Weeks Act

Yeah.

Well, and your point about clean water, a lot of the public land, specifically in the East, was purchased in the early 1900s under something called the Weeks Act, specifically for water quality.

Because like, again, West Virginia, the Mon National Forest, 1.1 million acres, was bought specifically for this because the entire state had been logged.

It was owned largely by private logging companies.

So we need to restore those lands.

And they persuaded Congress to pass something called the Weeks Act in 1911, which authorized the federal government to acquire from willing sellers for market value.

value, lands to restore and protect the environment.

And so most of the federal lands that we see in the Midwest, the South, the Northeast, they were created, they were acquired, bought, and protected as a result of that Weeks Act, which dates back to that post-Gilded Age movement to hold and protect public lands.

Yeah, that's incredible.

I didn't know any of that.