 Hi, I'm Mark Madison, the historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and today I'm here with Jeffrey Ryan, author, historian, outdoorsman, who's talking about his most recent book, This Land Was Saved For You and Me, How Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and a Band of Foresters, Rescued America's Public Lands. So, Jeffrey, it's great to have you here, and I would like any of you out there viewing this, please do share any questions you might have. I mean, one of the virtues of this forum is you get to ask questions and have some interactivity with our author, Jeffrey. And, Jeffrey, one of the things that's great about this book is there's some lesser-known figures in it that we can talk about a little later, but there's also some fairly famous people like Frederick Law Olmsted that had surprising starts to their career, and I wonder if you want to talk a little about that to kick this off. Sure. I had also prepped a little just quick background info on me before we dive into the first hero that I highlight in my book, and I'll be really brief, I promise. My background in conservation history came through hiking. Here I am on the Pacific Crest Trail hiking from Mexico to Canada in 1983, and then I followed that up with a 28-year hike on the Appalachian Trail with a good friend of mine. We did a little piece of the trail every year. We smorgasborded it, as we would like to say, doing a nonlinear approach, and as I said, it took us almost three decades to complete that. And in doing those two adventures, I really got interested in, first of all, telling the story about how we section-hiked, which is my first book, Appalachian Odyssey, and then the second one was Blazing Ahead, which is about the history of how the Appalachian Trail was devised and built, and that turned me on to the path of America's conservation history. And as Mark well knows very well, I have followed that up with gusto digging deep into the archives of American conservation history. So that being said, I have also hit the road to find the places where the great conservationists were born and raised and practiced their craft. This is Ernest Oberholzer's Island near the Boundary Waters Wilderness, which he was integral in creating. This is Aldo Leopold Shack in Barabu, Wisconsin, where he did much of his writing and, of course, wrote the Sand County Almanac, one of the greatest conservation books of all time. And finally, Gifford Pinchot Estate in Milford, Pennsylvania. He's one of the main characters in my book, as one might surmise. And my initial intent with this book, this land was saved for you and me, was to create somewhat of a conservation family tree, if you will. I wanted to try to figure out the interconnectedness between the different people and the environmental movement. And it got so complex so quickly that even if I put the full team of finding your roots on to this project, I don't think they would have been able to pull it off. So what I figured out was really, for me, the best way to tell the story was in a series of conservation baton passes over a 100-year period. So basically, it goes from Frederick Law Olmstead to Gifford Pinchot to the band of foresters, which we will undoubtedly mention today. So Olmstead's interesting because a lot of people know Frederick Law Olmstead primarily as the co-designer of Central Park and the preeminent landscape designer in American history, but also he had a huge effect on American conservation in general and public lands. So what's fascinating about Olmstead, who's 200th birthday was last year, by the way, he saw the world through the eyes of it from a very young age of someone who was predominantly occupied with an interest in scenery. Scenery had a huge effect on him psychologically and physically. He would go on great walks even as a child and figured out early on that scenery gave him energy and gave him a sense of a ability to pause and consider things in nature. His career decidedly did not start out in landscape design. He in fact dabbled in a number of things including surveying, tried to go to Yale, didn't like it, became a deck hand on a sailing ship bound for China, didn't like that either. He gave that up after a year decided he would become a fruit farmer instead. So fast forward in 1857 Olmstead was in a hotel working on the final edits for his fourth book. Yes, he was an author as well and he got a telegram that the publisher had failed. So he's literally reading the manuscript of his book and finding out that it's all for naught. When a good friend of his named Charles Elliott walked into the room and said, oh my gosh Frederick Law Olmstead, I've been thinking about you. I'm working on this project. I'm on the board of this project in New York City looking for a superintendent. And the next morning or that night rather, he boards a ferry for New York City and ultimately becomes the supervisor of Central Park, which was underway but not being built in the way that the board originally had envisioned. So he teamed up with a cathedral designer from Europe named Calvert Vox and they came up with a plan for Central Park. The big thing here about Olmstead as it relates to my book and about conservation in general is he saw Central Park as an opportunity to bring nature to people. So he's building a resource within an urban environment, bringing scenery, if you will, to the urban environment. He's emphasizing nature. The whole design that he worked on with Vox was to minimize man-made features and offer this freedom and repose which I had alluded to earlier, giving people a way to get away from the crowds and appreciate nature, common theme with Olmstead. So by the time he's done working on Central Park, he's deep in the hole, deep in debt due