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Speaker 1: While it's historical story is what creates the West and

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Speaker 1: the eyes of the world, for residents and most visitors today,

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Speaker 1: it's the public lands that now define Western life. I'm

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Speaker 1: Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to

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Speaker 1: you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest.

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Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters

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Speaker 1: and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.

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Speaker 1: Enjoy responsible New West's Modern West public Lands West. For

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Speaker 1: eighteen years of my life, I live full time in

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Speaker 1: the state of Texas. I'm not a Texan by birth,

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Speaker 1: but rather from old Louisiana families, and living in Texas

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Speaker 1: made me understand that you very likely do need to

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Speaker 1: be born and raised in that state to fully embrace

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Speaker 1: lone Star life. Native born Texans accept at face value

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Speaker 1: things about their history and modern existence there that don't

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Speaker 1: necessarily resonate if you're from somewhere else. I spent the

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Speaker 1: majority of my Texas years in West Texas, but not

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Speaker 1: the Big Bend Country or the trans Pacos as it's known.

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Speaker 1: I lived in the southern high Plains, most of those

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Speaker 1: years in a canyon insized into the state Plain or

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Speaker 1: Yano West Taccado, a giant plateau spreading from the Texas

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Speaker 1: Panhandle across into eastern New Mexico. Was I living in

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Speaker 1: the West in those years? Is Texas part of the West?

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Speaker 1: Is West Texas part of the West. Historically Texas is

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Speaker 1: as much deep South as West. It was Southerners who

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Speaker 1: largely settled it, even West Texas, bringing their culture, religions,

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Speaker 1: and a drawl geographically and ecologically. The High Plains certainly

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Speaker 1: appear as Western, though, as the celebrated writer Joseph wood

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Speaker 1: Krooch put it in his book The Desert Year, as

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Speaker 1: he described driving the Texas Panhandle, the red eroded sandstone

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Speaker 1: and the cactus declare that this is New Mexico, a

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Speaker 1: good many miles before the map makers have recognized the fact.

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Speaker 1: So in High Plains Texas there are canyons and cactus

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Speaker 1: ranches and rodeos and index finger waves on the highway.

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Speaker 1: But as this region the full on modern American West,

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Speaker 1: it never seems so to me. And I'll tell you why.

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Speaker 1: We all should admit that the West's modern story is

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Speaker 1: as impart as it's passed. In terms of what it's

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Speaker 1: like to visit are to live in such a celebrated region.

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Speaker 1: But it's the West, merely a place with a frontier

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Speaker 1: history and the enduring symbols of it. If the presence

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Speaker 1: of cowboy hats and pickup trucks as a replacement for

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Speaker 1: horses is enough to muster the West, then Texas is in,

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Speaker 1: but so is Tennessee. If that's all you need, then

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Speaker 1: Austin and Nashville are both Western cities. On the other hand,

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Speaker 1: when today's historians identify what makes the West as a

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Speaker 1: region different from the rest of America, they put up

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Speaker 1: a ven diagram that includes a list like this number

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Speaker 1: one with a few exceptions, Like the Pacific Coast. The

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Speaker 1: West is defined by aridity, a dryness that exposes geology

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Speaker 1: and opens up views to far distances, which it means

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Speaker 1: that compared to the rest of America, the West is

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Speaker 1: ecologically different or unique. Beyond the ninety eighth meridian of longitude,

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Speaker 1: America is forested only on its high mountain ranges or

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Speaker 1: in deep canyons. Otherwise, sparse moisture produces grassy prairies and plains, cactus,

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Speaker 1: creosote and sagebrush deserts, scattered and dwarfed tree cover of

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Speaker 1: pinion and limber pines and junipers. Aridity also produces dry,

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Speaker 1: clear air, sparkling nights of polysh stars, and oceans of sunshine.

