 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacocha Tank Peoples. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Adam Sowards about his new book, Making America's Public Lands, which synthesizes public lands history from the beginning of the Republic to recent controversies. Joining the author in conversation will be journalist and author Michelle Nighouse Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, April 28, at 1 p.m. Mark Uptegrove offers an illuminating account of John F. Kennedy's brief about transformative tenure in the White House in his new biography, Incomparable Grace. And on Wednesday, May 4, at 1 p.m., Tamiko Brown-Nagin will discuss her new book, Civil Rights Queen, which tells the story of Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. Two years ago, as the COVID-19 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 they have been used over time enriches our 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 nation's public lands. The Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. 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 America's Public Lands, Adam Sowards takes us through the history of these lands and examines the changing priorities and challenges concerning them. Adam M. Sowards is Professor of History at the University of Idaho. He's the author of United States West Coast and Environmental History, The Environmental Justice, William O. Douglas, and American Conservation, and an open pit visible from the moon. Michelle Nyhouse is project editor at The Atlantic, where she edits features for the planet section in a series called Life Up Close. Her writing has appeared in publications, including the National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. And she's the author of Beloved Beasts, Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Now let's hear from Adam Sowards and Michelle Nyhouse. Thank you for joining us today. Hi, everyone. It's such a pleasure to be with you today. I'm Michelle Nyhouse, and I'm here with Adam Sowards to talk about his wonderful new book, Making America's Public Lands. If you are tuning in today, it's likely that you've spent at least some time in what Adam calls the public's lands, our national parks, wildlife refuges, national forests, or any one of the other landscapes that make up our public's land system. And Adam's history, one of the many things I appreciate about Adam's book is that it's 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 a way you might not expect. He invokes both Henry David Thoreau and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. And I 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 Thoreau had a very prescient idea that forests could be held in common for the public good. And then he invokes Hannah Arendt's idea, her metaphor of a 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. And 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 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 nation's land and for what purposes, how new ideas supplanted old ones and how novel understandings complicated traditional views. With the lands themselves as the common object that focuses people's 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 interests 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 remain 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. One of the great 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 very complicated with countless characters and it's also very long. Its prehistory is as long or longer than its written history. You've 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. 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 long. How did you find a 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 those kind words about the book. I'm glad that it reads that way to you. As you know, when you tackle a big project you can't use every example and every story that you uncover. I think about the book a little bit like a key, that it unlocks the larger history so that if you're reading it and it doesn't include your favorite park or your favorite forest or the rangeland that's in your state that you go to, you'll 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 don't know that it's 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 and there are some that look at all of the public lands but when you look at those many of them are organized. Here's a section on the park service and here's a section on the 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 tied multiple things together where if I had gone bit by bit agency by agency park by park I would have would have been a much much longer book. Yeah I can see that. I think that you you brought out some themes that that were maybe not new to me but I hadn't quite grappled with directly they were they were so big that I couldn't 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 doesn't of course begin with the founding of the Forest Service doesn't begin with the signing of the Constitution as I mentioned the prehistory of the public lands is is longer than the written history of the public lands where where does the history of the public lands truly begin? That's 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 the forces of colonization that depopulated much of the continent and changed the political, military, economic dynamics here sets the stage for all that comes after and so it's that it's 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 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 um there are some some modern responses to it that I think are very interesting and 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 wasn't aware of of Madison's role in uh which his his vision was mostly ignored I should say but but his his uh 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? I'd be glad to um it's the effect is somewhat indirect but Jefferson has sometimes been called the agrarian philosopher and sort of famously sees virtue embedded in farming and 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 that's happening with that westward movement and independently with their labor transform the raw earth as they imagined it into good productive labor or good productive products that we might sell and have sustenance for. The challenge with this is there's a lot of land in North America and it became very easy to just sort of to mix my metaphors here cut and run as as you would imagine in a forest and Madison along with others in the early part of the Republic thought there's a need to slow down and there's 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 an anti-slavery position as well an idea not to keep moving west and moving the expand the the slave system west too. Of course there's 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 so maybe I'll stop with with that. Yes both were slave owners we should acknowledge that so and so really for a long time that the vision that the vision that led to the public lands was was a commercial vision I mean conservation didn't come in until much later and and it's 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 and the reality of the western climate and and the the public land system I I think it could be said that that in a very broad sense it