Covid19 pandemic closed down businesses and schools people across the nation turned to parks and other open spaces. 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 c adam southwards takes us through the history of these lands and examines changing priorities and challenges concerning them. Lynn hudson is professor of history at the university of idaho, author of United States west coast, and environmental history, the Environmental Justice and american conservation, and this book from the moon. Reel america edits features for the planet section. The series called life up close, her writing has appeared on publications including National Geographic and New York Times magazine and she is the author of beloved beast, fighting for life. Now lets hear from lynn hudson and reel america. Thank you for joining us today. It is a pleasure to be with you today. I am reel america and im here with lynn hudson to talk about his wonderful new book understanding tornadoes making americas public lands. It is likely you spent some time in the publics land, our National Parks, wildlife refuges, National Forests and on landscapes that make up public land system. One of the things i appreciate about adam sowardss book is it is very nuanced but also accessible and it is, in addition, very alert to the role of 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 environmental politics but national politics. So adam sowards begins by invoking Henry David Thoreau and the political philosopher hannah arendt. If it were possible to eavesdrop on a conversation between these two human beings i would give up a lot. Adam invokes thoreau because he had a prescient idea that forests could be held for the common good and he invokes hannahs idea, or metaphor of a table as a place, a metaphor for the public sphere, a table being a place where citizens can gather and find something approaching Common Ground. Adam will start with a short reading from the introduction that elaborates on the second metaphor. Thank you. This will be a very short reading. This table metaphor guides us through the history of American Public lands and helps us think about the public land 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 when the nation is rooted in the disposition of indigenous land and 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 land as an element in the democratic experiment is helpful, because we can see who defines the nations land and for what purposes. How new ideas supplanted old ones and novel understanding complicated traditional views. With the lands themselves as the common object that focuses peoples attention, we learned 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 in science not to mention shifting political interests was like a growing family at a holiday dinner, incorporating new entrees, the more interests at the table, the more cacophonous and unfamiliar it appeared to those who had been gathering 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 tends to explain how the system came to be and why 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 remains central to the account vote follows. It draws special attention to where constraints and boundaries were redrawn and new political and legal traditions initiated. These transitions draw attention to novel arrangements of power and the land. Frequently if not always there were contested, demonstrating these lands and the processes that govern the 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 but some participants directly excluded, and some merely perceived their exclusion at other times. Thank you for setting the cacophonous table for us. One of the great things about this book, youve studied the history of public land 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 populated with countless characters that is very long. Its prehistory is as long or longer than its written history. Youve managed to fit a lot of complexity into volumes that is let me make sure a little over 200 pages. I know from experience the history of the Conservation Movement the writing efficiently and writing short is more difficult than writing long. How do you find a path through the history of public land that captured nuance as well as tell the story at manageable length. Thank you for saying those kind words about the book. Im glad it read that way to you. When you tackle a big project, you cant have an example in every store you uncover. I think about the book a little bit like a key that unlocks the larger history so that if you are reading it and it doesnt include your favorite part or your favorite forest that you go to, read it and understand the larger context in which those things exist. One thing i tried to do in the book that i dont know if it is 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. What i tried to do is look at all the public lands. When you look at those many of them are organized, heres a section on the bureau of Land Management, i wanted to try to tell it as a history in more of a stream of time. Looking get for trends the cross all the agencies in the same sort of decades and many, to use examples, the time multiple things together, if i had gone bit by bit, agency by agency, would have been a much longer book. Liz i can see that. You brought out some scenes that were maybe not news to me but i havent quite grappled with directly, they were so big that i couldnt see them because i was down in the reeds of individual agencies or individual places so i found those you make clear the history of public lands begin with the founding of the Forest Service, not the signing of the constitution, the prehistory of public lands is longer, where does the history of public lands truly begin . Great question. As with so many things in american history, the history of public lands begins with the disposition of Indigenous People, the forces of colonization that depopulated much of the continent and changed it the dynamics here. Sets the stage for all that comes after so it is that clash of colonization that precipitates, that leads to the public land system that we see emerging later. Host i want to return to that later. That history is very much with us and there are some there are some modern responses to it that i think are very interesting, sources of hope for all of us but let me move forward in time a little bit in the context of that dispossession, there was a very interesting, complementary role played by jefferson and madison and i wasnt aware of madisons role, his vision was ignored i should say but it was influential in the formation of public lands. Can you say a little bit about their complement revisions and their effect . On the public land system. I would be glad to. The effect is somewhat indirect but jefferson, sometimes called the agrarian philosopher and famously sees virtue embedded in the practices of that sort of waiver 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 independent yeoman farmers could move west. This land is in the process of dispossession that is happening with that westward movement and independently with their labor transform the raw earth as they 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 easy to mix my metaphors, cut in one as you would imagine in a forest and madison along with others in the early part of the republic thought there is a need to slow down and the need to improve our land and not use it so extensively, stay rather than move and treat the land better and more sustainably, which was in some ways and antislavery position as well, and idea not to keep moving west and moving the slave system west. There are so many paradoxes we could spend the rest of the hour talking about them but both of these men who did not so much live there ideals as right about them. I will stop with that. Those were slave owners we should acknowledge. So