Transcripts For CSPAN2 Adam 20240704

About American History and empire of the summer moon and rebel yell. His latest, his majestys airship that went up killing more than the hindenberg did. In depth, live sunday noon eastern on book tv on cspan2. Two years ago as the covid 19 pandemic closed down businesses and schools, we sought places to socially distance and let nature lessen the stress of the dayment we enjoy the public lands and often take them for granted. And theyre used. Here at the archives, the four federal agencies most involved in our nations public lands. Bureau of Land Management. U. S. Forest service, u. S. Fish and Wild Life Service and the park service. The written records contain the stories of the beginning of federal stewardship. In this book, making americas public lands, adam takes us through the history of the lands and examines the changing priorities and challenges concerning them. And a professor of history at the university of idaho, and the west coast an environmental history and conservation and the moon. For the planet sectn in a series. Called life up close her writing has appeared in publications, including the nations geographic and the New York Times magazine, and shes the author of beloved beasts fighting for life in an age of extinction now, lets hear from adam swords and michelle nighouse. Thank you for joining us today. Hi everyone. Its such a pleasure to be with you today. Im michelle niehaus, and im here with adam sowards to talk about his his wonderful new book, making americas public lands. If youre tuning intraday, its likely that you spent some time in what adam calls the public lands, our National Parks, wildlife refugees, national force, or any one of the other landscapes that make up our public land system. One of the many things i appreciate about adams book is that its both very nuanced but also wonderfully accessible. And it is in addition very alert to the role of the public lands today not only as valuable conservation lands but as a source of some very deep rooted myths and concepts and traditions in our national politics, not only our environmental politics but our national politics. So adam begins the book in the way you might i not expect. He invokes both Henry David Thoreau and the political philosopher and a rent. I didnt know if it were possible to eavesdrop on a conversation between those two human beings i would give up a lot in order to do so. Adam invokes thoreau because het had a very prescient idea that the forest could be held in common for the public good. And then he invokes her ideas, her metaphor of the table as a place as a metaphor for the public sphere, a table being a place where citizens can gather and find something approaching Common Ground i think adam will start with a short reading from the introduction that elaborates on that second metaphor. Thank you, michelle. This will be a very short reading. This table metaphor works to guide us in history of American Public lands and helps us think about the public lands as part of the democratic experiment that is the United States. It takes great insight to find faults and failures in meeting the promises of democracy, for the nation is rooted in the disposition of indigenous land and of the enslavement of africans. The history of public lands include democratic shortcomings and exclusions just like every other part of u. S. Political history. That is partly why thinkingem about public lands as an element of the democratic experiment is helpful, because we can see who defines theur nations land and r what purposes, how new ideas supplanted old ones, and how novel understanding complicated traditional views. The land themselves as at government object that focuses peoples attention. We learn that this kequintessentially american sysm like the nation itself is full of experiments, successes and failures, and promises made, broken, and redefined. About this history the table of those gathered around it changed and multiplied, guided by evolving laws and science, not to mention shifting political interests. Like a growing family at a holiday dinner incorporating new entrees, the more interest at the table, the more cacophonous and unfamiliar it appeared to those who have been gathering there for generations. This book is an account of how the table changed, which is to say it is a history and not a philosophical treatise or a polemic. The book attempts to explain how the system came to be in ny, as well as how and why it changed over time. The consequences of the system on the land itself and for the people who relied on it for whatever purpose, they drive special attention to where constraints and boundaries were redrawn and new political and legal traditions initiated. These moments of transition draw attention to novel arrangements of power into the land. Frequently, if not always, they were contested, demonstrating that the slant and the processes that govern them matter to americans who relied on them. Such disagreements are inevitable and healthy in a democracy when participants were allowed to be involved. This involvement has not always been the case. With some participants directly excluded and some merely perceived their exclusion at other times. Thank you, adam. Thank you for setting the cacophonous cable for us. One of the great things about this book, you have studied the history of public lands for a long time. Na i have reported on public land politics for a long time as a journalist. We both know that this history is very complicated with countless characters and its also very long. Its prehistory is as long orhi longer than its written history. But youve managed to fit a lot of complexity into a graceful volume that is let me make sure i get in the screen desperate that its just a little over 200 pages. So i knew often from experience have been written history of the Conservation