is it resulted from a collision between this this Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic and then the harsh reality of of the western climate can you tell us tell us what happened when those two visions met or those two 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 then under the constitution developed a various means to get that land into private hands the most famous example of course is the homestead act of the 1860s but there were predecessors to that and that worked reasonably well 160 acres you could make a self-sufficient 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 too mountainous that was an also something that was the homestead act was not sustainable for and so congress tried out adapting these laws they said gosh well if you plant some trees you can have more land or if you bring your irrigation you can have more land and these just kept not working and 160 acres on a steep slope in the Rocky Mountains isn't going to lead you to a very self-sufficient 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 exactly yeah and so in the 1870s and 1880s and sort of increasing in that era 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 shouldn't 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 but Congress moves slowly even 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 couldn't be homesteaded we're 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 it's it's 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 they're competing with the other cattle and sheep operators in the in the valley and so that led to pretty bad overgrazing in lots of cases there's 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 there's a great fear at this time in American life that we're going to run out of trees and we're going to 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 there's a great concern that that can't be allowed to happen in the sierras in the cascades in the Rockies or we wouldn't have enough wood to fuel our nation and their nation's economy so that is sort of create 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 they're taking from the public lands valuable resources and turning a profit from it and that's also part of the concern that develops around these conservationists who want to institute some reforms as we move into the 20th century. So this was in part this these were people who were in a sense echoing Madison's warning about soil you know we're going to use up the soil they were saying we're going to use up these trees these were you know early conservation sentiments but there was also a commercial interest here the federal government is is is losing money by giving away or passively giving away these resources. Great. So the federal government's assertion of control over the public's lands did create enormous bitterness I know I've read some stories about what it was like to be an early one of the first forest rangers and to 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 we're going to have to pay grazing fees or we're going to have to manage their cattle in certain ways and generations later I know from from reporting and living in the rural west it's not unusual to hear the federal government's presence in the west and I'm sure another part to the country as well referred to as as a land grab so set the record straight for us I know it's it wasn't a land grab but what was it yeah well it wasn't a land grab I'll have to think about what it was as so there's 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 there's just a couple exceptions explicitly gave up claim to all of those public domain lands that those are the federal governments so you'll often hear in well throughout the 20th century and the 21st century talking about the the state should get their land back it was never theirs to have so it couldn't have been couldn't 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 there's no agency in charge of them until 1905 so there's 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 you're 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 the record shows that the initial creation of these source 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 it 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 century not that big a deal and so there's a settling in process I think where locals get accustomed to what these public land agencies are doing because quite frankly they're not doing a lot they're doing more than what it existed before but not real restrictive measures quite yet so the agency as the agency settles into its place at your 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 that's a good way to describe it yeah and and there so it wasn't 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 and between land users and there were also arguments among between land users themselves right I think people may have heard of the conflicts between the cattle ranchers and the sheep grazers uh which which actually got quite um well they're they're they're legendary in a negative sense in the region can you tell me a little bit about why why that was so passionately fought yeah that's a real complicated story and it depends on the location where you are a part of it has to do with scarce resources when uh when the forage declines and there are a lot of animals trying to eat um that scarcity generates uh conflict um if you are a pastoralist and you have animals you move them and you move them across land um and so that system of it's called transhumans is not uh doesn't 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 um we're not always white and that could be associated with uh conflict as well um and associations regarding who is a legitimate uh home builder which was a term that was used often um at the turn of the 20th century um so many of those sorts of uh economic conflicts sort of emerge and there's also the conflict between someone who runs thousands of cattle and someone that's just got a small little homestead is just trying to make it work and those bigger more powerful political economic interests can really run what you might call the little guy out um and and there were in fact um there was violence um people were killed um over these sorts of issues um they're not divorced from the land they're not divorced from larger political questions they're not divorced from cultural preferences and um issues like that either yeah you sometimes hear them referred to as the cattle and sheep wars and uh they might not have been on the scale that we usually think of as wars but they did as you say uh sometimes result in violence and but that's that's a good point it's not simply a conflict between two ways of of using the public's lands but it's an economic perhaps racial and cultural conflict as well yes um 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 the presence of newly created federal agency there is also in the nation as a whole there's a growing interest in conservation we've 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 that's a great great question um there's lots of elements of conservation and um so for example one element that is involved is recreation so we want to protect beautiful places that people could visit and enjoy um as a tourist and that this