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Speaker 1: Despite the cowboy hats, Nashville fades out rapidly as this

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Speaker 1: kind of Western place. Number two. The West is often

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Speaker 1: thought of as wide open spaces, but it has featured

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Speaker 1: cities like the Great Rock buildings of the Chaco and

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Speaker 1: civilization as far back as a thousand years ago. Unlike

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Speaker 1: much of the rest of the country, the West cities

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Speaker 1: tend to be widely scattered in what geographers call an

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Speaker 1: oasis settlement pattern, with vast open lands between. That's still

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Speaker 1: true along both sides of the Rockies and even along

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Speaker 1: the densely populated Pacific Coast today. Number three. The most

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Speaker 1: western of American places tend to be those that still

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Speaker 1: retain the continent's original diagnostic wild animals and the ecologies

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Speaker 1: they've long shaped with wolf and grizzly bear recovery. In particular,

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Speaker 1: the West is the part of the country that retains

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Speaker 1: more of its wild keynote species than the rest of

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Speaker 1: the country. Number four. The West is still the home

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Speaker 1: of most of America's Native people, whose presence is a

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Speaker 1: notable feature of the region's cultural imprint and human diversity

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Speaker 1: Number five and five. The West is the primary region

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Speaker 1: of America's public lands. Whether there are national parks, monuments,

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Speaker 1: wildlife refuges, national forests, or national grasslands are Bureau of

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Speaker 1: Land Management holdings, The vast majority of the country's public lands,

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Speaker 1: wilderness areas, and wild and scenic rivers are in the West.

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Speaker 1: Most importantly of all, the presence of the West's public

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Speaker 1: lands provides residents and visitors and ability to access the

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Speaker 1: natural world to an extent that's rarely a feature of

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Speaker 1: modern life in other American regions. So as for the

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Speaker 1: high plains of West Texas, it is arid, and in

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Speaker 1: the places where its nature is still intact, it is

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Speaker 1: ecologically Western. It has cowboys and pickups and a frontier history,

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Speaker 1: but it lacks the other three characteristics that make up

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Speaker 1: today's American West. The wild bison and wolves and wild

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Speaker 1: horses that made up its keystone animals are almost completely gone,

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Speaker 1: as are its native peoples entirely long since banished to Oklahoma,

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Speaker 1: and the vast percentage of its landscape is not publicly

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Speaker 1: accessible but privately owned and often jealously decorated with those

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Speaker 1: symbols of the not quite West, angry and belligerent no

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Speaker 1: trespassing signs. Next door to Texas, However, in New Mexico,

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Speaker 1: twenty one Native tribes live in the state. Mexican wolf

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Speaker 1: numbers are at nearly three hundred animals and increasing yearly,

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Speaker 1: and compared to Texas is one percent. In New Mexico,

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Speaker 1: forty two percent of the state is federally managed. The

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Speaker 1: vast bulk of that all but Indian reservations and military

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Speaker 1: installations in public and accessible form manage lands in nearby

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Speaker 1: Colorado make up thirty seven percent of that state, and

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Speaker 1: Wyoming the figure is fifty two percent, and in Montana

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Speaker 1: thirty three percent. Arizona's figure is seventy two percent, Utah's

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Speaker 1: sixty four percent, and Nevada's eighty percent. Idaho's is at

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Speaker 1: sixty two percent, California's forty five percent, Oregon's fifty four percent,

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Speaker 1: Washington State's thirty five percent, and Alaska's public lands are

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Speaker 1: at eighty nine percent. Texas's federal lands public are not,

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Speaker 1: as a reminder, make up one percent of that state.

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Speaker 1: The East and the Midwest, they're the percentage of accessible

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Speaker 1: nature ranges from one percent to nine percent. The larger

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Speaker 1: figure a result of later transplanting of the public lands

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Speaker 1: idea from the West to destroyed cutover forest lands in

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Speaker 1: the east. Texas has about as much publicly accessible landscape

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Speaker 1: as Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, all at one percent

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Speaker 1: or less. Recently, an editor of Outside magazine, long based

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Speaker 1: in Santa Fe, left the magazine and moved to Austin,

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Speaker 1: thinking he was going to a progressive urban part of

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Speaker 1: the West in a state with almost no way to

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Speaker 1: access the natural world. He didn't last six months before

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Speaker 1: moving back to New Mexico. Even among the Great Plain states,

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Speaker 1: which like West Texas, have Western aridity and frontier history

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Speaker 1: going for them and often do retain native populations, only

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Speaker 1: South Dakota, with eighteen percent of its lands federally managed,

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Speaker 1: can claim to be fully a part of the modern

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Speaker 1: American West. How did this happen with respect to the

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Speaker 1: public lands, whose presence or absence plays such a role

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Speaker 1: in how one gets to live in the world. It's

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Speaker 1: time for me to tell you their creation story, from

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Speaker 1: the time of the very first homestead acts designed by

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Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson in the seventeen eighties. The former Indian lands

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Speaker 1: that made up the public domain the US was adding