Movement that writing efficiently and writing short is much more difficult than writing long. How did you find the path through the history of public lands that managed to capture nuance as well as tell the story at a manageable length . Well, thank you for saying these kind words about the book pure im glad it reads that way to you as you know when you tackle a big project you cant use every example in every store that you uncover, and to think about the book a little bit like a key that it unlocks the larger history. So that if youre reading it and it doesnt include your favorite part or your favorite forest or the rangeland in your state that you go to, you will be able to read it and understand the larger context in which those things exist here one thing i tried to do in the book that i dont know that its unique, but i tried to write it other systems at large. Wr many writers and historians have taken on the single part or taken on Forest Service. And what i tried, or there are some that look at all of them public lands, but when you look at those many of those are organized and has a section on the park Service Enters a section on the era of Land Management. And i wanted to try to see if i could tell it as a history and more every stream of time. So looking for trends that crossed all the agencies in the same sort of decades. And maybe better i need to use examples that tied multiple things together and were if i had gone bit by bit agency by agency part by part i would have been, it wouldve been a much, much longer book. Yeah, i can see that. I think that you brought out some scenes that were maybe not new to me but i hadnt quite grappled with directly. They were so big that it couldnt sleep because i was down in the weeds of individual agencies or individual places. So i found those big seems to be especially fascinating. Now, you may conclude that the history of the public lands doesnt of course begin with the founding of the forest f, doesnt begin with the signing ofto the constitution. As image in the prehistory of the public lands is longer than the written test of many of the written history. Where does actually begin . Thats a great q question. As with so many things, sadly in American History, i think the history of the public lands begins with the dispossession of Indigenous People who lived on this continent since the time immemorial, the forces of colonization that depopulated much of the continent and change the political military economic dynamics here, sets the stage for all that comes after peer and so its that class of colonization that i think really helps precipitate what leads to this public landt system that e see emerging a little bit later. And i do want to return to that later in our discussion because that history is of course still very much with us and there are some modern responses to it that i think a very interesting and sources of hope for all of us. Let me move forward in time a little bit in the context of that dispossession. There was a very interesting and complementary role played by Founding Fathers jefferson and madison, and actually wasnt aware of madisons role in which his vision was mostly ignored i should say, but it was influential in the formation of the public lands. Can you say a little bit about their complementary visions and their effect on the public land system . I would be glad to. The effect is somewhat indirect but jefferson is sometimes has been called the agrarian philosopher and sort of famous macys virtue embedded in farming and practices of that sort of labor in the land, and that in part explains why he was enthusiastic today the Louisiana Purchase to increase the size of the nation, expecting that independent yeoman farmers could move and move west. Of course this land, this is a process of dispossession thats happening with that westward movement. R independently with their labor transform the law under rock earth as he imagined it into good productive labor, good productive products that we might sell and have sustenance for. The challenge with this is theres a lot of land in north america and it became very easy to justho sort of to mix my metaphors here, cut and run as you would imagine any forest. Madison, along with others in the early partc of the republic, thought theres a need to slow down energy to improve our land and not use it so extensively, so stay rather than move and treat the land better and more sustainably which was in some ways an antislavery position p s well and i did not to keep moving west and moving the slave system west. Of course theres so many paradoxes we could spendg the rest of the hour talking about the but both of these men who did not so much to live their ideals as of right about them. Ill stop with that. Ac yes. Both were slave owners, we should acknowledge. So really for a long time the vision, the vision that led to the public lands was aom commercial vision. I mean, conservation didnt come in until much later. And its interesting to me what comes out very clearly in your book is that it was a commercial vision very divorced from the reality of the land itself in that the reality of the western climate. And that the public land system, i think it could be said, in a very broad sense it resulted from a collision between this jefferson vision of an agrarian republic event the harsh reality of the western climate. Can you tell us what happened when those two visions met . Yeah. So even before the constitution was signed, the system that was in place was that all land held in common by the state, the ultimate goal was for that to become privately owned. The government under the articles of confederation and then under the constitution developed various means to get that land into private hands. The most famous example of course theres the homestead act of the 1860s, but there were predecessors to that. And that worked reasonably well, 160 acres, you could make a selfsufficient parking lots of places like that, but as more white farmers moved to the west, they found that 160 acres was way too little or way too much. So it was too dry or also to mountainous. That was also something that was, the homestead act was not sustainable for. Answer congress tried adapting hes lost her face that gosh, if you plant some trees you can have more land, or if you bring irrigation you can have more land and these just kept not working. 