mostly to the publishing failures. He owes his father several thousand dollars, almost ten thousand dollars, which was a huge sum in the 1850s, 1860s, early 1860s. So he gets a job managing a gold mine in California and after walking in the Mariposa forest and seeing the giant trees, he has an epiphany about how important this natural landscape is and how important that could be to people that will eventually come to see this magnificent place. So he writes a report about it and again details why we need scenery. Importantly, this is in 1864 when he's writing. He's already saying that it's a scientific fact that natural scenery helps our health and vigor and gives us health benefits that are unimaginable to others and irreplaceable. And importantly, nature gives the ability to increase our happiness not just for the time when we're physically there, but because we've been exposed to this, it's an entree to securing happiness in the future. So once we discover the benefits of nature, they are with us forever. And also he says what happens if we don't have access to nature and he talks about softening of the brain and other melancholy and other things that would affect us if we didn't have such places to go to. So importantly, the thing that Olmsted was bringing to the party on a national scale was this fact that we all need nature, we need a place to go to, and he's starting to take that ball and run with it. So he is able to affect the establishment and saving of Niagara Falls area and also does the same thing when he goes to the World's Fair of 1893 and decides that amidst this hustle and bustle, he needs to create a place of repose and he builds an island into the landscape where tens of thousands of people are going a day and need to have that place. And of a more permanent factor, he will go on to become instrumental in creating the managed forest at the Biltmore estate. That's wonderful. Obviously, he's known for Central Park and then in Boston where I studied, he did the Emerald Necklace there where there's a nice national park site in his former office. So Olmsted, it's pretty well known, although this is the first I ever heard of his Yosemite adventures, which is fascinating. But there's also some people in your book that aren't as well known conservationists that were pioneers also, kind of at the base of that tree you showed us. Do you want to talk about some of those, Jeff? Yes, absolutely. And sort of about the same time when Olmsted was writing about the need for Yosemite in that report, and oh by the way, Abraham Lincoln ceded the land to the state of California in 1864 to create a state park. We all know that it became a national park afterwards, but sort of concurrently with the thinking that Olmsted was having was a particularly interesting character. George Perkins Marsh, Franklin Benjamin Hoff will talk about all of these. We're sort of concurrently leading up to this epiphany that we need more natural lands. At the time it was mostly state parks, as I mentioned before. So the first of them is George Perkins Marsh. George Perkins Marsh grew up in rural Vermont. And in the 1850s and early 1860s, he started recognizing what deforestation in particular effect was having on the landscape around him. An avid trout fisherman, he was seeing that clear cutting the forest nearby was causing soil infiltration into his favorite trout fisheries, but it was also causing droughts. So there were these cycles of droughts and floods, and he became very concerned with that and wanted to sort of bring this to the national attention. So in 1864, he publishes a book called Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. And this book took the world, particularly in America, by storm. It was really the first environmental book to talk about the air relationships between man and nature and what the prospects were if we continued doing some of the things we were doing. Stuart Udall said it was the beginning of the consciousness of the land ethic in our country. So to sort of set the stage here of what was happening around Marsh, this is how much virgin forest there was in America in 1620. Fast forward to 1850, you can see it disappearing. It was going at a very rapid clip. And then by 1920, we're just seeing dots of virgin forest left. So this is indicative of the sort of rampant clearing that was going on as the country was being built. And to be sure there was a genuine need to have timber building railroads and housing and whatnot, but there was genuine concern about the rate at which it was happening. And also more to the point, the fact that a lot of the land was being cut and not cared for basically particularly in the Adirondacks, there were tens of thousands of acres of land that had been clear cut and left wanting. No taxes were collected because the foresters absconded. So Enter Man and Nature and some of the points that Marsh was making in that book was the need to restore our forests. He's talking about specifically we have the means to restore the forest we should get to it. The influence of the book was probably, it was second only the Darwin's book on Origin of Species, but up until the fact, up until the publishing of Silent Spring and the Sand County Almanac, it was a critically important book and it's well worth going back there to read it again. So Man and Nature had a tremendous impact in general on the sort of general public consciousness about the need for managed forestry, but in particular I found it really interesting that there were two people in particular that had a very direct influence on. The first one is a guy named Franklin Benjamin Huff who grew up in upstate New York. He was raised from an affluent family in upstate New York and went on to medical school and started practicing