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Speaker 1: to the country in the nineteenth century all went into

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Speaker 1: the coffers of the General Land Office or GOLO. The

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Speaker 1: GOLO offered land for sale or later in history as

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Speaker 1: free homesteads or grants to citizens non citizens, and to

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Speaker 1: infrastructure building entities like railroads or canal builders. In the

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Speaker 1: tradition of the Western European countries, General Land Office holding's

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Speaker 1: intended destiny was to become private property through purchases Louisiana, Alaska,

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Speaker 1: the Gadsden purchase, diplomatic agreements with Britain for the Northwest,

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Speaker 1: for example, treaties for Indian lands, or for ending the

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Speaker 1: Mexican War and incorporating the Southwest, and finally annexations like

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Speaker 1: Texas and Hawaii. The US acquired an enormous amount of

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Speaker 1: real estate between eighteen o three and eighteen ninety eight.

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Speaker 1: As various federal expeditions explored those lands and reported on them,

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Speaker 1: a prescient handful of Americans began to wonder about privatization

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Speaker 1: as a blanket policy aimed so bluntly at such an

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Speaker 1: ecologically diverse range of landscapes, even As they did so,

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Speaker 1: evolving homestead laws continued to survey, partition and sell our

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Speaker 1: grant lands to advancing settlement. Very frequently that settlement took

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Speaker 1: place on lands the Indians, who had long owned the

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Speaker 1: ground had barely left. During and after the Civil War,

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Speaker 1: two influential Americans in particular worried about this privatezation tradition

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Speaker 1: in widely read influential volumes. One of those volumes became

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Speaker 1: a best seller, the other one a widely discussed congressional report.

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Speaker 1: The author of the best seller was an American diplomat

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Speaker 1: named George Perkins Marsh, a polymath New Englander who read

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Speaker 1: twenty languages and as a result, received diplomatic appointments all

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Speaker 1: over the globe. Marsh wrote a book in eighteen sixty

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Speaker 1: four he called Man and Nature. In effect, this was

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Speaker 1: the first modern history of the environment any writer had

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Speaker 1: ever attempted. Although Marsh took on a huge range of

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Speaker 1: topics relating to humanity's relationship with the natural world, Man

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Speaker 1: in Nature became most famous for its description of a

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Speaker 1: pattern the author had observed in places as disparate as France, Turkey,

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Speaker 1: and China. Rivers had always been crucial to human civilization,

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Speaker 1: he wrote, and almost everywhere their origins were in mountains.

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Speaker 1: But privatizing mountains the well springs of water that were

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Speaker 1: so critical to human development had been a disaster almost everywhere.

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Speaker 1: Countries that let it happen. Private interest that logged and

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Speaker 1: grazed mountains had destroyed their watersheds and created landscapes that,

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Speaker 1: Marsh stead looked like the surface of the moon, ruining

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Speaker 1: the possibilities to settle inhabitable valleys below. As a brand

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Speaker 1: new country, the US still had time to avoid such

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Speaker 1: a mistake. Marsh believed the solution was to remove its

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Speaker 1: mountain landscapes from private settlement that would invite overlogging and overgrazing,

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Speaker 1: to retain them instead as public preserves to protect the

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Speaker 1: West Snow Fountain watersheds, critical for providing water to the

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Speaker 1: surrounding arid country. Marsh's book went through eight printings and

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Speaker 1: appeared in a new edition in eighteen seventy one, and

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Speaker 1: its success brought his argument to the attention of the

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Speaker 1: National Association for the Advancement of Science, which in eighteen

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Speaker 1: seventy three endorsed Marsh's new policy recommendation. The other author

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Speaker 1: was a one armed Civil War veteran who became the

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Speaker 1: most famous American explorer of the post war era and

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Speaker 1: eventually the most powerful bureaucrat in government in the late century.

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Speaker 1: John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, but

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Speaker 1: that couldn't prevent him from leading the first party to

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Speaker 1: take on the dangerous and unknown descent of the Grand Canyon,

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Speaker 1: which he did not once but twice, even serializing the

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Speaker 1: account of his adventures in the most popular magazines of

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Speaker 1: the day. Then, in eighteen seventy eight, the year before

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Speaker 1: he became the director of the new US Geological Survey,

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Speaker 1: Powell laid before Congress his masterpiece for rethinking public domain

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Speaker 1: policies in America. The lands of the arid region of

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Speaker 1: the United States. Didn't exactly endorse Marsh's plan, Powell focused

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Speaker 1: more on the diversity of public domain landscapes and why

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Speaker 1: Congress should tailor different settlement plans for valleys, foothills, and mountains.