160 acres on a steep slope in the Rocky Mountains isnt going to lead you to a very selfsufficient sort of livelihood, and many places in the west were too high or too cold to have really an agricultural economy as the founders had expected. No matter how trees you plant. Exactly. And so in the 1870s and 1880s and sort of increasing in that area you have a number of people say well, we get to do things differently. And some of that was maybe the land needed to be the land given away, taken away, we need to be smaller and bring irrigation or manage a small amount of labor or may be needed to be bigger. You need a lot of acreage to run cattle in different parts of safe colorado as an example. So we can make some adjustments of their. And within those conversationst one of the ideas that emerges is maybe these big mountain ranges with alldn these trees shouldnt be owned by individuals, because 160 acres of trees is not going to last very long so maybe they should be controlled by the federal government. So these ideas start percolating in the 1860s, 1870s that congres moves slowly, even then, and it took a while before congress decided that in 1891 the president could have the right to reserve some of those lands so that they would not be cut, there would not be owned by individual people or companies, but it would be kept in trust by the federal government. Admin that evolves in a variety of different ways around that turn of the 20th century. Right spirit into what we think of as conservation. Yeah. And just to emphasize, these lands that couldnt be homesteaded were still being exploited, both by individual landowners and by corporations who saw them as well, you know, free trees or free pasture. Tell us a little bit about what was happening, whats happening on the landscape. Right. So before these measures go into effect, its free and open for whoever can get to it, and there are large herds of cattle o sheep that are moving up the mountains and sometimes they are competing with other cattle and sheep operators in the valley. Answer that led to pretty bad overgrazing and lots of cases. Theres a lot of concern about timber being stolen from these federal grants as well. When the first forest reserves as they were initially called werere created, they were relatively few regulations and so then the concern was about timber trespass, people stealing. Abacus to back up one bit of context is theres a great fear at this time in American Life that were going to run out of trees and were going to run out of lover. This is the age of wood and divided fuel as well as building material, and typical corporations had denuded district denuded the upper midwest very quickly in the last part of the 19th century and is a great concern that that cant be allowed to happen in the sierras come in the cascades, in the rockies, or we wouldnt have enough wood to fuel our nation and our nations economy. So that is all sort of creates some of the urgency around us. T. No one paid anything. So theyre taking from the public lands valuable resources and turning a profit from it and thats also part of the concern that develops around these conservationists who want to Institute Summary forms as we move into the 20th century. Mmhmm. So this was in part this these were people who are incense echoing madisons warning about soil, you know, were going to use up the soil. They were saying were going to use up these trees this week these were, you know, early conservation sentiments, but there was also a commercial interest here the federal government. Is is losing money by giving away . Or passively giving away these resources. Right um, so the federal governments assertion of control over the publics lands did create enormous bitterness. I know ive read some stories about what it was like to be in early one of the first forest rangers and to ride into town as a representative of this newly created Forest Service and be confronted by a bunch of unhappy ranchers who for the first time were going to have to pay grazing fees or were going to have to manage their cattle in certain ways and generations later. I know from from reporting and living in the rural west its not unusual to hear the federal governments presence in the west, and im sure in other parts of the country as well refer to as as a land grab so set the record straight for us. I know its it wasnt a land grab but what was it . Now, well, it wasnt a gland grab. Ill have to think about what it was as so theres the vast unclaimed once the land had been dispossessed by native from native peoples. Those all the unclaimed land was part of what was known as the Public Domain and as territories, utah, wyoming, idaho, whatever as they be entered into the union almost everyone. Theres just a couple exceptions explicitly gave up claim to all of those Public Domain lands that those are the federal governments. So youll often hear in well throughout the 20th century and the 21st century talking about the state should get their land back. It was never theirs to have so it couldnt have been it couldnt be taken back. And when the Forest Service is probably the best example of this when it is finally created in 1905. So just a quick note you can reserve for us in 1891, but theres no agency in charge of them until 1905. So theres a little gap there in how things are going to be managed. Real quickly some