In urban parks and sprawling National Parks. We sought places where we could socially distance and let nature lessen the stress of the day. We enjoy our public lands, but often take them for granted learning how they came about and how theyve been used over time in riches riches are overall understanding of them. Here at the national archives. We preserve the records of the four federal agencies most involved in the management of our nations public lands the bureau of Land Management the Us Forest Service the us fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park service. The written records photographs and Motion Pictures contain the stories of the beginnings of federal stewardship. In his book making americas public lands, adam swords takes us through the history of these lands and examines the changing priorities and challenges concerning them. Adam m. Swords is professor of history at the university of idaho. Hes the author of United States west coast and environmental history. The Environmental Justice will the mo douglas and american conservation in an open pit visible from the moon michelle. Niehaus is project editor at the atlantic where she at its features for the planet section 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 wonderful new book making americas public lands if you are tuning in today, i its your its likely that youve spent at least some time in what adam calls the publics lands our National Parks wildlife refuges National Forests or anyone of the other landscapes that make up our public lands system. And adams history one of the many things i appreciate about 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 deeprooted. Myths and concepts and traditions in our in our National Politics not only our environmental politics, but our National Politics so adam adam begins the book in a way you you might not expect he invokes both Henry David Thoreau and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and i know if i 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 and folks thoreau because the row had a very precient idea that that forest could be held in in common for the public good and then he invokes hannah or rents idea her metaphor of a table as a place as as a metaphor for the the public sphere a table being a place where citizens can gather and and find thing approaching Common Ground and i think adam will start with a short reading from the introduction that on that second metaphor. Thank you, michelle. This will be a fairly short reading. This table metaphor works to guide us through the history of American Public lands. And it helps us think about the public lands as part of the democratic experiment. That is the United States. It takes no great leap of insight to find faults and failures in meeting the promises of democracy for the nation is rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and the enslavement of africans. The history of public lands include democratic shortcomings and exclusions just like every other part of us political history. That is partly why thinking about public lands as an element in the democratic experiment is helpful. Because we can see who defined the nations land. And for what purposes how new ideas of planted old ones and how novel understandings complicated traditional views. With the lands themselves as the common object that focuses peoples attention. We learn that this quintessentially american system like the nation itself is full of experiments successes and failures and promises made broken and redefined. Throughout this history the table and 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 had 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 and why as well as how and why it changed over time. The consequences of this system on the land itself and for the people who relied on it for whatever purpose remains central to the account that follows it draws 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 and to the land. Frequently. If not always they were contested demonstrating that these lands and the processes that govern them mattered 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 table for us. Things about this book you have studied the history of public lands for a long time. I have reported on public land politics for a long time as a journalist. We both know that this history is is very complicated with countless characters and its also very long. Its prehistory is is as long or longer than its then its written history. But youve managed to fit a lot of complexity into a graceful volume. That is let me make sure i get it in the screen that is just a little over 200 pages so i know also from experience having just written a history of the Conservation Movement that writing efficiently and writing short is much more difficult than writing along. How did you find a path through the history of public lands that managed to capture nuance as well as as well as tell the story at a manageable length. Well, thank you for saying this kind words about the book. Im glad that it reads that way to you as you know when you tackle the big project you cant use every example in every story that you uncover and i 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 park or your favorite forest or the range land thats in your state that you go to youll be able to read it and understand the larger context in which those things exist. One thing i try to do in the book that i dont know that its unique, but i tried to write it of the systems at large many writers and historians have taken on a single park or taken on the Forest Service and what i tried to or in in there some that look at all of the public lands, but when you look at those many of them are organized heres a section on the park service and heres a section on bureau of Land Management, and i wanted to try to see if i could tell it as a history in more of a stream of time. So looking for trends that cross all the agencies in the same sort of decades and maybe that allowed me to use examples that type multiple things together and where if i had gone a bit by bit agency by agency parked by park i would have would have been a much much longer book. Yeah, i i can see that. I i think that you you brought out some themes that that were maybe not new to me, but i hadnt quite grappled with directly. They were they were so big that i couldnt see them because i was down in the weeds of of individual agencies or individual places. So i found those those big themes to be especially fascinating now you make clear that the history of the public lands doesnt of course begin with the founding of the Forest Service doesnt begin with the signing of the constitution as i mentioned the pre history of the public lands is longer than the written history of the public lands. Where does the history of the public lands truly begin . Thats a great question and 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 