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