  • No backroom deals that cut everyday people out of the process
  • No giveaways to foreign mining companies

Signatures will be delivered to Congress and state houses on National Public Lands Day, September 26th, 2026.

Show Notes & Links

Transcript

Save Public Lands: Room for All of Us
The Parks Podcast, Episode 87 | Tania Lown Hecht, VP of Communications and Strategy, Outdoor Alliance
Welcome and What Is Outdoor Alliance

Missy Rentz: I’m excited to welcome Tania Lown Hecht to The Parks Podcast. Tania is the Vice President of Communications and Strategy for Outdoor Alliance. Tania, welcome to The Parks Podcast.

Tania Lown Hecht: Thank you for having me, Missy.

Missy: So Tania, you are wrapping up our series on the Save Public Lands initiative, and I’m very excited to have you here because Outdoor Alliance is playing a very big role in this proactive program to save public lands. So before we get into the program, can you first tell us — what is Outdoor Alliance?

Tania: Yeah, thank you for having me. Outdoor Alliance is a coalition of 10 outdoor recreation groups, most of whom are national and advocate for a different outdoor recreation activity. So they represent climbers, paddlers, surfers, backcountry skiers, mountain bikers. Our newest member is Runners for Public Lands, who represents trail runners. And so we bring together all of these organizations and work on policy issues to conserve public lands and waters and protect outdoor recreation experiences across the country. So we really bring the public land user voice — the human-powered outdoor recreationist voice — to lawmakers to help protect the outdoors.

Missy: I love how you phrase it as human powered. I think that’s such a beautiful way to describe it. And we have talked to The Conservation Alliance and other groups that are part of this, and they’re the opposite side of it. So I think it’s really special that you all are representing the user of the public lands. And there are a lot of us out there that do a lot of different things in our public lands.

Tania: Yeah, we work closely with The Conservation Alliance and other organizations that represent businesses, and we represent their customers in a way, because we work directly with those folks on the ground. And yeah, we like to think that people who love outdoor recreation are amazing advocates for their public lands because they know those places really well. You think about your favorite trail, or river, or the spot that you like to run, or the beach where you like to surf — you know that place really well. You notice when there are changes there. You’re a great advocate for those spaces.

Missy: In the regular standard park episodes that we do, the speed round of questions taps more into the personal side of people’s experiences on public lands. And it always is humbling to me how connected users are to the public lands and to the spaces that they participate in.

Tania: Yep. I think that’s much where a conservation ethic comes from for many of us — it’s our connection with place. And there are special places to each of us. And then you can also recognize a place that you’ve never been, that’s a special place to a bunch of people, and say, “I’m gonna stand up and help protect it because I know it matters to a bunch of other people.” I think that’s the inspiring part of where the conservation movement is going — recognizing that people have this deep connection to place, and we can draw on that connection, that attachment, that relationship, to really power our conservation efforts.

60 People on the Hill — Going on Offense

Missy: Yeah. And a lot of our efforts have been reactive recently. And I love how this program, Save Public Lands, is a proactive approach. And this week — we’re recording this a couple of days before it’s gonna go live — your staff is on the Hill right now meeting with lawmakers and advocating for us. How does that turn the table when it’s a proactive approach?

Tania: Yeah, so our whole team is in DC right now along with a bunch of partners and a bunch of advocates. We have 60 people in DC meeting with lawmakers. And when we go to the Hill, we are doing some defense work — we’re saying, “These are things we don’t like,” or, “We’re not really thrilled about this.” But a lot of what we’re doing is telling lawmakers what we’d like them to do, what we’d like to see happen with the public lands that they are helping make decisions about. So we’re going this week, we’re talking a lot about the importance of keeping public lands public — and not just public in name only, but respecting the public process.

Tania: So one big thing is the Roadless Rule. The administration is trying to rescind the Roadless Rule right now. There’s public comments pouring in. The last comment period, it was 98, 99 percent in support from the public of keeping the Roadless Rule. So we can bring that message to lawmakers. We can say, “People really support this. They want a say on their public lands. They want a say about what happens. We wanna see this rule survive. Here’s what we would really like you to do.” And I think going to lawmakers and saying, “You have the support of our coalition. You have the support of your constituents. You have the support of millions of people who recreate” — to take a stand for public land, stand up for the public process, stand up for public access, stand up for conservation values. And we can back that up with all of the people in our member organizations and in our coalition.

Missy: And it’s not a small number. In one of our other episodes we talked about the number that came out in March — it’s a $1.3 trillion industry. This is a massive industry. So to have the support of the outdoor industry is really powerful.

Tania: Yeah, for sure. Millions of Americans get outside to recreate every year. People really love our public lands. When they do polling, there’s just enormous public support. And it’s rare right now — at a time where there is quite a lot of partisan conflict — to have an issue that really unites Americans on both sides of the aisle. People go to their public lands for different things, for different reasons. And I think the Save Public Lands coalition is a really nice representation of the different types of people that care about public lands. There’s hunters and anglers, there’s outdoor businesses, there’s human-powered outdoor recreationists. But we all share these common values of wanting to see public lands stay public.