this comes to be seen as you know America's equivalent of visiting the Alps for example in Europe so we want to protect these these unusual usually they're unusual landscapes so the Grand Canyon Yellowstone and these get protected because um it would be a place to recreate um and really recreate ourselves and to think about ourselves as Americans as something distinct in the world so that's that's one element of this so that's that's different at this point from let's protect the trees from getting all cut down um there are other elements of the conservation movement that are interested in making sure there's water to be either irrigated or to 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 water sheds we don't normally think about it this way but that's what many of those first national forests are all about is to protect the watershed of Seattle or the watershed of what becomes Phoenix um and so these things start to work together um 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 um where certain animals are are are either going extinct or very nearly so and there's um the the the necessity to protect some habitat where these animals might be able to survive or to have places where they wouldn't 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 um but that was how uh 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 campaigns to get rid of all the wolves or to reduce the coyotes and so that we can have the animal that we want um so they're what's starting to emerge in that early part of the 20th century and really intensifies as we move toward the middle of it is um 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 and this is the place where we have this sort of animal and this is we'll get rid of that other kind of animal that might cause a problem there and we'll manage these forests for water but also for timber later down the road so um there's a long term thinking but there's 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 that's it's such an interesting point just as someone who's thought who's 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 sportsmen who are trying to protect the animals they love to hunt the urban reformers 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 on the public lands um and they yeah they were all uh either sitting at the table or trying to get a seat at the table um and then as you say that the managers themselves who had kind of tentatively sat down and said oh don't worry about us we're just going to charge modest grazing fees and perhaps limit you know the number of cattle that you run on the public lands and perhaps prevent timber poaching uh we're now going to have a much expanded you know move over we're going to take up a much much more uh space at this table and we're going to get much more involved in in what happens on the landscape so that brings us into um an uh era that I know you've you've thought a lot about in particular the the 50s through the 70s you've 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 that we have the conservation movement we have a pretty now professionalized um system of land managers uh and then we have continued use of the public lands and perhaps multiplying uses of the public land so how how did that uh cacophonous conversation unfold in the the 50s through the 70s yeah that's great um a quick preface uh that's I think important in the 1930s there's a great depression of course and one of the most popular programs of FDR's 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 built and fire lookouts got built and phone wires got strung between these places in the back country and um that helped sort of set the stage for what happens after World War II because so much had had been built during the 1930s because of these programs okay and so when you move sorry just to interrupt you there but just there was an economic stimulus uh purpose to that not only to employ people but to stimulate tourism correct um right on the public lands that it wasn't they built campgrounds and 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 II era on the one hand we have a big chunk of American society that has pent up demand to have fun and they've got some money we have surplus from the military so people start rafting like they hadn't before and you have gear to go backpacking and there are all these new trails and the infrastructure to get to these places so there's on the public side there's this large and growing group of people who want to experience the outdoors want to experience the public lands and um they're going to scenic places and seeing just magnificent landscapes unquestionably magnificent and just you can't argue with that at the same time some of the land managers are trying to trying to manage they're trying they're getting involved and they're intensifying their management of these places and they're intensifying everything they're intensifying recreational use they're intensifying how they're going to manage the forage the grasses that the animals are going to eat they're intensifying how they're 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 timber lands had been if not entirely exhausted before world war two they 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 national forests increased dramatically so a bunch of stuff is happening here there is intensifying management in the national parks in the national forests on the bureau of land management lands heck they're even intensifying their management of ducks we want to have more ducks that we can hunt on the wildlife refugees so there's lots of like we're going to so it's not just managing it's we're going to maximize the use of these places and of the use of these resources and at the same time all these americans are going out and they're driving their big cars into the national parks they're going camp in the national forests and they're starting to see stuff they're starting to see overgrazed rangelands they're starting to see some clear cuts and they're starting to think maybe maybe maybe the forest service is doing too much maybe the park service has built too many visitor centers so emerging in the 1950s then and i haven't even mentioned the dams that are being put in every stream that is possible as it seems like at this time there is an emergent wilderness movement where there's 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 that's not the very first law in this era but between 1964 and 1976 a whole handful or a couple handfuls actually of laws passed congress overwhelmingly bipartisan just some of them unanimous in the house or the senate right the endangered species act the endangered species act wilderness act had four votes against them it just it's overwhelming bipartisanship at this time to vastly 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 if timber sale is going to go up there will now be beginning of the 1970s a place for the public to not only object but just to weigh in and the Forest Service would have to say we're planning a timber sale here are the options for the proposals that we have and the public could have the lawsuit this created opportunities for that and so to get back to the table metaphor all of a sudden there's 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 