time immemorial the forces of colonization that depopulated much of the continent and and change the political military economic dynamics here sets the stage for all that comes after and so its that its that clash of colonization that i think really helps precipitate what leads to this public land system that we 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 and there are some. There are some some modern responses to it that i think are very interesting in sources of hope for all of us, but let me move forward in 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 i actually wasnt aware of of madisons role in. Which his vision was mostly ignored i should say but but his his it was influential in in the in the formation of the public lands. Can you say a little bit about the their complementary visions and and their effect . On the public land system. Id be glad to its the effect is somewhat indirect but jefferson is sometimes been called the agrarian philosopher and sort of famously sees virtue embedded in farming in the practices of of that sort of labor in the land and that in part explains why he was enthusiastic to gain the Louisiana Purchase to increase the size of the nation expecting that independent yeoman farmers could move and move west. Of course this land is this is a process of dispossession thats happening with that westward movement and independently with their labor transform the raw earth as they imagined it into good productive labor are 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 be very easy to just sort of to mix my metaphors here cut and run as you would imagine in a forest and madison along with others in the early part of the republic fought. Theres a need to slow down and theres a need 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 in antislavery position as well and idea not to keep moving west and moving the the slave system west to of course, theres so many paradoxes like we could spend the rest of the hour talking about them for both of these men who who did not so much live their ideals as right about them know, ill stop with with that. Yes, i both were slave owners. We should acknowledge. That so and and so really for a long time that the vision the the vision that led to the public lands was was a commercial vision. I mean conservation didnt come in until much later and and its interesting to me the what comes out very clearly in your book is that it was a commercial vision very divorced from the reality of the land itself and that the reality of the the western climate. And and the the public lands system. I i think it could be said that that in a very broad sense it resulted from a collision between this this jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic and then the the harsh reality of of the western climate. Can you tell us tell us what happened when those two visions met or those are realities met. Yeah, so even before the constitution was signed this the system that was in place. Was that all land held in common by the by the state the ultimate goal was for that to become privately owned and the government under the articles of confederation and under the constitution developed various means to get that land into private hands and the most famous example, of course is the homestead active the 1860s, but there were predecessors to that. And that worked reasonably. Well 168 acres you could make a selfsufficient farm in 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 two mountainous. That was an also a something. That was the homestead act was not sustainable for and so congress. Try it out adapting these laws. They said gosh well if you plan some trees you can have more land or if you bring irrigation you can have more land and these just kept not working and 16 acres on a steep slope in the Rocky Mountains isnt gonna lead you to a very selfsufficient sort of livelihood and many places in the west were too high or too cold to to have really an agricultural economy as these founders had expected. No matter how many trees you plant. All right, exactly. Yeah, and so in the 1870s and 1880s and sort of increasing in that area. You have a number of people saying well we need to do things differently and some of that was maybe the land needed to be the land given away taken away would need to be smaller and we bring irrigation and manage a smaller amount of land or maybe it needed to be bigger. You need a lot of acreage to run cattle in different parts of say colorado as an example so we can make some adjustments there and within those conversations one of the ideas that emerges is maybe these big mountain ranges with all these trees shouldnt be owned by individuals because 168 acres of trees is not going to last very long. So maybe they should be controlled by the federal government. So these eyes start or these ideas start percolating in the 1860s 1870s, but Congress Moves slowly. Then and it took a while before congress decided that in 1891 that the president could have the right to reserve some of those lands so that they would not be cut they would not be owned by individual people or companies, but they would be kept in trust by the federal government and then that evolves in a variety of different ways around that turn of the 20th century. Right into what we think of as conservation. Yeah, and i mean and just to emphasize these these lands that that couldnt be homesteaded. Were still being exploited both by individual landowners and by corporations who saw them as oh well, you know free trees or free pasture. Tell us a little bit about what was happening. Just what was happening on the landscape. Right. So before these measures go into effect. Its its free and open for whoever can get to it and there are large herds of cattle or sheep that are moving up the mountains and sometimes theyre competing with the other cattle and sheep operators in the in the valley. And so that led to pretty bad over grazing in lots of cases. Theres a lot of concern about timber being stolen from these federal lands as well when the first forest reserves as they were initially called were created there were relatively few regulations. And so then the concern was about timber trespass people stealing and i guess to back up one bit of context is theres a great fear at this time in American Life that were gonna run out of trees and were gonna run out of lumber. This is the age of wood and which provided fuel as well as Building Material and timber corporations had denuded the upper midwest very very quickly in the last part of the 19th century, and theres a great learn that that cant be allowed to happen in the sierras in the cascades in the rockies or we wouldnt have enough wood to fuel our nation in their nations economy. So that is all sort of creates some of the urgency around us. But to use any of that wood or to use any of that pasture. 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 couldn