in upstate New York in his hometown as an MD, which he did for a couple of years until he read Man and Nature and then he started realizing that he had to be taken active role in establishing forestry in the United States. So in the 1870s he got involved. He quit his medical profession in the 1850s. He first actually published the first American forestry periodical in 1862. Unfortunately, there were not enough subscribers to keep it going. Then he joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which was a civil war entity department that was created to help bring medical equipment to the troops and he ended up working under Olmsted, interestingly enough. So in 1855 and 65 he oversaw the census for the state of New York and it was during that 10-year period where he put everything together and said, oh my gosh, look at the forests that are disappearing, particularly in his neighboring Adirondack region as I mentioned before and he had read Man and Nature. So therefore by 1872 he had risen to such prominence that he served on a New York commission to review devastation in the Adirondacks and then ultimately came to Portland, Maine, my hometown to deliver a paper on the importance of preserving forests. In that paper he makes some revelatory observations. One is obviously the need for timber is established and well needed. Any efforts to manage forests would not be against forestry quote-unquote, but they were aimed at managing forests a little smarter than we had been and the rate of timber use was unsustainable. Obviously the forest needed to be managed in his eyes and fourth really amazing for 1873 we need forestry schools. There was no such animal back then. So as a result of all of this he was named a special agent to the Department of Agriculture to assess the forests and lumbering operations in the United States and being Franklin Benjamin Huff he took the opportunity to travel all throughout the country and write a 650 page compendium on everything from land use and misuse to preservation of seeds, basic horticulture that's what what growing conditions are needed for various types of trees and oh by the way recommending a forestry school curriculum. Right on the heels of that there was a division of forestry chief position and created and he was named the first one which was interesting to me because I like many have heard that Giverd Pinchot was the first head of a forestry department. It was in fact Franklin Benjamin Huff. It would not be until 1905 when Giverd Pinchot was named the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. So that's one of the lesser known. That's really interesting. It's the USDA is also starting the biological survey around this time. It's really kind of a home agency for early American conservation and yeah like you I'd assume Giverd Pinchot was the first chief of a national forest service and Marsh his homestead which was part of that deforested landscape you showed us and now is reforested secondary growth. It's just in Woodstock, Vermont. It's a national park now called Marsh Billion Rockefeller. So like you people we've both been there. Yeah can go visit it and retrace these steps. Are there other lesser known conservationists that we should talk about? One lesser known conservationist is actually the father of Giverd Pinchot and I mentioned James Pinchot for a variety of reasons. One is I think one of the most interesting facets of this whole story is that the Pinchot family came to Milford, Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. They purchased about 400 acres of land and promptly clear cut it and they had also made money in land speculation and they owned a store and I think at a gut level James was always a little uncomfortable with that for whatever reason and he decided that he would go make his fortune a little bit farther afield. He went into New York as New York was going New York City was going through an incredible boom in the 1850s to 60s and made his fortune importing wallpaper from France. There were a lot of hotels being built and he rode the wave and became a multi-millionaire. After that he was of course very socially connected in conjunction with building all these hotels and other places that needed wallpaper so he became well connected and he also became enamored of the idea of bringing the Statue of Liberty to the United States so during all this activity he meets Richard Morris Hunt of Bennington, Vermont who rose to fame designing the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and also would go on to build several ornate residences in the United States including the Biltmore as we shall see. Here's the pedestal and the monument being built. There's the pedestal today. James Pinchot ended up deciding to retire at age 44 with his millions and bought some property overlooking the valley where his family had first settled in Milford, Pennsylvania and hired Hunt to build this palatial estate which still exists today. I believe it's the only U.S. Forest Service building of its type that's maintained. Most of their other lands are obviously national forests but it's an amazing place and I highly highly recommend going. It's called Grey Towers. James married Mary Jane Eno who also came from a background of wealth and they decided that to do their Hunt designed house justice they would hire Frederick Law Olmsted to be the landscaper so his landscape design is all around that house even to this day and at the time Young Gifford was literally just being a toddler just being born and James retires and happens to get his hands on a book called Man and Nature. This is James' copy of Man and Nature which is at the Milford house under glass. Pretty neat. I think I undoubtedly is a first edition. But more to the point he read this