Public Lands Hate You

Why does Public Lands Hate You exist?

The person who started this was tired of seeing his favorite places on public lands trashed by people who didn't know any better or just didn't care.  He noticed a marked increase in abusive behavior to our public lands about five years ago, which coincidentally was about the same time the ever popular social media platform Instagram started to pick up steam, allowing people to share all their super rad outdoorsy photos.  He believes that people just "doing it for the Gram" are a major source of this irresponsible behavior as people try to out-do each other getting the best shots with the most likes, in a bid to become an "influencer", who will continue with the same behavior, except now with corporate sponsors.



What's the goal here?

The primary goal of Public Lands Hate You is education.  We want people to be thinking about behaving responsibly before they even leave their house to visit our public lands.  Obviously, as you can see from the pictures featured here, many people aren't getting the message.  So the next step is that we encourage people to reach out in person, and on social media, to anyone that they see breaking to rules, and provide them with information about why what they are doing is wrong, the impacts of that behavior, and what they can do next time to be better humans.  Turns out that many people/companies don't like being told they are doing something illegal or harmful to the environment.  Many people/companies choose to ignore this information, make excuses, or just straight up tell people to get lost.  That's when things get interesting.

 

Public Lands Hates You started as a way to post the aftermath of people behaving badly, transitioned to posting pictures of people caught in the act, and is moving toward a more proactive, educational approach.  That said, the original mission of publicly posting people's bad behavior will never go away.  There needs to be some level of accountability for what people post online, and since there aren't any environmental law police on the internet, we will continue to take things into our own hands.  If we come across people or companies that are blatantly abusing your public lands and continue to be ignorant when the facts are presented to them, we will post them here for the world to see.  Call it a wall of shame.  Call it public humiliation.  Call it whatever you want.  This method has been used for 1,000's of years as a way of keeping people from breaking the law.  We are just giving it a modern twist and using all the tools at our disposal to do it.  Fighting fire with fire if you will. Disclaimer, we are not in favor of public stoning.

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Why did you make this website and blog?  Why not just stay on Instagram?

We would have much preferred to stay only on Instagram.  Having to pay for, and maintain, a blog and website isn't really what I want to do with my free time.  However, this medium gives us much more freedom.  Instagram is notorious for being run almost completely by algorithms, which is a major problem for an account like Public Lands Hate You.  Although we are an educational account, we do call people out for their bad behavior, and some influencers have lost sponsors because of us.  In retaliation, influencers will mobilize their followers to report the account as bullying, harassing, or posting inappropriate content.  The result is that sometimes posts will just disappear without any kind of notification.  And if enough reports are made, the entire account can be removed without warning, and once it's gone, there is no way to contact Instagram to make a case that it was unfairly reported.  So this website and blog is a way for us to continually connect with people interested in the cause, even if the algorithm in the clouds at Instagram decides to deep six @publiclandshateyou.