Make space for public lands, right to recreate

Beaver Dam State Park

Different people feel differently the pinch of the federal government shutdown in the United States. 

(All photos from Nevada in August 2025, except T.R. Birthplace; all photos by RJ Peltz-Steele, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) 

I'm fortunate not to depend on the federal government for my paycheck. I'm saddened for the steadfast government clerk trying to make ends meet, and nothing I write here means to diminish that anxiety. Professionally, I've been disappointed to see the work of the federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee paralyzed. The committee comprises some heroic public servants in federal agencies.

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace
National Historic Site,
N.Y., June 2025

On the purely personal front, what hits me hardest is to see the closure of public lands, such as parks and museums. I treasure these places where the public can find education, recreation, and respite. Maybe because I'm an academic, I don't much distinguish among the three. So much of our public dialog in America is preoccupied with how we work. But it's on public lands that Americans live.

As a libertarian, I'm wary of public lands. But I'm not a great, or "pure" libertarian. I have always been what I call a "moderate" libertarian—I've been called a "bad" libertarian—because I do not believe that the private sector is the answer to all problems. I rather believe that being a libertarian is about being thoughtful: making an informed decision at the threshold of any given problem as to whether the problem is better addressed by society as a composition of independent private actors—the presumption—or by society as a collective.

A vexing problem for libertarians is the tragedy of the commons, which arises when competing private individuals, acting in their own interests, will intolerably deplete a resource that the society as a collective requires. The environment is often raised as paradigmatic example. Any one private actor is incentivized only to cut down the trees, or use fresh water. But society needs there to be trees and fresh water, saved from depletion.

Selected public lands in Nevada, besides state parks

American society is heavy on libertarianism—the "Wild West" ethos has long outlived western settlement—but maintains its own delicate balance of liberty and collectivism. The duplexity was embodied by President Theodore Roosevelt, whose reconstructed childhood home I visited in New York in the summer. Roosevelt, a nature enthusiast, was a rugged individualist, and also is credited with founding the very notion of U.S. national parks, which today are widely regarded as a crown jewel of federal government purpose.

All 27 Nevada state parks

Pure libertarians respond to the tragedy of the commons by insisting that the private sector can handle it. The tree cutters ultimately will stop cutting trees, or farm more trees, because they want to keep cutting trees. Water consumers will not use all of the water, because eventually, they will suffer thirst. A slightly watered down take on pure libertarianism makes room for non-governmental public interest organizations to manage collective resources. But there's no place for government.

My Nevada drive
(excluding two national parks
I visited previously)

I find these responses strained and unconvincing. If we destroy the glaciers of Glacier National Park because corporations want to commodify the pure waters, or because wealthy people want to land helicopters on them and take home souvenirs, there's no restoring a natural glory that took 170 million years to form.

If the planet bakes while we wait for the trees to regrow, then the private-sector experiment has failed in a profound and irreversible way. If we run out of fresh water while we wait for innovation to perfect desalinization, then millions might die, and only a few persons with inherited wealth might survive. I wouldn't call that a socially optimal outcome. 

The problem with the purely individualist approach is that it assumes infinite time, perpetual capacity for resource renewal, and indifference to human suffering in the meantime. That sounds to me like a recipe for humanity's self-extinction.

"Citizen Science Station,"
Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument

Public lands are an easy call for me, even as a libertarian. I would like to live in a world in which everyone has access to recreational opportunities, and everyone has a chance to see the inexplicable glory of the creation that fills the earth.

Writing about nuclear weapons in September, I mentioned the time I spent in the summer exploring public lands in Nevada. I visited all 27 Nevada state parks, and a great many other public lands as well: local, state, and federal. Local and state parks fortunately carry on while the federal government is shut down.

I am grateful for all these places, local, state, and federal, and the people who steward them.

One fun thing I happened upon in Nevada was a "Citizen Science Station" at the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. There, a bracket is mounted on a pole, prepared to receive a smartphone, so that passersby can take a photograph of the terrain. Images can then be uploaded to Chronolog.io, which partners with the National Park Service. The collected images are then compiled into a time lapse series (below, at end), which users can enjoy and study. I contributed an image (Aug. 7, 2025).

Notwithstanding so much natural beauty and the participatory excitement of the Citizen Science Station, I found memorable something else I saw at Tule Springs, a different kind of socially minded contribution from the private sector:

Go see the natural wonders of Nevada, including fossils and fossil beds. See them before the pure libertarians cart them off to private museums, where no doubt they'll be best cared for.

Durango Loop Temporary Trail at Chronolog

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1901: Disgruntled laborer shoots, kills President

Assassination of President McKinley by T. Dart Walker, c. 1905
Library of Congress

In Buffalo, New York, this week, I felt obliged by recent events to seek out the place where Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley in 1901.

Contemplating Thomas Crooks's still unknown motive for shooting President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13, I thought about something Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last week: that every U.S. presidential assassin has been mentally ill.