i would say fairly light regulations get imposed and some very fairly small grazing fees get imposed. But if youre a rancher who had grown accustomed over a decade or two decades or three decades of running cattle and not paying anything those grazing fees seemed like they were taking money from you. They were taking your rights away. So there was a great deal of controversy around that and a desire to push back against it Supreme Court by 1911 said absolutely the Forest Service has the right to do that and to administer these sorts of fees in many places, i think. A record shows that the initial creation of these sorts of places generated a lot of resentment and a lot of uncertainty and then in a little bit of time. It became okay that say the fact that the Forest Service was going to help put out fires. Made in an okay thing for them to be around now and many of the restrictions were in the larger context of all the changes happening in the first part of the 20th 20th century. Not that big a deal and so theres a settling in process. I think were locals get accustomed to. What these public land agencies are doing . Because quite frankly theyre not doing a lot theyre doing more than what it existed before but not real restrictive measures quite yet. Mmhmm. So the agency as the Agency Settles into its place that youre at your metaphorical table the people who are already sitting at the table or who had had sat themselves at the table get used to their presence. Yeah. I think that thats a good way to describe it. Yeah, and and theyre so it wasnt just that the conflicts did continue there was acceptance of the the presence of the Forest Service, but but of course arguments continued between the agency in between land universe users and they were all so arguments among between land users themselves, right . I think people may have heard of the conflicts between the cattle ranchers and the sheep grazers, which actually got quite well, theyre theyre legendary and a negative sense in the region. Can you tell me a little bit about why why that was so passionately fought. Yeah, its thats a real complicated story and it depends on the location where you are a part of it has to do with scarce resources when when the forage declines and there are a lot of animals trying to eat that scarcity generates conflict. If you are a pastoralist and you have animals you move them and you move them across land and so that system of its called transhumans is not doesnt work super well with private property and that could generate some challenges as well the labor that ran many of these animals across the mountain ranges and across valleys in wyoming or in the southwest. Were not always white and that could be associated with conflict as well and associations regarding who is a legitimate home builder, which was a term that was used often at the turn of the 20th century. So many of those sorts of um economic conflicts sort of emerge and theres also the conflict between someone who runs thousands of cattle and someone thats just got a small little homestead is just trying to make it work and those bigger more full Political Economic interests can really run what you might call a little guy out and and there were in fact there was violence people were killed over these sorts of issues. Theyre not divorced from the land. Theyre not divorced from larger political questions. Theyre not divorced from cultural preferences and issues like that either. Yeah, you sometimes hear them referred to as the cattle and sheep wars and they might not have been on the scale that we usually think of as wars, but they did as you say sometimes result in violence and but thats thats a good point. Its not simply a conflict between two ways of of using the publics lands, but its an economic perhaps racial and cultural conflict as well. Yes. So as this is happening as as the the i suppose we can call them customary users of the public land are are grappling with the presence of newly created federal agency. There is also in the nation as a whole theres a growing interest in conservation. Weve mentioned this briefly. But but how was that affecting the the work of these agencies . And how is it affecting what was happening to the landscape itself . Thats a great great question, and theres lots of elements of conservation and so for example one element that is involved is recreation. So we want to protect beautiful places that people could visit and enjoy as a tourist and that this this comes to be seen as you know, americas equivalent of visiting the alps for example in europe. So we protect these these unusual. Usually theyre unusual landscape. So the grand canyon yellowstone and these get protected because it would be a place to recreate and really recreate ourselves and to think about ourselves as americans as something distinct in the world. So thats thats one element of this. So thats thats different at this point from lets protect the trees from getting all cut down. There are other elements of the Conservation Movement that are interested in making sure theres water to be either irrigated or to to go to cities and that relates very closely to the National Forests, which are almost always the early ones are almost always in urban watersheds. We dont normally think about it this way, but thats what many of those First National forests are all about is to protect the watershed of seattle or the watershed about becomes phoenix. Now and so these things start to work together, i think at this time as well. Um, there are other concerns about say wildlife which you know more about than i do of course where certain animals are are either going extinct or very nearly so and theres the the necessity to protect some habitat where these animals might be able to survive or to have places where they wouldnt be hunted. This was a sort of simplistic notion that it was just