shouldn't be cut in trees in this place for these purposes and so if you're 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 you're 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 yes as people all reach out to get what they want yeah um maybe this is a good time to take a breath and and just look back at how far we've come during our discussion in the last few minutes i'm i'm 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 couldn't give them away because they were not suitable for homesteading they had some per commercial value but but really they were they were kind of you know unwanted lands and then and now you know what is the period we're discussing in the 70s these lands are expected to you know provide timber provide clean water provide pasture provide you know water it through reservoirs and then provide all sorts of recreation motorized and non-motorized and then provide all the values that we attribute to capital w wilderness the legal definition of wilderness this is just a huge it's a huge shift in our perception of of these of these lands and and what 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 that's an important way to think about it like if you're a young person born in say the year the Forest Service was created in 1905 and you start working for the Forest Service when you're 25 and 1930 and you spend 30 or 40 years in that Forest Service it's going to 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 you're saying you know all of a sudden there's 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 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 considered as you're as you're planning for the forest and you know these are all these are all what we consider today great conservation victories but they certainly changed the conversation about the public lands in in quite significant 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 don't mean to make it sound negative this this this inclusion of more people at the table without necessarily making the table bigger that led to that in in some ways led into the political polarization that we saw during the Reagan years can you talk a little bit about the connection there and and i'm interested in the polarization not just in environmental politics which you and i are both familiar with but but in to some extent the public lands started to become started to play a significant role in national politics yeah i think that that's right part of it is again about sharing power which i've already mentioned but 1979 the assembly of Nevada declared that the public lands within Nevada were theirs and that the congress never had the right to take them and that really starts what we call the sagebrush rebellion and we've seen various forms of it sort of pop up every every half decade or so since it seems like and when Ronald Reagan did run for president in 1980 the first time he declared i'm a count me in as a rebel he was trying to associate himself with the sagebrush rebellion because it it what it does at this time is it's one more representation of the federal government and federal overreach and too much but all of our problems or most of our problems are being caused by government from from that perspective in the 1980s and if you look back the previous couple of decades you do see increased responsibilities for the federal lands but also a variety of other things that are being done in American society at this time and as i was speaking of in the last a few minutes it's a bewildering change to a whole lot of people and one way to resist change is to say well let's go back to the way things were and not have it or let's go back to the way we imagine things were exactly and we'll states will take over now states you know most state lands are required by statute to maximize resource potential and that's not consistent with the wilderness act and 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 dc to have less control and what the ramifications of that might be i guess we never found out because most of those things did not actually go into effect and one of the things that did go into effect is that ramped up the environmental movement so one of the things you see happening in the 1980s is a shifting radicalism from the environmental side and a shifting radicalism from the anti conservation side if you will neither label is exactly correct but i think you get my sense here and so there's spectacles that both sides participate in there's protests that both sides participate in civil disobedience that both sides participate in and over the next 40 years i guess those things wax and wane violence is involved as we move into the 1990s the day after the oklahoma city bombing a local forest office was was told if you come take my cattle you're going to be greeted with with a hundred men with guns which is something that we saw again in the 21st century as well so this is an accelerating trend that happens out of a reaction to those changes that that happened in the middle part of the 20th century yeah and and as you say just to to emphasize that point there there is a perhaps on on both sides there's a nostalgia for a past that never quite was because the public lands were never envisioned the public land system was never envisioned as as a place that was purely to protect land undisturbed and it was never envisioned as a purely commercial enterprise there was always an element of sustainability from the beginning and there was always an element of of commercialism isn't it yeah i think that that's right yeah i think that that's true yeah and there was never a time where everyone was getting along and getting exactly what they wanted yes right yes there but there were times when people perhaps were had more of a voice because other people were being left out and that that is a real change though perhaps not not quite the the change that perhaps the the the way it's characterized by people doesn't often acknowledge that that the reason why they felt like they had more why they had more of a voice was because other people didn't have a voice yeah and now of course the the polarization we're talking about does continue today you know i remember quite clearly when i was a a by tenor and wildlife field researcher in the mid 1990s hearing some of these conflicts over the management of endangered species on public lands that got quite heated um and you know violent as you say with with threats and and actual violence um toward forest service and bureau of land management um employees and um and that has continued some of the same people in fact or the descendants of some of the same people have continued that kind of rhetoric um into into the modern era so perhaps you could you could talk a little bit about what we've what we've seen just in the past few years and and how and the the connection you see back to the origins of the public land system yeah so there have been anti-conservationists um from the beginning of the of these public lands being reserved and retained by the federal government and i think that they're again they sort of pop up during different times there was a big movement right after world war two there was a hope that a bunch of the land could be returned returned again to the states um and most