I wasn't sure about that. After some looking into it, I suppose the accuracy of the assertion depends on what one means by mentally ill.

One could argue that anyone with ambiguous motive to murder a President is mentally unwell. Indeed, an "insanity" argument was made in the criminal defense of Czolgosz for the 1901 shooting of McKinley. The defense hardly slowed the conviction. Inside of two months from the shooting, Czolgosz was executed.

Site of President McKinley assassination, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

So in informal terms, O'Reilly probably is right. In clinical terms, we don't have enough data to be sure of the mental state or diagnosis of past assassins. Experts have disagreed about Czolgosz. Then there's the legal concept of "insanity," having to do with capacity to differentiate right from wrong. Czolgosz knew what he was doing; I don't think O'Reilly meant to say otherwise.

Czolgosz was attracted to radical socialism and then anarchism because he lost his job in an economic crash when he was 20—the same age as Crooks when his life ended. Czolgosz couldn't find consistent work amid the labor turmoil of the ensuing depression in the 1890s. Born into a Polish-immigrant family, he became convinced that the American economic system was rigged to favor the establishment over the working class. Hm.

Czolgosz learned that socialists and anarchists in Europe were struggling with similarly entrenched economic inequality as royals endeavored to maintain their traditional grip on social order. European anarchists had resorted to assassination as a means to express their displeasure and spark reform. However, bolstering O'Reilly's theory on Czolgosz's mental state, even American socialists and anarchists raised, no metaphorical pun intended, red flags over Czolgosz.

Pan-American Exposition, by Oscar A. Simon & Bro., 1901
Library of Congress

In his second term as President, McKinley was in Buffalo for the Pan-American Exposition, a kind of world's fair. He was riding a wave of national optimism upon consolidation of American power in the hemisphere. It was in McKinley's first term that the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain after substantially prevailing in the Spanish-American War. 

McKinley was keen to attend the exposition, because he saw political promise in associating himself with American prosperity and invention. The 342-acre exposition featured the latest engines, the hydroelectric power of nearby Niagara Falls, and an "Electric Tower" framed by the newly proliferating magic of light bulbs. 

No doubt McKinley's exposition strategy galled Czolgosz. In a morbid irony, when Czolgosz was executed in October 1901, it was by electric chair.

Reenactment in Porter's Execution of Czolgosz (1901).
Library of Congress

Like President Trump, McKinley liked being up close and in person with his public, despite the exposure to risk. McKinley's security staff, of course, knew of the anarchist assassinations in Europe and the organization of anarchism in the United States. McKinley's top adviser twice canceled the appearance of the President at the exposition's Temple of Music, for fear he could not be protected there. McKinley overruled the cancellations. That's where he was shot.

Like Crooks, Czolgosz intended to shoot the President while he was giving a speech, the day before the Temple of Music event. But the crowd at the speech was too dense, and Czolgosz didn't think he could make the shot. So instead, he approached the President in a receiving line at the Temple of Music and shot him at close range. Czolgosz's first shot only grazed the President. The second struck McKinley in the abdomen and resulted in death two days later.

Fordham Drive, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Like Crooks, Czolgosz was recognized as a potential threat. But security blunders—for example, he should not have been permitted in the receiving line with the closed and covered hand that concealed a gun—let him reach the President. After the shooting, he was tackled by a heroic but later undersung African-American man standing nearby, then pummeled by security staff. Czolgosz might have been killed right then, but McKinley himself called off the beating.

Many Americans no doubt saw the assassination of McKinley as signaling a tragic inevitability of the times. President Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865, and President Garfield in 1881. Director Edwin S. Porter made a creepy, one-minute silent film for the Thomas Edison company in 1901 about the assassinations; The Martyred Presidents is available online at the Library of Congress. Present in Buffalo to film the exposition and yet early in his prolific career, Porter also made a four-minute film featuring a reenactment of Czolgosz's execution.

President Roosevelt at the Wilcox House, 2024.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Another assassination attempt did follow, injuring President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Roosevelt had been inaugurated in Buffalo in succession of McKinley in 1901. The location of the hasty inauguration, the then-private Ansley Wilcox House, is now a National Historic Site in Buffalo; I stopped by there, too.

Me'n'T.R. meet inside the Wilcox House.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Roosevelt's survival seemed to break the generational cycle, at least until the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. A more entertaining explanation for the abatement of presidential assassinations is featured in Sarah Vowell's characteristically superb book Assassination Vacation (2006): the Robert Todd Lincoln "jinx." The eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln was present at the assassinations of his father, President James Garfield, and President McKinley, but not for the attack on T.R.

The Pan-American Exposition is long gone. The land where the incident occurred became a residential development. A small plaque and garden, and a flagpole and flag in the roadway median of Fordham Drive in Buffalo mark the approximate location of the fatal shooting in 1901.

A nearby high school is named for McKinley. Buffalo, N.Y., 2024.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0