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Speaker 1: He even offered up a map of the West, projecting

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Speaker 1: a bile regional future for it, with settlement and governments

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Speaker 1: organized around rivers and watersheds. Yet, by emphasizing the special

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Speaker 1: difficulty settlers were facing in a West that was far

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Speaker 1: more desert like than any place Americans had ever tried.

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Speaker 1: The homestead. Powell added yet another layer of reasoning why

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Speaker 1: protecting the mountain sources of western water was so crucial.

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Speaker 1: Powell did point out that press ccidents were already in

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Speaker 1: place for public lands in the West from its beginnings

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Speaker 1: in the early sixteen hundreds, Spanish colonization in New Mexico

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Speaker 1: had made land grants in the high elevation mountains to

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Speaker 1: communities settling the valleys below them. These land grants, known

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Speaker 1: as aheitos, were used in common for firewood stock grazing, hunting,

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Speaker 1: and irrigation of mountain rains and snowpacks by all of

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Speaker 1: the residents of the valley towns. Powell also admired a

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Speaker 1: different pattern of public lands Mormon settlers in Utah were trying.

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Speaker 1: The Mormon approach involved communal sharing of high mountain resources

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Speaker 1: carried out through church sanctioned monopolies like the one granted

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Speaker 1: to Parley Pratt in the Salt Lake Highlands that still

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Speaker 1: today is known as Parley's Canyon. Those managers then made

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Speaker 1: the public use of grass, timber, and water available in

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Speaker 1: the upland when the interior Department proclaimed US Forest reserves

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Speaker 1: in the New Mexico and Utah Mountain Ranges. Both those

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Speaker 1: precedents ended up abandoned, although not without a fight. In

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Speaker 1: New Mexico, Spanish land grants had passed intact to the

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Speaker 1: Republic of Mexico during the twenty seven years that Mexico

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Speaker 1: controlled the Southwest. An Article eight of the treaty that

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Speaker 1: ended the Mexican War with the US promised full protection

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Speaker 1: for those land grants, which by eighteen forty eight blanketed

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Speaker 1: almost eighty percent of New Mexico. But American law, with

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Speaker 1: its elaborate protections for individual property rights, had little experience

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Speaker 1: with the property rights of communities. In the eighteen ninety

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Speaker 1: seven Sandivil Decision, the US Supreme Court decided that land

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Speaker 1: grants to communities implied such public use that the lands

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Speaker 1: granted had actually remained in legal possession of the Spanish

235
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Speaker 1: and Mexican governments, thus were now part of the public

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Speaker 1: domain of the United States. The twelve million acres of

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Speaker 1: land grants the US did approve in New Mexico were

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Speaker 1: those that had gone exclusively to individual grantees. Hence the

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Speaker 1: Southern Rockies was cleared for the designation of the Pacos

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Speaker 1: and Santa Fe Forest Reserves as part of America's public lands.

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Speaker 1: Pacos Forest Reserve, in fact, was already designated before the

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Speaker 1: Sandevil case even went before the court. Here's how all

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Speaker 1: this public lands happened. In eighteen ninety one, Republican President

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Harrison's administration passed an Appropriation's Bill for the General

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Speaker 1: Land Office that included a writer that by eighteen ninety

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Speaker 1: three would place thirteen million acres of the West Mountains

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Speaker 1: off limits to homes and privatization. As has been the

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00:19:03,280 --> 00:19:07,119
Speaker 1: case for a great many conservation and environmental policies, the

249
00:19:07,200 --> 00:19:11,960
Speaker 1: idea was embraced by both political parties. Before he left office.

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Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety seven, Democrat Grover Cleveland added another twenty

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Speaker 1: one million acres to the West Forest Reserves. By this point,

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Speaker 1: twenty forest reserves lay across the forested mountains of every

253
00:19:26,480 --> 00:19:30,520
Speaker 1: Western state except Nevada, and stretched from the Rockies to

254
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Speaker 1: the Pacific coasts. While private home setting continued on the

255
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Speaker 1: Great Plains and in the Western Valleys. These new high

256
00:19:37,320 --> 00:19:41,960
Speaker 1: elevation public lands, designed originally to protect the West Snow

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Speaker 1: Fountain sources of water, now included a total of thirty

258
00:19:46,520 --> 00:19:52,280
Speaker 1: four million acres. This was the beginning in the Sierra Nevadas,

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Speaker 1: the Cascades, the Rockies, and numerous detached island mountains in

260
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Speaker 1: the desert west of what evad into America's National Forest system.