hunting and if we could stop hunting all the animals would come back, but that was how managers were starting to think about this in the early part of the 20th century or to create more of this type of wildlife and less of that type of wildlife. So there would be predator control a campaigns to get rid of all the wolves or to reduce the coyotes and so that we can have the animal that we want. So theyre whats starting to emerge in that early part of the 20th century and really intensifies as we move toward the middle of it is lots of management lots of fingers trying to get into these systems and tinker with them to make them. Well, this is the place where we can have tourism. This is the place where we have this sort of animal and this is well get rid of that other kind of animal that might cause a problem there and well manage these forests for water but also for timber later down the road, so theres long term thinking but theres also a sort of a narrow range of options that are in the imagination of the people that are starting to do all the tinkering. Hmm. Yeah, that thats its such an interesting point it just as someone whos thought whos thought a lot about the rise of the Conservation Movement. There are all these all these different threads that are that are you know working on separate fronts to a large extent, you know, the sportsman who are trying to protect the animals they love to hunt the urban performers who wanted clean water in the cities people who were trying to protect scenic landscapes and people who, you know recognize that were starting to recognize the ecological importance of forests and wanted to protect them for that reason they were as i said, they were all fighting on on separate fronts, but they all converged in a sense in the public lands and they yeah, they were all either sitting at the table or trying to get a seat at the table and then as you say the managers themselves who had kind of tentatively sat down and said, oh dont worry about us. Were just going to charge modest grazing fees and perhaps limit the number of cattle that you run on the public lands and perhaps prevent timber poaching. Were now going to have a much expanded, you know move over. Were going to take up a much much more space at this table, and were going to get much more involved in in what happens on the landscape. So that brings us into a error that i know youve youve thought a lot about in particular the 50s through the 70s youve identified as an especially important chapter in the public lands and this is something that was fairly new to me as well. So so what was we have the we have the Conservation Movement. We have a pretty now professionalized. System of land managers and then we have continued use of the public lands and perhaps multiplying uses of the public land. So how did that cacophonous conversation unfold in the 50s through the 70s . Yeah, thats great a quick preface that i think important in the 1930s theres a great depression, of course and one of the most popular programs of fdrs new deal was the civilian conservation corps. And so public land agencies had at sort of their availability a bunch of unemployed men to do projects. So trails got built and roads got build and fire lookouts got built and phone wires got strung between these places in the backcountry and that helped sort of set the stage for what happens after World War Two because so much had had been built during the 1930s because of these programs. Okay, so and there was sorry just interrupt you there, but just there was an economic stimulus purpose to that not only to employ people but stimulate tourism, correct. Right on the public lands that it wasnt they dont people around. Yeah. Yeah all sorts of things. Okay. Yeah interesting. So this that infrastructure if you will is created then during that 1930s or expands what had been there before and as we move into world the post World War Two era on the one hand we have. A big chunk of American Society that has pentup demand to have fun and theyve got some money. We have surplus from the military. So people start rafting like they hadnt before and you have gear to go backpacking and there are all these new trails and the infrastructure to get these places. So theres on the public side. Theres this large and growing group of people who want to experience the outdoors want to experience the public lands and theyre going to scenic places. Just magnificent landscapes unquestionably magnificent. Im just you cant argue with that. At the same time some of the land managers are trying to trying to manage their trying theyre getting involved and their intensifying their management of these places and their intensifying everything their intensifying Recreational Use their intensifying how theyre going to manage the forage the grasses that the animals are going to eat. Theyre intensifying how theyre going to manage the forest themselves and at the same time part of that consumer demand that i mentioned just a moment ago included building a lot of new houses and a lot of private timberlands had been if not entirely exhausted before World War Two. It had been cut over pretty good and so at this point in the post World War Two era, they looked to the public forest as a source of lumber. And so timber sales on Fort National forest increased dramatically. So a bunch of stuff is happening here. There is intensifying management in the National Parks in the National Forest on the bureau of Land Management lands, heck theyre even intensifying their management abducts. We want to have more ducks that we can hunt on the what wildlife refugees so theres lots of like were gonna so, its not just managing. Its were gonna maximize the use of these places and the use of these resources and at the same time all these americans are going out and theyre driving their big cars. National parks. Theyre going camp in the