Although many of the arguments made thru out this thread are valid, none really get at the root cause....I will be 62 in a couple of months...my wife has a few years on me....so what, you ask ?
Well, the population of the u.s. has already doubled in her lifetime and almost doubled in mind. The western state where I graduated now has 10....yes 10...x the population it did when I moved there in 69..
Please Spend an hour on google disecting some of the demographic stats around the country and you can understand that the knot in your stomach from feeling things are out of wack is real....very real. You are not imagining things.
Increasing population, combined with increased wealth and mobility has continually changed this country for well over 200 years. I did not appreciate that reality back in the early 90's when I made my first trips to kansas and nebraska, and by the later 90's, the dakotas
.. that reality is not somewhere in the future at some place to be determined....it is with us in the here and now..at every step..at every tick of the clock.
It's called change and it's a constant in life whether we like it or not.
The best we can do is to work hard to appreciate what we have right now and manage our expectations based on how things are now, not what they were 20,30,40 years ago.
I get out and use public lands across the west and alaska....Those public lands truly are a national treasure...something of a birthright I would go far as to say.
States in the midwest have very little public land.....again, google can give you the stats. As old timers pass on and family lands get sold off, less and less access will be available. It's a slow moving train wreck for sure, and unfortunately I don't see any good ways to slow or stop the train..
Not very positive or upbeat....sorry about that.
Go out and enjoy what you have right now...