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00:20:08,880 --> 00:20:12,920
Speaker 1: There were still steps remaining in establishing the full foundation.

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00:20:13,880 --> 00:20:17,320
Speaker 1: Appointed Chief Forester of the Reserves in eighteen ninety eight,

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Speaker 1: Yale Gifford Pinchot began work on what became the multiple

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Speaker 1: use principle. These lands of many uses, as Pinchot told

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00:20:27,800 --> 00:20:31,280
Speaker 1: audiences all over the West, wouldn't simply be locked away.

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00:20:32,200 --> 00:20:36,000
Speaker 1: Planning both for the future and for democratic use. Pinchot

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00:20:36,200 --> 00:20:40,480
Speaker 1: underlined that the Forest Service would regulate the reserves, but

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00:20:40,600 --> 00:20:44,159
Speaker 1: they would not be closed off. Instead, they would be

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00:20:44,320 --> 00:20:49,560
Speaker 1: used for watershed protection, for grazing, for logging, for recreation,

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00:20:50,119 --> 00:20:53,760
Speaker 1: and since many of the West's remaining animals had fled

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00:20:53,800 --> 00:20:58,640
Speaker 1: to the mountains, for wildlife habitat, to emphasize that these

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00:20:58,720 --> 00:21:01,960
Speaker 1: lands now belonged to the American citizens, no matter where

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00:21:01,960 --> 00:21:05,360
Speaker 1: in the country they lived. In nineteen oh seven, Pinchot

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Speaker 1: and President Roosevelt decided to rename them the National Forests.

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Speaker 1: This conversion of so much of the American landscape from

276
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Speaker 1: potential private entry to public ownership and federal management had

277
00:21:19,840 --> 00:21:24,840
Speaker 1: already shocked conservatives, who began calling the new policy pink

278
00:21:25,040 --> 00:21:31,200
Speaker 1: tea socialism. So maybe the new National Forests designation lubricated

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00:21:31,240 --> 00:21:36,600
Speaker 1: the hit somewhat when Roosevelt stunned conservatives by dramatically adding

280
00:21:36,960 --> 00:21:40,480
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five million more acres to the system,

281
00:21:40,840 --> 00:21:43,480
Speaker 1: bringing the totals by the time he left office to

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00:21:43,720 --> 00:21:49,160
Speaker 1: fifty one national forests covering a whopping one hundred fifty

283
00:21:49,240 --> 00:21:53,720
Speaker 1: nine million acres, all of it in the West, and

284
00:21:53,800 --> 00:21:57,760
Speaker 1: Roosevelt wasn't done. The public land system for the West

285
00:21:57,840 --> 00:22:00,480
Speaker 1: and increasingly for small parts of the the rest of

286
00:22:00,520 --> 00:22:04,600
Speaker 1: the country included a new designation made possible by the

287
00:22:04,680 --> 00:22:09,159
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six Antiquities Act, to protect archaeological sites and

288
00:22:09,240 --> 00:22:14,119
Speaker 1: those unusual geologic features like the Grand Canyon. Unlike the

289
00:22:14,160 --> 00:22:18,520
Speaker 1: more complicated creation of national parks, this Act allowed the

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00:22:18,600 --> 00:22:23,000
Speaker 1: president to make designations out of the public domain, so

291
00:22:23,160 --> 00:22:28,560
Speaker 1: Roosevelt himself proclaimed eighteen of these new national monuments, several

292
00:22:28,640 --> 00:22:31,919
Speaker 1: of which, like the Grand Canyon, went on eventually to

293
00:22:32,000 --> 00:22:37,280
Speaker 1: become national parks. While the United States had pioneered the

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00:22:37,480 --> 00:22:41,280
Speaker 1: idea and reality of the national park. We had never

295
00:22:41,480 --> 00:22:46,040
Speaker 1: created a National Park Service. Whether the existing national parks

296
00:22:46,080 --> 00:22:49,639
Speaker 1: were intended to last was called into question when, with

297
00:22:49,720 --> 00:22:54,120
Speaker 1: Theodore Roosevelt's blessing, the hetch Hetchy Valley of the Grand