National Forest, theyre starting to see stuff. Theyre starting to see overgrazed rangelands. Theyre starting to see some clear cuts and theyre starting to think maybe maybe the Forest Service is doing too much. Maybe the park service has built too many visitors centers. So emerging in the 1950s then. And i havent even mentioned the dams that are being put in every stream that is possible. It seems like at this time. There is an emergent Wilderness Movement where theres a desire to protect places from commercial development more or less entirely and that coalesces in the 1950s and pushes toward what becomes the wilderness act which passes in 1964. And thats not the very first law in this era but between 1964 and say 1976 a whole handful or a couple handfuls actually of laws past Congress Overwhelmingly bipartisan. Just some of them unanimous in the house or the senate to the endangered species act the endangered species. Act wilderness act had four votes against i mean just its overwhelming by partisanship at this time to totally change what happens on the public lands and what some of the purposes are and not only that so the wilderness is a different purpose that gets really codified for the first time through congress, but the other thing that emerges during this era that is so important is the processes of management change. So that when changes to wilderness areas. Or when a timber sale is going to go up there will now be beginning in the 1970s. A place for the public to not only object but just to weigh in. And the Forest Service would have to say were planning a timber sale. Here are the options for the proposals that we have. And the public could i have a lawsuit this created opportunities for that and so to get back to the table metaphor all of us sudden. Theres a lot more people sitting at the table. There are people there who are going to represent salmon and there are people there who are going to represent rafters and there are people there who are going to say we shouldnt be cutting trees in this place for these purposes. And so if youre someone that sat at the table when there are only 10 people and now there are 20 you have less power and that becomes. Concerning you used people used to listen to you and now you have to wait longer to speak and youre not the only voice and so that really changes how this system has been functioning right . And what used to look like a full table is starting to look a little thin. People all reach out to get what they want. Yeah. Yeah, maybe this is a good time to take a breath and and just look back at how far weve comment during our discussion in the last few minutes, and im just struck by the the contrast between what was happening just a century earlier that the federal government had these lands that that were almost in some sense is a burden to the federal government. They couldnt give them away because they were not suitable for homesteading they had some commercial value. But but really they were they were kind of you know un it lands and then and now, you know as were the period were discussing in the 70s. These lands are expected to you know provide. Timber provide clean water provide pasture provide, you know water in through reservoirs and then provide all sorts of recreation motorized and nonmotorized and then provide all the values that we attribute to capital w wilderness the Legal Definition of wilderness. This is just a huge. Its a huge shift in our perception of of these of these land and and we expect from them. Absolutely, and i mean if within the career of one person in one of those agencies, they would have seen just a radical change in what was being asked of them. And i think that thats an important way to think about it. Like if youre a young person born in say that youre the Forest Service was created in 1905 and you start working for the Forest Service when youre 25 and 1930 and you spend 30 or 40 years in that Forest Service. Its gonna look pretty radically different by the time that you retire. Right that i mean the landscape probably looks very different and then and the processes as youre saying, you know, all of a sudden theres a there where you used to as a as a forest ranger, you might have gone out and talked with a few people about what was going to happen next year on the forest you now have a formal system of public consultations that are participated in by people from all over the country. There are a number of federal laws that that need to be it as your as youre planning for the forest and you know, these were all these are all what we consider today great conservation victories, but they certainly changed the conversation about the public lands in in quite ways. Absolutely. Yeah. So so this and you talk about how this this in a lot of ways. This shall we say crowding of the table . I dont mean to make it i dont need to make a sound negative, this conclusion of more people at the table without necessarily making the table bigger. That led, that in some ways led into the Political Polarization we saw during the reagan years. Can you talk about the connection there . Im interested in the population not just environmental politics but to some extent the public lands started to become, started to play a significant role in national politics. I think thats right. Part of it is negative about sharing power which ive already mentioned, 1979 the assembly of nevada declared that the public lands within nevada where theres an Congress Never had the right to take them and thate really starts what we call the sagebrush rebellion. Wheezing various forms of it sort of popup every half decade or so, since it seems like and when Ronald Reagan did run for president in 1980 the first time he declared count me in as a rebel pair he was trying to associate himself with the sagebrush rebellion. Because what it does at this time is its one more