people most the critics of that movement said this isn't about that it's about not supporting the conservation movement at all and so it was under trying to undermine that with the idea less of an idea of sustainability and more maximization of of private profit um to make it easier um and the the polarization that we're all living through if we're adults um we've seen this and we see it play out on on conservation um issues where uh wildlife refuges are taken over by protesters or wilderness study areas are have roads carved into them to try to prevent them from becoming wilderness areas and so it it i think one's one's set of radicalism leads to another set of radicalism and these things sort of ratchet up and the i think the antidote to that is hard work it's sitting down at the table and and like i sort of imagine this table most of the time in this book being round where we can all sit at this round table and we can see each other or we're all in a different position and all have different values but we can all see each other but as we move into this the period closest to us it feels much more like a long skinny table where we can't see everybody anymore and we just continue to face off rather than share and i think that that's one of the challenges because i think the one of the solutions is a lot of hard work getting to know what you want what i want where we might be able to compromise and collaborate and there are examples of this in a variety of locations but there's not a lot of examples of it and it's time consuming and it's costly and the conservation challenges that we're faced with are expensive and they're interconnected because these lands are connected with one agencies and another agencies plus private land so all of this is it takes so much time and so many resources and it's a lot easier to just yell at each other right i like that i like that metaphor of the right i don't like it but it's a it's a very appropriate metaphor of a long table where we can't quite see each other or can't see each other fully and and are just i often feel that way when i report on these kinds of conflicts that people are just you know standing up and and pontificating from from a great distance to the other people who have a stake in these public lands and there's very little listening going on but as you say there are some examples of perhaps you know these these round tables still exist at the local and regional level we're getting close to the end of our time so maybe you could leave us with some some inspiration because i know some of these stories especially that involve indigenous land conservation are are very heartening and and and are examples of things that that we could follow in the future yeah there aren't we don't know these stories well enough yet i think um but i know that there are in the in the american southwest there have been examples for decades now of of environmentalists working with traditional land users to figure out better ways there's a high desert partnership i believe is what it's called in eastern oregon worked really hard to because this is in the same neighborhood where the now here wildlife refuge was taken over in 2016 in in the 1990s tensions there were really really at a high point and kind of not you know hot and violent and there was a determination in this community to like let's solve this and make it you know less less tense and there's been some research done that suggested the reason that the wildlife refuge takeover didn't have a greater local effect is because there had been long hours of neighbors getting to know neighbors and trying to solve these sorts of problems and i look to things like the bear's ears intertribal coalition that come together to try to protect bear's ears in southern utah and eventually get it turned into a national monument where they will be co managers with the federal government involved in this and this feels like some sort of whole circle something happening here where we have indigenous people reaching out and being part of this rather than being left out deliberately or having land taken deliberately so i'm hopeful where that might go as as it moves forward and develops their management plans there yeah i mean we we started this conversation talking about the that the history of public lands is rooted in dispossession and a story like bear's ears gives me hope that uh there is there certainly that that history can't be reversed or and can't be made up for but that there is a way forward from it and and the high desert partnership i mean we should say for those of you who don't remember the malhear national wildlife refuge takeover was it was an armed takeover by by extremists anti-government extremists and it lasted 40 days and i think that as you say the reason why the community was not more supportive of the ideals of these these interlopers was that unbeknownst to these extremists who are from out of state that the local people and and local public land managers had done decades of work to to find their places at the table and to have a conversation with one another exactly yeah so i think we can we can all take heart that those those conversations are not easy but they are are possible exactly i know you wanted to end with just a very short reading um and i think that that reflects the spirit of what we're just just talking about so you take us out with that the last paragraph in the book um and i just get done talking about some people coming to tables to find common ground you see this point is not meant to suggest that using and 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 history's most complicated and important tasks and the exercise of democracy and a diverse and complicated society like the united states challenges citizens and their elected decision makers to set aside narrow 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 moving toward the future public lands can and should play a central role in combating these compounding crises recall terry tempest williams words quoted in the book's 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 an honest reckoning with history a past that includes the exploitation of people and the land as well as the protection of places and democracy robin wall kimmerer stated the very land on which we stand is our foundation and can be a source of shared identity and common cause the task before us then is to ensure that our common forests parks rangelands and refuges scattered across the nation function as the public's land and not the preserve of one group or another for that undermines the promise of a democratic and ecological citizenship that might bind the nation together one way we might begin to repair the earth and our politics is with the public lands thank you so much adam and thanks for this conversation today it's great to hear your insights again adam's book is called making america's public lands and it's out now i hope you'll all pick it up and read it it's it's really full of full of just very thoughtful commentary on these on the on a very complicated story that that affects all of our lives and affects some landscapes that i know all of us love so thank you for joining us today and i hope you'll join the next event at the national archives take care adam