298
00:22:54,240 --> 00:22:58,439
Speaker 1: Canyon of the Tuolomie River and Yosemite National Park became

299
00:22:58,520 --> 00:23:02,879
Speaker 1: the destination of a dam and reservoir to provide water

300
00:23:02,960 --> 00:23:06,640
Speaker 1: for San Francisco. That led to calls for the creation

301
00:23:07,080 --> 00:23:10,920
Speaker 1: of a National Park Service to manage the parks, which

302
00:23:10,960 --> 00:23:15,960
Speaker 1: Congress finally created in nineteen sixteen. By nineteen thirty two,

303
00:23:16,440 --> 00:23:20,920
Speaker 1: the Park Service was administering twenty two National parks and

304
00:23:21,119 --> 00:23:26,639
Speaker 1: thirty six National monuments focused on America's most monumental and

305
00:23:26,720 --> 00:23:30,480
Speaker 1: most vertical scenery, the overwhelming number of the so called

306
00:23:30,600 --> 00:23:37,720
Speaker 1: crown jewels parks like Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Sequoia, Rocky Mountain,

307
00:23:38,040 --> 00:23:42,560
Speaker 1: Grand Canyon, Zion, Mount McKinley, or in the American West.

308
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Speaker 1: The same was true of the monuments, the wildlife refuges,

309
00:23:47,760 --> 00:23:52,199
Speaker 1: the national forests. This was the public land system that

310
00:23:52,280 --> 00:23:55,919
Speaker 1: has made life in the modern West distinctive from life

311
00:23:56,000 --> 00:23:59,600
Speaker 1: elsewhere in America. It was the system that provided the

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00:23:59,640 --> 00:24:03,359
Speaker 1: habit possible to retain most of the historic bestiary of

313
00:24:03,440 --> 00:24:07,479
Speaker 1: the West's original animals, particularly as big predators, And it

314
00:24:07,560 --> 00:24:10,360
Speaker 1: was the system that made access to the natural world

315
00:24:10,560 --> 00:24:14,240
Speaker 1: a reality for Western citizens, and in the nineteen sixties

316
00:24:14,240 --> 00:24:19,120
Speaker 1: would make setting aside vast wilderness areas and scenic wild

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00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:25,240
Speaker 1: rivers possible. There would be farms, ranches, and towns located

318
00:24:25,280 --> 00:24:28,800
Speaker 1: around the borders of all these vast expanses of public

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Speaker 1: forests and parks, but not within them, despite roads, trails,

320
00:24:34,320 --> 00:24:41,040
Speaker 1: campgrounds tourists within them. Big nature prevailed. Instead of replicating

321
00:24:41,080 --> 00:24:44,280
Speaker 1: the East with the public land settlement in the western

322
00:24:44,320 --> 00:24:47,320
Speaker 1: third of the country, we had angled off on a

323
00:24:47,400 --> 00:24:53,720
Speaker 1: new historical trajectory. Of course, into the nineteen thirties, homesteading

324
00:24:53,800 --> 00:24:57,560
Speaker 1: and private entry continued in some places in the West.

325
00:24:57,960 --> 00:25:00,600
Speaker 1: In fact, there were more Western home stays taken up

326
00:25:00,600 --> 00:25:04,119
Speaker 1: after nineteen hundred than before that year. But with most

327
00:25:04,240 --> 00:25:08,240
Speaker 1: of the West mountains and canyons now public lands, private

328
00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:11,480
Speaker 1: lands were largely at low elevation, and a great many

329
00:25:11,520 --> 00:25:15,040
Speaker 1: were out in the open plains country of states like

330
00:25:15,160 --> 00:25:19,399
Speaker 1: Colorado and Montana. Many of the counties on the Great

331
00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:25,000
Speaker 1: Plains reached their highest all time populations with homesteading in

332
00:25:25,040 --> 00:25:30,119
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. But when agricultural prices dropped precipitously after

333
00:25:30,160 --> 00:25:34,840
Speaker 1: the Great War, followed by wind and drought across country

334
00:25:34,960 --> 00:25:39,320
Speaker 1: now plowed and stripped of its protecting grasslands, the policy

335
00:25:39,359 --> 00:25:43,480
Speaker 1: of continuing to privatize the Western public domain began to

336
00:25:43,640 --> 00:25:47,080
Speaker 1: seem like a bad bet and an open invitation for

