These surviving traces of landscapes long vanished are wild, quirky, remote, usually stunning, and managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency known more for its chumminess with oil, gas, and mining interests than for its conservation ethos. Which is why former interior secretary Bruce Babbitt—in close consultation with longtime conservationist Edward James Norton—created the NLCS in 2000, giving the BLM a clear conservation mandate to follow.

Norton, who is now involved in, among other things, protecting Indonesia's orangutans, bristled at my suggestion that the NLCS could be seen as a second-tier National Park System. "There's nothing second-tier about it," he said in a phone interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. "It's different, but it's not second-tier."

Yet the NLCS is a bit of a bastard child when it comes to federal funding. The system receives little financial support to provide visitors centers, rangers, and in many cases even Porta-Pottys. NLCS lands receive only about $55 million a year for everything from signs to management plans to law enforcement, while the National Park Service's annual budget is $2.4 billion. This lack of resources might explain, at least in part, why the BLM is often unable to enforce the rules designed to protect these lands—a criticism frequently leveled by environmentalists. Recreationists in places such as California's rolling Imperial Sand Dunes roar over fragile landscapes in all-terrain vehicles, creating serious erosion and damaging vegetation and archaeological sites. People steal prehistoric pots, dinosaur fossils, and other artifacts: The Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area, just outside Las Vegas, displays prehistoric petroglyphs seized from someone who jack-hammered them out of the rocks to sell.

Alarmed by these problems, a group of concerned citizens created the National Conservation System Foundation two years ago to help ensure that the BLM adequately protects and promotes the NLCS. Norton, Babbitt, and Norton's son, the actor Edward Norton, all sit on the foundation's board. "We're trying to raise the profile of the system," both within the BLM and outside it, said Brian O'Donnell, the foundation's executive director, from his office in Durango, Colorado. "Americans should know that these places belong to us and be proud of them." And visit them, of course, which may be the very best way to protect them.

That's where Edward Norton the actor comes in. Like his father, he's a committed conservationist and has his own projects, including working to help Kenya's Masai tribe protect their lands in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, and I'm curious to know why he added the NLCS to his list of causes. "Apart from the fact that my father is chairman of the board and I do what my father tells me," he joked, "I was inspired by the revelation that there was something so significant that I had never heard of. I can't believe I didn't know about this treasure chest of public lands that are underserved, undermanaged, and underappreciated." To lend his support to the cause, Norton has narrated a short film about the NLCS and has done media interviews to get out the word. At the Cannes Film Festival last year, Norton, who starred with Matt Damon in the poker film Rounders, won a charity poker tournament and donated the $100,000 proceeds to the foundation. Its $2 million annual budget, raised primarily from private donations, goes toward promoting the system in the media and working with the BLM on policy issues. While the influence of a celebrity helps, it's the ground game that Babbitt and the elder Norton say is crucial. And the single most important part of their strategy is creating local Friends Groups. "It's not the suits in Washington who get things done," says Norton senior. "If you look at the history of well-protected lands, the main ingredient is local support."