book and he was also taken like Huff had been taken and one of the salient points in here is the improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries so much more the reason for beginning now that really hit James and he decided that he would urge his son to become a forester to help undo that deforestation and do something about it so even before his son enters Yale class of 1889 James asked Gifford how would you like to be a forester and of course Gifford was really a little bit perplexed because he didn't know what one was and why would he and he said later on it was an amazing question for his father to ask that he didn't really understand the the import of until much later here's young Gifford in Yale and he tells his peers that he is going to become a forestry professional it will become his life work he's promptly assured that by a professor that not only does the profession not exist but there is not a single class being taught in forestry in the United States and quite excitedly and this is a nice little insight into Gifford's thinking and self assurance he writes home I shall not only have a I shall have a science to found as a result no competition so on his 21st birthday James and Mary give Gifford his own copy of man and nature just one example of their encouragement to him to make forestry his career and then Gifford goes off to forestry school comes back to the United States and announces that he's here to find the profession of forestry and really no one's ready to listen to what he has to say he's not getting anywhere he's not really gaining traction he does get a few side hustles but no one's really understanding what it is that he's trying to get off the ground or not willing to buy into it until someone else does it first so now he intersects with Olmsted in 1888 Olmsted is summoned by George Vanderbilt to come to Asheville and Vanderbilt is distraught because much of the land that he has purchased has been clear cut and Olmsted immediately looks around and says there's this thing that's starting to get off the ground about managing forests maybe maybe we can get that young man Gifford pinchel on board to manage this now 86,000 acres of forest so in 1892 young Gifford is hired and his first job is quite public and he is able to try to try his hand at proving the viability of managing forests being Gifford he throws his entire weight into trying to get this enterprise off the ground he stubs his toe a few times but as we all know he ultimately prevails so there's some other evolutions you chart in your book that that come after pin show and you promise to tell us a little about the relatively unknown Julius Ward who is Mr. Ward Julius Ward perfect timing um you might remember on an earlier slide when I was showing underneath Olmsted some of the figures underneath including Marsh and I had also mentioned this character Reverend Julius Ward of New Hampshire he was quite an amazing person so he was born in Massachusetts and then became a pastor in Connecticut and Maine but he spent much of his time in the white mountains and was very taken by the scenery in the whites and also taken by the devastation that happened as a result of queer cutting there um he wrote an Atlantic monthly article highlighting the importance of the forest not only to the timber industry but importantly to the tourism industry and he was really one of the first ones to bring that thought to the fore and it really gained traction so he talks about climbing to the summit of mount washington and looking out at this frightful frightful desolation the slaughter of the forest and saying that even youngsters today will be great when when this thing is when this area is reforested it is a devastating landscape to look at from the top of the highest peak in new england but even more presciently he he writes about the effect that queer cutting has on the soil much like marsh he's talking about how when the forest is deforested the whole nature of the soil changes the sponginess is gone it dries up the storms come and the water flows down over it in such torrents that it causes other ecological dam damage and he talks about fresh it's which which is uh what we now call floods and he sends out a warning saying this cannot continue to happen or there will be horrible uh price to pay downstream and lo and behold just two and then the following year three years later there were hellacious floods on the maramaic river as a result of the deforestation that he was talking about and uh one one such event put 6 000 people out of work overnight so now we're seeing uh not only ecological issues but and and economic issues as it relates to tourism we're now seeing issues as it relates to manufacturing which is another thing that happened in the out of rondacks i should add is that one of the reasons that the out of rondacks were turned into a national sorry a state entity was because the merchants in new york city were worried about the effects that forestry deforestation were having on the eerie canal and they were afraid that if the eerie canal did not provide enough competition to the railroads that they would be paying through the nose to bring their goods to market or their raw goods into the factory so that was another interesting thing that i learned about how the out of rondacks came into uh being saved so how does this story find a solution how do you jump ahead there we go yep there are the white mountains today by the way hugely forested well this kind of brings us to baton pass number two so i i do want to talk about how wilderness areas came into uh into being so gifford pincho um obviously rose to become the head of the forest service he actually spent about 10 years being um the the head of the agency under agriculture