337
00:25:47,240 --> 00:25:52,680
Speaker 1: human disaster, as the dust Bowl rage from West Texas

338
00:25:52,760 --> 00:25:57,240
Speaker 1: and Oklahoma all the way to eastern Montana and hundreds

339
00:25:57,320 --> 00:26:01,520
Speaker 1: of thousands of people abandoned their homesteads and the words

340
00:26:01,520 --> 00:26:04,399
Speaker 1: of the Woody Guthrie song of the time, so long

341
00:26:04,520 --> 00:26:07,600
Speaker 1: It's been good to know you. In nineteen thirty three,

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00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:13,640
Speaker 1: the Franklin Roosevelt administration elected to call an end to homesteading.

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00:26:15,200 --> 00:26:18,000
Speaker 1: It was the end of a grand American tradition that

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00:26:18,119 --> 00:26:21,800
Speaker 1: was almost one hundred and fifty years old. Whatever further

345
00:26:21,920 --> 00:26:26,000
Speaker 1: privatization of the Western public domain happened was now limited

346
00:26:26,040 --> 00:26:30,280
Speaker 1: to irrigation developments around some of the new Western dams

347
00:26:30,280 --> 00:26:34,240
Speaker 1: and reservoirs. In fact, the US went so far as

348
00:26:34,320 --> 00:26:39,320
Speaker 1: to turn back the clock on a Western ownership society.

349
00:26:39,440 --> 00:26:44,960
Speaker 1: The FED actually resettled thousands of people elsewhere and bought

350
00:26:45,080 --> 00:26:48,760
Speaker 1: back homesteads and a few of the worst wind whip

351
00:26:48,840 --> 00:26:54,040
Speaker 1: and eroded areas, then laboriously replanted them and incorporated them

352
00:26:54,119 --> 00:26:57,479
Speaker 1: back into the public domain in the form of the

353
00:26:57,640 --> 00:27:03,920
Speaker 1: National Grasslands. As for all the unsettled leftover low elevation

354
00:27:04,119 --> 00:27:06,840
Speaker 1: country in the West, two hundred and forty five million

355
00:27:06,880 --> 00:27:09,800
Speaker 1: acres of it, In fact, much of it was true

356
00:27:09,840 --> 00:27:13,920
Speaker 1: desert that the Fed retained in ownership, to be administered

357
00:27:13,960 --> 00:27:18,320
Speaker 1: by a new agency called the Grazing Service, which by

358
00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:22,520
Speaker 1: mid century had become yet another of the West public

359
00:27:22,680 --> 00:27:30,439
Speaker 1: land agencies, the Bureau of Land Management. Like many of

360
00:27:30,520 --> 00:27:33,639
Speaker 1: us who grew up in other regions and when we

361
00:27:33,720 --> 00:27:36,600
Speaker 1: got to live in the public lands West, decided we'd

362
00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:39,240
Speaker 1: died in gone to Heaven. I've done my best to

363
00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:43,720
Speaker 1: take advantage of my unprecedented access to the West natural world.

364
00:27:44,640 --> 00:27:47,720
Speaker 1: I've done three week float trips down the Grand Canyon,

365
00:27:48,280 --> 00:27:52,600
Speaker 1: week long backpacks through the Tuolomy Canyon in Yosemite, packed

366
00:27:52,600 --> 00:27:56,560
Speaker 1: across Montana's Glacier Park from its western boundary to its

367
00:27:56,600 --> 00:28:00,640
Speaker 1: eastern one, and traversed the wilderness of the Wind River

368
00:28:00,840 --> 00:28:04,760
Speaker 1: Range in Wyoming in the opposite direction east to West.

369
00:28:05,640 --> 00:28:08,000
Speaker 1: I've done a twelve day raft trip through the Arctic

370
00:28:08,080 --> 00:28:12,040
Speaker 1: National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, canoe the wild and Scenic

371
00:28:12,119 --> 00:28:15,920
Speaker 1: Missouri River, climbed Santa fe Baldi in the Southern Rockies

372
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:19,960
Speaker 1: and the National Forest there, and watched wolves and grizzlies

373
00:28:20,080 --> 00:28:25,280
Speaker 1: in Yellowstone Parks Lamar Valley. Had history turned out differently,

374
00:28:25,680 --> 00:28:28,280
Speaker 1: I guess I could have had experiences like that on