really for a long time, the vision that led to the public lands was a commercial fishing. Conservation didnt come in until much later and it is interesting to me what comes out clearly in your book is its a commercial vision very divorced from the reality of the land itself and the reality of the western climate and public land system, i think it could be said in a broad sense that it resulted from a collision between the jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic and the harsh reality of the western climate. Can you tell us what happened when those two visions met . Are those two realities met . Even before the constitution was signed, this system that was in place was all land held in common by the state, the goal was for that to be privately owned and the government under the articles of confederation, under the constitution developed a various means to get that land into private hands, the most famous example is the homestead act of the 1860s but there were predecessors to that. That worked reasonably well one hundred 60 acres, you could make a selfsufficient farm in lots of places like that but as white farmers moved to the west, they found that one hundred 60 acres was too little or too much so it was too dry or also too mountainous. That was something that was not sustainable. And so congress tried adapting these laws, if you plant some trees you could have more land or have irrigation you could have more land and it kept not working. One hundred 60 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 westward too high or too called, to have, an agricultural economy as the founders had expected. Host no matter how many trees you plant. Guest exactly. In the 1870s and 1880s, you have a number of people saying we need to do things different, some of that was maybe the land needed to be the land given away, taken away, would need to be smaller, and make irrigation, manage a smaller amount of land. You need a lot of acreage to run cattle in different parts of colorado as an example so we can make some adjustments there. And the thing about those conversations, one of the ideas that emerges, these big mountain ranges with all these trees shouldnt be owned by individuals. Those trees will not last long so maybe they should be controlled by the federal government. So these ideas start percolating in the 1860s and 1870s but progress moved slowly even them and took a while before congress decided that in 1891 the president could have a right to reserve some of those land so that they would not be cut, they would not be owned by individual people or companies bus would be kept in trust by the federal government and that evolved in a variety of different ways around the turn of the Twentieth Century into what we think of as conservation. Host to emphasize these lands that couldnt be homesteaded were being exploited both by individual landowners and corporations who saw them as 3 treaties, free pasture, tell us what was happening on the landscape. Before these measures go into effect, it is free and open for whoever can get to it and there are large herds of cattle and sheep moving up the mountains, sometimes competing with the other cattle and sheep operators in the valley so that has led to overgrazing and lots of cases. A lot of concern about timber being stolen from federal lands as well. The first forest reserves were created, relatively few regulations and the concern then was about timber trespass, people stealing and to back off one bit of context, there was great fear in American Life that we are going to run out of trees and we are going to run out of lumber. This is the age of wood which provided fuel and building material. The corporations had denuded the upper midwest very very quickly in the last part of the 19th century and there is great concern that that cant be allowed to happen in the sierras, the cascades, the rockies or we wouldnt have enough wood to fuel our nation and our nations economy. So that creates some of the urgency around us. To use any of that pasture, no one paid anything so they are taking from the public land valuable resources and turning a profit from it and that is also part of the concern the develops around conservationists who want to institute reforms as we move into the 20th century. Host these people were echoing madisons warning about soil. We will use up the soil in these trees. This would be early conservation sentiments but also a commercial interest here, the federal government is losing money by giving away, passively giving away these resources. So the federal governments assertion of control over the publics land did create in honest bitterness which ive read some stories about what it was like to be one of the first forest rangers to ride into town as a representative of the 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 manage their cattle in certain ways and generations later, i know from reporting in the real west its not unusual to hear the federal governments presence in the west, and other parts of the country as well referred to as a land grab. So set the record straight for us. It wasnt a land grab but what was it . It wasnt a land grab. Ill have to think about what it was. The vast unclaimed, once the landed didnt dispossessed from native peoples, the unclaimed land was part of what was known as the Public Domain and utah, wyoming, idaho, whatever, as they entered into the union almost everyone, just a couple exceptions explicitly gave up claim to all those Public Domain lands, those are the federal governments. So you will often hear throughout the Twentieth Century and 21stcentury talking about the states should get their land back. It was never theirs to have so it couldnt be taken back. The Forest Service is an example of this. When it is finally created in 1905, a quick note, there is no agency in charge of them until 1905 so there is a little gap in how things are going to be managed. Quickly, some, i would say regulations get imposed, fairly small grazing fees get imposed but if you are a rancher who had grown accustomed over a decade or two decades or 3 decades of running cattle and not paying anything those grazing fees seemed like they are taking money from you, taking your rights away, so there was a great deal of controversy around that and a desire to push back against it. The Supreme Court in 1911, the Forest Service has the right to administer these sorts of fees. In many places i think the record shows that the initial creation of these sorts of places generate a lot of resentment and uncertainty and in a little bit of time it became okay, the fact that the Forest Service was going to help put out fires, did an okay for them to be around now. Many of the restrictions were in the larger context of all the changes happening in the first part of the 20th century not that big a deal. So there is a settling in process where locals got accustomed to what public land agencies are doing because quite frankly they are not doing a lot. They are doing what has existed before but not real restrictive measures quite yet. Host as the Agency Settles into its place, at your metaphorical table, the people already sitting at the table or who had set themselves at the table get used to their presence. Guest thats a good way to describe it. It wasnt just the conflict did continue. There was acceptance of the presence of the Forest Service but arguments continue between the agency and land users and our august so arguments between land users themselves. People may have heard of the conflicts between the cattle ranchers and the sheep grazers which actually got quite they are legendary in a negative sense in the region. Tell me a little bit about why that was so passionately fought. Thats a real complicated story and it depends on the location where you are. Part of it has to do with scarce r