um interior though owned all the land so he was in a position of being in an advisory role with no power so he was largely ignored on on on in the terms of forest policy forestry policy so he ultimately was able to convince um tr to move everything over to uh him under in the department of agriculture so he was thrust into a position of being the forestry chief now he had several tens of thousands of acres of forest to manage and he needed to hire people to do it and so uh his father interestingly enough had endowed the Yale forestry school in the early 1900s so it just coincided with having freshly minted foresters to go work for pincho's department so many of those foresters um were famous would become famous in their own right um including Aldo Leopold who was sent out to new mexico in the 19 early 1920s um with a horse and a rule book and um the the the us laws of forestry and trying to convince people that they needed to adhere to a new set of rules um and then also there were quasi famous people like Benton Mackay who was also one of the first foresters that would go on to come up with the idea for the Appalachian Trail so and Bob Marshall was another one uh of Bob Marshall Wilderness fame um many of you may know his name he was uh instrumental in getting the wilderness movement off the ground as well i'll refer to that in a minute but these first foresters said okay um we've come to this fork in the road where we have um state parks we have national parks we have national forests but the one piece that was missing in their mind was um wilderness areas but places that would be left alone quote unquote um untrammeled and so one of the things that made them worry and and rightfully so i believe was the advent of the automobile and that and the egress into public the public realm um Mackay himself was saying in the early 1930s that the function of true wilderness is to provide a refuge um of from billboard pavement and the auto horn um they are all negations of wilderness and the reason he was saying this is because um the the roads the building of roads was starting to infiltrate places like the Appalachian Trail in fact um as we will see in some places it was built roads were built right over the footpath that he had helped establish so it really hit home with him of course as i mentioned the adoption of the automobile was also driving this um let just look at the rise between 1910 and 1930 we're seeing a tremendous growth in automobile ownership and of course people were looking to escape the suburban and urban environment and go out and explore it also sort of uh coincides with the growth of the national park movement as uh ken burn so aptly pointed out but the other thing that was going on were skyline drive so this is a long skyline drive in virginia um these were becoming a quote unquote thing um they at one point there were 12 of them being proposed at at once um one of them of course was skyline drive which was built over 34 miles uh over the top of the Appalachian Trail and then Blue Ridge Parkway sort of piggybacked on top of that but in addition to those there were another 10 being proposed and one was over the masonutton range to the west of Shenandoah others believe it or not hard to believe today were uh proposed to go over the whole top of the green mountains the whole state of vermont over the top of the white mountains in new hampshire and so on and so forth so these first foresters were concerned and Benton Mackay had decided that he would pose the question to some fellow foresters uh in private at the 1934 american forestry association meeting there's Benton in the upper left um harvey broom was very instrumental in the creation of Smoky Mountain National Park Bernard Frank was mostly um he was a forester but he also was well known for what water quality and restoration management in the early days and of course Bob Marshall so Benton Mackay says to the gathered group here the small group that uh hey guys what do you think about starting a um an organization which is against skyline drives and Bob Marshall very aptly said we shouldn't start an organization which is against anything rather we should start an organization that is for something um very smart young man indeed I think he was only in his 30s um and so therefore they asked Aldo Leopold to join them Marshall was one and Benton Mackay um to found the wilderness society which they did in 1934 which brings us to the story of Howard Zahnizer yeah our first non-forester he's got a good pedigree with the Fish and Wildlife Service so tell us a little about Zani well what was really interesting is that when the those first foresters started the wilderness society they were basically playing whack-a-mole with um doing um exactly what Bob Marshall had cautioned against which was they they were trying to halt halt progress on a number of dam projects which they were successful in doing more often than not but they were not creating a wilderness network or a network of wilderness areas um and it finally came to a head um Benton Mackay said after about 15 years into doing this that um they had to they were exhausting themselves on this sort of one at a time approach to trying to get to their ultimate goal what they really needed what they felt that the country needed was an organized approach to establishing wilderness areas and protecting them and um when Mackay became the head of the organization in 1955 um he was getting up there in years and didn't have the energy to really put together this concerted effort so they hired this young man named Howard Zahnizer and you know the joke internally was the guy looks more like a librarian than a wilderness type um and here he is with his son Ed who Mark and I both know Ed um and he's a lovely