representation of the federal government and federal overreach, and too much, all of our problems are most of her problems are being caused by government from that perspectivo in the 1980s pair and if you look back the previous couple of decades you do see increased responsibilities for the federal lands but also of right of other things that are being done in American Society at this time. As i speaking of in the last few minutes, its ane bewildering a change to asi whole lot of peope in resist change is to say well, lets go back to the way things were and not have it, lets go back to the way we imagined things were. Exactly spirit and states will take over. Now states, most state lands are required by statute to maximize resource potential, and thats not consistent with the wilderness act or other such things. So calls by western states to return the land to the states was a way of saying we want to have more control, we want washington, d. C. To have less control, and what the ramifications of that might be i guess we never found out because most off those things did not actually go into effect. Wind of the things that did go into effect is that ramped up the environmental movement. One of the things you see happening in the 1980s is a shifting radicalism from the environmental side and a shifting radicalism from the anticonservation side, if you will. Need to label is exactly correct, and so their spectacles that both sides participate in. Theres protests that both sides participate in civil disobedience that both sides participate in. Over the next 40 years i guess, those things wax and wane. Violencewa is involved as we moe into the 1990s. The day after the Oklahoma City bombing, local Forest Office was told if you come take my cattle you will be greeted with a hundred men with guns, which is something that we saw a get in the 21st century as well. This is an accelerating trend that happens out of a reaction to those changes that happen in the middle part of the 20th century. And as you say just to emphasize that point, there is perhaps on both sides theres a nostalgia for a past that never quite was. Because the public lands were never envisioned, the public land system was never envisioned as a place that was purely to protect land and disturbed, and was never envisioned as a purely cocommercial enterprise. There was always an element of sustainability from the beginning. And there was always an element of commercialism. I think thats right. I think thats true. And there was never a time when everyone was getting a a vote in getting exactly what they wanted. Yes, right. Yes. But there were times when people perhaps had more of his a ve because of the people being left out. That is a real change though perhaps not quite the change that perhaps the way its characterized by people, the reason why they felt they had more of her voice was because other people didnt haveum a voice. Yeah spirit and now of course the polarization were talking about does continue today. I remember quite clearly when i was Wildlife Research in the mid1990s hearing some of these conflicts over the management of endangered species of public lands that got quite heated and violent as you say with threats and actual Violence Toward Forest Service and bureau of Land Management employees, and that has continued some of the same people. Affect the descendents of some of the same people have continued that kind of rhetoric into the modernit era. So perhaps you could talk a what weve seen just in the past few years and the connection you see back to the origins of the public land system. Now. So there have been anticonservationists from the beginning ofub these public lans being reserved and retained by the federal government, and i think again they sort of pop up during different times peer that wass a big movement right after world war ii. There was a hope that a bunch of the land could be returned, returned again to the states. And most people, the critics of that movement said this isnt about that. Its about not supporting the Conservation Movement at all. And so trying to undermine that with thede idea, most of an idea of sustainability and more maximization to private profit to make it easier. The polarization that we are all living through as adults we seem this and we see it play out on conservation issues where wildlife refuge are taken over by protesters or wilderness study areas have roads carved into them to try to prevent them from becoming wilderness areas and so i think one set of radicalism leads to another set of radicalism and these things sort of ratchet up, and i think the answer thereto that is hard work. Its sitting down at the table and like sort of imagine this table most of the time in this book being around we can all sit out this roundtable and we can see each other. Were all in a different position and all have different barrierso but we can all see each other. But as we move into this time closest to us it feels much more like a long skinny table we cant see everybody anymore anda we just continue to face off ratherhe than share, and i think thats one of the challenges because i think one of the solutions is a lot of hard work, getting to know what you want, what i want, we might be able to compromise and collaborate. There are examples of this in a variety of locations, but theres not a lot of examples of it and its timeconsuming and its costly, and conservation challenges where faced with our expensive and theyre interconnected because these lights are connected with one agency and another agency plus private land so all of this come take so much time to so many resources, and its a lot easier to just yell at each other. Right. I likeet that metaphor, i dont like it but its a very appropriate metaphor of a low table where we cant quite see each other orh cant see each other fully and are just, i often feel that way