Room for All of Us

Missy: I also thought — in one of our conversations — you talk about how different we are, but we all use the same land. Like it’s a space where maybe hunting season is not when I’m boating, or whatever the case may be. And there’s a tremendous amount of respect and community and collaboration in the outdoor space that you maybe don’t see when you’re not outside. It’s really magic.

Tania: Yeah, totally. We always like to say there’s room for all of us on public lands, that there’s plenty of space. And there are ways that public lands could be managed to help maintain that balance so that everyone feels like they have the space to do what they wanna do, they’re safe to do what they wanna do outside. Ultimately, the human-powered community has a lot more in common with the motorized community, for example, than it does with the timber industry or with mines or extraction. We want to see public lands stay open to people. We want to see them generally conserved. It’s much nicer to hike, mountain bike, and ATV through areas where there’s not clear cuts. We care about the broader landscape. And so I think focusing on what we all have in common, our shared values and our shared advocacy goals, is really fruitful and really important at a time where there’s a lot of threats to public lands.

The Save Public Lands Campaign — How It Was Born

Missy: Absolutely. So tell me about the Save Public Lands initiative.

Tania: Yeah. So this campaign was born out of what happened last summer where there were these attempts to sell off public lands — to offer up millions of acres for sale. And Americans responded in force. Millions of people saying, “We want public lands to stay public. We don’t wanna sell off any public lands. We really care about this.” There was this huge outpouring of support. And we heard from offices, “I’ve never gotten this many messages about any issue ever in my time in office.” People really supported public lands. And we were like, we’ve got this. We’re gonna be able to harness this energy and really have more support for conservation.

Tania: But even after that happened, we’ve had just a really rough year in terms of how public lands have been treated. So there’s been the rollback of the BLM Public Lands rule, a current process to rescind the Roadless Rule which protects national forest land, the rollback of protections in the Boundary Waters, Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, changes to travel management rules which are how Forest Service lands are managed, wilderness lands. There’s just been across the board a lot of decisions — and decision-makers acting in contrast to how Americans have said they want their public lands managed. And so this campaign was born out of that moment of feeling like we should be able to harness that energy that we had last summer to make demands of lawmakers and make it very clear that Americans — their voters — really expect decision-makers to protect public lands and waters. And we want that going forward. So we’re taking these three demands, getting as many people as possible to say, “I sign on to that. I agree with that,” and bringing that to lawmakers as a show of force.

Missy: And so how can people participate?

Tania: If you haven’t signed the petition, definitely sign the petition. It’s really easy — it takes a single minute to do.

Missy: Maybe. Maybe.

Tania: And we’re gonna be bringing those names to lawmakers at the end of the month and saying, “Here are the hundreds of thousands of people who want to see you standing up for public lands — you have the support of your voters to stand up for public lands.”

Missy: And if you go to savepubliclands.us, you will go to that page, click on Sign the Petition, and then it is really like first name, last name, zip code, submit. It is the easiest thing I’ve done. I think it’s so exciting what we’re doing. It is proactive. We encourage everybody to go sign. When this airs it will be four days before it closes. So make sure you go to savepubliclands.us and sign the petition while you’re listening to this.

What Public Lands Mean to Tania

Missy: Now, Tania, one of the things that I think is so important is the personal stories. What do public lands mean to you?

Tania: Public lands are very important to me. I think as anyone who works in the conservation space, I have a story about what public lands mean to me. I grew up in California, and I spent summers in the Eastern Sierra around Sonora Pass, and that was a really special place to me. I went to a summer camp up there and went backpacking — basically lived up there all summer every summer. And I had cancer as a teenager, and when I was diagnosed my first question was, “Will I be able to go up to the mountains this summer?” And that was really the thing that drove me to survive — was to get back outside. I remember that first summer being back up after treatment and feeling just immensely grateful to be alive, to be outside, part of the bigger universe, and to feel like your problems were small as you look out over the mountains. And so I don’t think there’s a time I go outside that I don’t feel just profoundly grateful to be here. I feel like, in a way, I owe coming back to life to the outdoors and to public lands. And so to dedicate my life to protecting them feels like an extremely fair trade.

Missy: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us. So what we’re wanting everybody to do is go to savepubliclands.us, sign the petition. Let’s push to get a million signatures to take to the Capitol later this month for National Public Lands Day. Tania, thank you so much for being part of The Parks Podcast. I really appreciate you sharing your personal story as well as all of the information about Outdoor Alliance.

Tania: Thank you so much for having me, and for your great advocacy for safe public lands.

Missy: Absolutely. Thanks for listening to this episode. Until next time — we’ll see you in the parks.

Music for The Parks Podcast is performed and produced by Porter Hardy. Follow us @TheParksPodcast or visit TheParksPodcast.com.