man spent his his life in conservation as well but what Zahnizer brought to the party was this amazing um ability to communicate he was from a writing a naturalist background he wrote wonderful pieces on birding which was very near and dear to his heart and um also I believe wrote for for Mark's department over there at Fish and Wildlife for a while or its precursor um and as I said they were concerned he wasn't a wilderness man in fact one of them is Ed still laughs to this day said uh Harvey Broom said in private correspondence he found later that he looks more like a librarian than a wilderness man but happily they were quite wrong um Mackay had proposed to focus the work on securing wilderness areas and as I said after he first proposed that it took another several years for them to hire Zahnie and uh get him up and running on it so it took Zahnizer 17 years of non-stop work to try to get Congress and and not just Congress but the timber industry the the forest service the parks service you know there was a lot of internal squabbling about what does wilderness mean does it take away from the lands that we're managing does it pose a threat um those kinds of political conversations were happening um but one thing Zahnie had was patience um unlike many people I I've seen in the political world uh for sure he did not see opponents as enemies he really tried to sit down and work with people what are your concerns um how can we address your concerns in some cases redrafting language to alleviate those concerns and he'd continue to circle around and sit down with people literally hundreds if not thousands of meetings he went all across the country meeting with garden clubs and you know wilderness advocates and you name it and he had one of the neatest things about Zahnie is he had this giant coat where he had a tailor build in a number of pockets so he could have different versions of talking points for the legislation in different pockets and hand them out to the person that to the right person to the right audience and of course not everything fit in his overcoat so he had that giant valise on his side um his son Ed would joke that he would he would try to lift his father's coat to put it over a chair at the end of the day and it felt like weightlifting so 19 hearings 60 plus rewrites of the legislation as I mentioned all sorts of appearances and importantly it was not just people that were on the side of the wilderness act but very importantly and this is a common theme in the book is that most progress was made when people of other viewpoints would sit down and and they just try to figure out a way to make it work um you know what a what a great thing for all of us to to remember um writing articles for newspaper and finding newspapers and finding support wherever and whenever he could find it and as I mentioned he's he's very high on collaboration and believed that even if the legislation was passed if it was not done with a spirit of cooperation then after it was passed the the people who were not happy with it would start working to undermine the legislation so he wanted to make sure that there were enough people on board to have the legislation take effect and last and then importantly he was a man of faith and he believed that the whole substance of our culture um is having a living wilderness in our midst it's important for our happiness arching back to Olmstead our health physically and mentally obviously and it it offers the chance to perpetually renew ourselves in contact with the earth does that bring us up to the present then it does great almost almost so zany died in his sleep in 1864 the tragedy being that he did not live long enough to see the wilderness act passed although he knew it was going to um he had had a history of heart problems and probably no small part of it was throwing his entire being into the passage of this legislation for 17 years um but in july of that year the law passed the house the full house 374 to 1 and uh i believe mark was there when i when i was giving a presentation at the us fish and wildlife headquarters and and um ed zonizer was in the audience and he raised his hand and said the one dissenter was asked after the legislation after the roll call um why did you vote against this and he he said that he admitted to the fact that he didn't really understand what he was voting for or against so he ended up being the lone dissenter um september 3rd 1964 the law was signed into laws we see here with lbj and um hubert humphrey standing behind him who was the sponsor one of the sponsors of the bill and in the center of the photograph is zonizer's wife alice looking on so originally the wilderness act established nine oh just over nine million acres of wilderness in 13 states including the places that you see below and then later on there were additions made to the wilderness system and now has almost 112 million acres and yes some of it was cleaved out within sections of our national parks and national forests and uh bureau of land management lands um the idea being that these places will be largely left whole to the extent that they can be um untrammeled meaning uh no permanent roads certainly visitation is encouraged but uh in the in the spirit of leave no trace just today to give a sort of roster we have 423 national parks um 803 wilderness areas 154 national forest plus grasslands and of course you can find out more about it in my book much more about olmstead and pin show i didn't even get to the creation of our national parks and and more about the headwinds and challenges facing all of these people well known or not and um another one is the whole question of preservation versus conservation what do each mean um what was the arc of each one of those movements and