when i report on this kind of conflict that people are just standing up and pontificating from great distance to the other people who have a stake in these public lands and is very little listening going on but as you say there are some examples of perhaps these roundtable still exist at the local and regional level. Were getting close to the end of ourur time so maybe you could leave us with some inspiration i know some of the stories especially that involve indigenous Land Conservation are very heartening and are examples of things that we could follow in the future. Yeah. We dont know the stories well enough yet i think but i know there are in the american southwest there have been examples for decades now of environmentalists working Traditional Land uses to figure out better ways peer there is high desert partner i believe was in eastern oregon, worked really hard because this is in the same neighborhood where the wildlife refuge was taken over in 2016. In the 1990s, tensions there were really, really at a high point andou kind of not, you kn, hot environment and there was a determination in this community to like lets solve this and make it less tense, and theres been some Research Done that suggested the reason for the wildlife refuge takeover did have a greater local effective because there hadd been long hours of neighbors getting to know neighbors and trying to solve the source of problems. And look to things like the bears peers Intertribal Coalition that come together to try to protect bears ears in southern utah and eventually get it turned into a National Monument where they will be comanagers with the federal government involved in this. This feels like some sort of whole circle something happening here where we have indigenous o people reaching out and being part of this, rather than being left out delivery or having land taken deliberately. So im hopeful where that might go as it moves forward and develop their management plans there. We started this conversation talking about the history of public lands is rooted in dispossession. A story like bears ears gives me hope that there is, there t certainly that history cant be reversed or it cant be made up for, but that there is a way forward from it. And the high desert partnership, i mean, we should say for those who dont remember, National Wildlife refuge takeover was an armed takeover by extremists, antigovernment extremists. And it lasted 40 days and i think that, ass you say, the reason why the community was not more supportive of the ideals of these interlopers was that unbeknownst to these extremists who were from out of state, that the local people and local public land managers had been decades of work to find their places at the table and to have a conversation with one another. Exactly. Yeah. So i think we can all take heart that those conversations are not easy but they are possible. Exactly. I know you wanted to end with just a very short reading i do think that reflects the spirit of what we were just talking about. Sure. You take it out without. The last paragraph in the book, atop or just get done talking about some people coming to table to find Common Ground. This point is not meant to suggest that using an governing public lands in the future will be, can be, or should be easy. It never has been. The work of living within Environmental Constraints is among world historys most complicated and important tasks. An exercise of democracy in a diverse and complicated society like the United States challenges of citizens and their elected decisionmakers to set aside their interests and seek a broader public interest. To make matters even harder, the 21st century includes global problems of climate change, biodiversity, crashes and political corruption peer moving toward the future, public lands can and should play a central role in combating these compounding crises. Recall Terry Tempest Williams words odor in the books introduction, the integrity of our public lands depends on the integrity of our public process within the open space of democracy. Promoting and maintaining that integrity demands honest reckoning with history. The past that includes the exportation of people in the land as well as the protection of places and democracy. The very land on which we stand if our foundation and can be a source of shared identity and common cause peer the task before us and then is to ensure that our common forests, parks, rangeland and refuges scattered across the nationio function as the public entered public slant and not the preserve of one group or another term for that undermines the promise of a democratic and ecological citizenship that might bind the nation together. One way weo might begin to repar of the earth and our politics is with the public lands. Thank you so much, adam, thanks for this conversation today. Its great to hear your insights. Again, adams bookd is called making americas public lands and its out now. I hope you all picks it up and read it. Its really full of, full of just very thoughtful commentary on these, on a very complicated story that affects all of our lives, and effects the landscape that i know all of us love appear so thank you for joining us today, and i hope you will join the next event at the national archives. Take care, adam. Thanks, michelle. Weakens on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday in American History tv documents americans stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 come from these Television Companies and more including comcast. Are you thinking this is just a Community Center . Comcast is partnering to create wifi enabled looks and sounds so students from lowincome families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. Comcast along with these Television Companies supports cspan2 as a public service. 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