NEW STORY: We spent months tracking billionaires who are buying up vast swaths of the West.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/wilks-brothers-fracking-business.html …
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Backstory: In my five years covering the intermountain West for The Times, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the intersection of land and power.
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The region is a patchwork of public and private forests, deserts, mountains and canyons, and what happens to those acres can make or break entire communities.
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In my travels in Colorado, Utah, Idaho and other states, I have come to appreciate the way a connection to the land molds people’s identities.
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Then, last year, on a visit to New York, editor
@julesm_b approached me with a query: Who owns the West?Show this thread -
Good question, I thought. The federal govt, of course, owns a lot of the region — half of its acreage — giving it enormous influence.
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This is when I began to think about large private landowners.
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Key fact from this piece: In the last decade, private land in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-mile expanse, according to the Land Report.
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Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.
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End of conversation
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