Currently, pretty much all land where those corporations mine for coal or drill for oil, is owned by the government, and is leased to these corporations on a temporary basis so they can extract their stuff (my guess the leasing has partly to do with people thinking governments will protect the pretty public land better if they owned it, and that some powerful corporations can use the lease thing to get land cheaper with help from buddy Senators)

There's a theory that, if those corporations were instead required to actually BUY the land (and on top of it, be taxed property taxes for owning it), they would have a huge incentive to make sure they either don't ruin it, or fix it up to be as good as it was when they bought it, so they can still resell it after they're done digging everything up. Otherwise they'll just go on owning a trashed chunk of land that costs them taxes.