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So is our pathological disregard for destroying our most precious natural spaces, and I will take belief in a higher power as a mental illness over utter destruction of the only planet we have.

It is the privilege of the oppressor to decide when history begins.

I'm paraphrasing a fictional character from a book, but the point stands.

You're saying that their history and beliefs don't matter because it infringes on a public good, but you leave out the context where these "public lands" were stolen from the indigenous people through a multigenerational campaign of genocide, and racial subjugation.

So... you find this meager apology and repatriation of some sacred lands to the wronged party here to be intolerable, and unjust?

I can understand not wanting folks traipsing over burial mounds that were actually built by their ancestors, but if someone is going to say “No you can’t go to Niagara falls!”, because their 35th great grandpa thought the view was divinely inspired, that’s just dumb.

What if their 34th, 33rd, 32nd, 31st, 30th, 29th, 28th, 27th, 26th, 25th, 24th, 23rd, 22nd, 21st, 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st great grandpa along with their father too all see a place as sacred to their culture?

Are you suggesting that because a place was declared sacred long ago that it has some kind of statute of limitations on being sacred that expires after a certain amount of time? Or, using the US an example, are you suggesting that because the native peoples and cultures that lived here before Europeans invaded were subject to a genocide and mass land theft that their claim to a place being sacred is now forfeit? What are you actually saying?

Your argument is nothing more than a hollow appeal to being willfully ignorant, and crucially you utterly fail to realize how vitally important indigenous cultures have been to preservation of precious natural spaces all over the world. Without indigenous people defending the lands they consider sacred there would be an unbelievable amount more of irreversible ecological destruction wrought by modern capitalism by this point and that is just simply a fact. If you don't care about the preservation of beautiful, natural spaces... well then I am damn happy there are indigenous land protectors out there who are devoted to pissing people like you off by refusing to let the cultural context of the landscape around them be erased by lazy people who can't be bothered to understand history or environmentalism.

Sure, if you want to consider native beliefs silly or dumb, whatever, I could care less but you are just factually wrong if you don't understand the immense material benefit to us all (and our children) from indigenous cultures defending the preservation of our most beautiful and rare natural landscapes.

You've decided that you have the right to impose your view over the views of the people who have traditionally lived in these places. You have decided that your view is the one that matters and damned those who have always occupied a space.

Strip the supernatural aspect out and just call it “important to the local culture”.

That's pretty much exactly what "sacred" means, yes. For the average westerner, religious or not, the term "sacred" smells of holy water created by someone in a fancy dress mumbling and waving their hands while for others it simple means "place of significance that should be honoured". These kinds of terms don't easily translate between cultural barriers even if everyone is, on the face of it, speaking the same language, see also e.g. the Native American use of the word "medicine".

Metalheads call the site of the Wacken Open Air festival "Holy Ground", and they have all the right in the world to do it. On the part of the people of Wacken you can be sure that they won't build anything on it, it's gonna stay a pasture -- a very well maintained one, the water management system is extensive to make sure rainfalls during the festivals won't turn it into a mudpit. Maybe, in case the villages around it grow together more, make some pathways through it and plant trees along the paths, but they certainly won't put a mall there. The vast majority of Wackeners, even if they don't partake in the religion of metal, don't mind a bit selling beer to the pilgrims so the site gets respected, just as the metalheads respect the site: They're cleaning it up perfectly each and every year. Right now it might seem a bit mundane, it's thinkable (if Wackeners weren't Wackeners) that someone would put a mall there, but give it 100 years of continued yearly ritual use and it'll become unthinkable.

Does the relationship invoke supernatural forces driving the phenomena? Then it's superstitious nonsense and has nothing to do with abrahamic religions other then them also invoking superstitious nonsense. Does someone own the land and want to keep people out for idiosyncratic reasons? Fine, rule of law says they get to control the land for whatever reasons they want. Is it public land? Then only safety concerns or preventing the degradation of a natural wonder should affect who can visit and for what purpose.