Oil and gas extraction and infrastructure compete with economic activities on public and private lands, and thanks to the Trump administration, the industry secured even more privileges for its operations. The administration reoriented federal agencies with oil and gas insiders at their helm to open more public lands to drilling, despite companies not drilling on half of the 23 million acres already leased and despite the sizable financial and ecosystem benefits from conservation. It facilitated the buildout of interstate gas pipelines by promulgating regulations that narrowed states’ powers to protect their water resources from proposed pipelines and by narrowing federal agencies’ assessment of the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects. It weakened the legal oversight of oil and gas operations that already enjoyed exemptions from a number of provisions under federal environmental laws. Despite professed concerns for private property rights, congressional Republicans failed to take steps to improve protections for landowners whose lands were traversed by pipeline projects. Despite Congress’s pervasive failures to keep the administration in check, the rare bipartisan legislation that provided conservation protections to segments of public lands offers some hope that voters’ strong support for public lands, as evidenced in polls, can still compel Congress to take critical action.

Climate change undermines the property concepts embedded within histories of capitalism and colonialism, placing them in crisis. As Arctic territories and Pacific island states recede to sea level rise, as wildfires burn through suburban communities in the wealthy world, as global fresh water runs dry, uncertainty shadows what it means to own, to use, and to inhabit. For the wealthier world, survival may depend on owning and occupying less, upon reducing the scale of supply chains and stewarding regional resources. Enter "the commons,” a concept and praxis tied to sustainability in the form of stable subsistence in anthropological literatures, to Indigenous economies and cosmologies worldwide, and to European peasant economies. For the world’s Indigenous, theconcept may be, at best, an incomplete translation of Indigenous traditional knowledges. Yet the commons as concept attempts to combat extractive, colonial economies, offering a justice-oriented and site-specific alternative to the state and the market as organizing systems and stories. This chapter considers the dynamic intellectual history of the commons as it relates to climate change, environmentalism and decolonization.

Whose everyday? Whose place? This chapter examines the moral assumptions that anchor the different senses of justice concerning Drakes Estero, located in largely rural and agricultural Marin County, California, Point Reyes National Seashore. Vociferous opposition riddled local communities and spread throughout the region over whether a locally popular, family owner–operated oyster company should be allowed to stay once its federal permits for its terrestrial operations expired, and over whether Drakes Estero, legally designated as potential wilderness, should be allowed to become actual wilderness. This chapter investigates the wide array of notions about just and unjust uses of Drakes Estero manifested in the public sphere and the courtrooms, paying particular attention to the moralities that shaped the conflicts over jobs, ways of life, wilderness, environment, and justice. This conflict illuminates the ways in which contentious notions about uses of US public lands are, for all of their differences, premised on a shared perpetuating of the foundational social relations of what Durkheim calls non-integrative social solidarity. Taken in the larger context of contemporary conflicts over US public lands, this particular conflict leads us to query the forms of civics that arise from the social and legal processes of justice already in place.