where are we with that today well jeffrey that was a tour de force thank you you gave us the history of the american conservation movement in about 50 minutes which was quite impressive and uh you know you cover a lot of people both known and unknown you cover a lot of the movement from the forest service through the wilderness system up till today what message do you want readers to take from your book well a couple of them i think um you know as as with most historical deep dives we find really amazing surprises like um franklin benjamin hoff who really i think sort of encapsulates this whole idea of follow your passion um here was this guy who was essentially a a lone lone voice in upstate new york saw what was going on and decided that he would dedicate his career to it give up a medical practice for it um it's pretty inspiring and then of course we have the the pillars the the giants of of any any sort of progression and history that get a lot of the acclaim but i think i my heart is really with um the interplay between the people and these sort of unknown grassroots building coalitions that seem to be disparate and they were all headed toward something really wonderful and then the second thing is i think um not to not to harp harp on it too much but i think the idea of meeting with people with different viewpoints and you know that's we're starting to come back to that again which is wonderful i know a lot of the agencies are are really taking that on trying to get local voices at the table um around not just meetings but operations putting offices on the ground in proximity to places that are being managed so they're accessible and you know pincho had a very famous adversarial this whole thing was building up as this horrible meeting with the timber harvesters in the west and he was sent out there by rosevelt to go speak with them and sat in the audience for two days listening to his name being dragged through the mud to be to culminate in his being introduced as the most evil man on earth and walks up to the podium and basically says you know i'm a forester just like you are and my interest is trying to make sure that we have a viable industry and um you know i'm not here to put you out of business if you have that idea that's not correct and um you know a lot of people stood and applauded i'm not saying you got a standing ovation by any means but i think it's really instructive to to take into account of course zonais are lived and breathed in on daily basis so i think those for me are the two pleasant takeaways um you know it's not always a straight line and it's not always it's not always easy but i think i think the end result is something where we can all be happy with like to think that that's a positive note i one other thing that's striking even in your brief presentation is the disparate backgrounds of these folks so marsh is a diplomat uh julius or it is a a theologian right um leopold during his most famous period as a professor zonais are is you know writing radioscripts for the biological survey for a federal agency um they're all coming from different backgrounds and all instead was a renaissance man i mean he was a fruit farmer a merchant marine uh uh a very highly regarded author and went on to create a company that designed 6 000 landscapes in the united states and canada um unbelievable really um everything was leading him toward what he became and he had that faith that that's what was going to happen and uh that's also an interesting lesson from the book yeah and the importance of place comes out right um you know the the silted trout streams of vermont and the denuded forests of the the white mountains and and uh leopold saw the the impact of the dust bowl and and settlement in the southwest that's really important was it helpful to you to visit these places or had they changed so much that you you you couldn't see it with their eyes oh my gosh no they they have um thankfully largely unchanged um and i i i think we've talked about this before but the the impact for me of being in those places gives me and i've always felt strongly about the getting a sense of where people operated um you know the furrow cabin i've been to many times uh kifford pincho estate more times than i can count um although leopold shack twice um i've been to zonizer's birth place um i've been to urnist oberholz resign one twice for a couple weeks and i just think it's really important to wake up in the places where they operated and listen to that white-throated sparrow or or walk on the shoreline and get an idea of what it was that made them such advocates for the for the for nature um you know those of us who feel passionately about it i think share that common thread of places that were were seminal in having us understand how important it is like this place in my slide is uh it is right behind the house where i grew up in main um one of my favorite places to go is this tidal creek that um constantly changing with the tides and i've been out there since i was eight years old tramping around in those woods and it's a very special place to me unfortunately someone in 1947 decided that this should be a 58-acre nature preserve um who knew you know it was a marvelous playground for a young man so maybe that's the final message huh jeffrey find your special wild places or natural places and then go out there and do your best with whatever your skills are to to help preserve them i think that's one message we definitely could take from your book wonderful thank you well that was a quick hour we're out of time here but thank you so much this was really really fun and we want to thank the national archives for sponsoring this and all of you who took the time to tune in thank you thanks for having me it was wonderful