The recent expansion of Western Watersheds Project with the opening of offices in Wyoming, Montana and California is truly a hopeful sign for the West.

While the new WWP offices and our new employees are but a small brushstroke in the overall picture of western public lands, they are emblematic of how all of us can change the way Americans view public lands.

By drawing public and governmental attention to the importance of our public lands for the protection and restoration of natural systems, our new offices will bring the necessary debate about the future of the West to millions of new listeners.

This debate and discussion will change the received view of the West's public lands as unwanted places left over from the rush of European settlement into a new vision of these lands as the centerpiece of a wonderful possibility-the recovery and restoration of much of western North America.

If the 270 million acres of western public lands can be devoted to the conservation of natural systems and the recovery of native wildlife and fisheries, we can help create a model of change for how people can rightfully join with the natural world.

Such a model will be created not just by the hard, grinding work of fighting old ways of thinking but more fundamentally by showing that an even older way of human understanding of close kinship with the animals, plants, air and water of this place we call home is still possible.

While WWP will continue to use the powerful tools of scientific knowledge combined with the informed legal advocacy of our attorneys, it is only by bringing a much deeper and stronger idea of the interconnectedness of the natural world to other people that we will be able to change the future of the West for the better.

Our efforts to re-create this depth of understanding is made hopeful by the qualities and character of the people who take on the work of our new offices across the sweep of our western public lands. I welcome them and honor their commitment to help paint this vision of the West.

Jon Marvel is executive director of WWP. He lives in Hailey, Idaho.