375
00:28:28,320 --> 00:28:32,359
Speaker 1: the Texas High Plains too. The truth is I did

376
00:28:32,440 --> 00:28:34,760
Speaker 1: do such things when I lived in Texas, but I

377
00:28:34,800 --> 00:28:38,600
Speaker 1: had to trespass and outlaw hike to do them. Why

378
00:28:38,640 --> 00:28:42,840
Speaker 1: that was the case requires a story, and I'll close

379
00:28:42,880 --> 00:28:46,920
Speaker 1: here by telling it. The reasons that Texas High Plains

380
00:28:47,120 --> 00:28:50,080
Speaker 1: fall short of being a part of the modern West

381
00:28:50,640 --> 00:28:54,560
Speaker 1: have to do with things that happened in Texas long ago.

382
00:28:55,080 --> 00:28:59,200
Speaker 1: Unlike much of America prior to US annexation in eighteen

383
00:28:59,360 --> 00:29:04,240
Speaker 1: forty five, Texas existed as an independent country for nearly

384
00:29:04,280 --> 00:29:08,760
Speaker 1: a decade. The eighteen thirties was the time when Indian

385
00:29:08,880 --> 00:29:13,400
Speaker 1: removal from the South and East was US policy, and

386
00:29:13,480 --> 00:29:17,920
Speaker 1: the Texas population was almost wholly from the Deep South.

387
00:29:19,040 --> 00:29:22,320
Speaker 1: What followed is the kind of history that just doesn't

388
00:29:22,400 --> 00:29:26,560
Speaker 1: remain in the past, the Republic of Texas committed itself

389
00:29:26,840 --> 00:29:31,200
Speaker 1: to the entire removal of its native population. That's a

390
00:29:31,240 --> 00:29:36,800
Speaker 1: step we'd call ethnic cleansing today. Doing so required considerable

391
00:29:36,920 --> 00:29:41,840
Speaker 1: military effort, which cost money. Texas ended up borrowing from

392
00:29:41,920 --> 00:29:47,440
Speaker 1: Britain and France. So Texas's annexation brought into the US

393
00:29:47,720 --> 00:29:51,440
Speaker 1: a state that had largely banished its Indians, and owed

394
00:29:51,520 --> 00:29:54,360
Speaker 1: so much money for doing so that the United States

395
00:29:54,440 --> 00:29:58,360
Speaker 1: refused to take on the debt. The only solution to

396
00:29:58,480 --> 00:30:02,240
Speaker 1: that was to permit to to retain title to its

397
00:30:02,360 --> 00:30:08,680
Speaker 1: lands and privatize virtually every acre to raise revenue. This

398
00:30:08,880 --> 00:30:12,440
Speaker 1: history is why of the Texas High Plains has no comanches,

399
00:30:12,800 --> 00:30:18,400
Speaker 1: caiawas Cheyennes or apaches all long ago removed to Oklahoma.

400
00:30:19,320 --> 00:30:23,840
Speaker 1: It's why ranches and farms protected by no trespassing signs

401
00:30:24,120 --> 00:30:28,160
Speaker 1: occupy almost every parcel of ground. Why there was little

402
00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:31,440
Speaker 1: or no habitat for buffalo and none at all for wolves.

403
00:30:32,200 --> 00:30:34,880
Speaker 1: And it's a powerful reason why the Texas High Plains

404
00:30:35,200 --> 00:30:38,280
Speaker 1: missed out on its one grand chance to join the

405
00:30:38,320 --> 00:30:43,600
Speaker 1: public Lands West. And it did have a chance. In

406
00:30:43,680 --> 00:30:48,520
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, National park personnel looking for new parks

407
00:30:48,600 --> 00:30:52,960
Speaker 1: began to pay attention to ecologist interest in the overlooked

408
00:30:53,000 --> 00:30:57,360
Speaker 1: Great Plains. No landscapes on the Great Plains measured up

409
00:30:57,600 --> 00:31:00,760
Speaker 1: to the monumental scenery of a Yosemite or Grand Canyon,

410
00:31:01,240 --> 00:31:03,640
Speaker 1: and most of the plains was now in private hands.

411
00:31:04,000 --> 00:31:07,880
Speaker 1: But the Park Service hoped to overcome those obstacles, and

412
00:31:08,040 --> 00:31:13,000
Speaker 1: Palo Duro Canyon, a sixty mile long, thousand foot deep

413
00:31:13,120 --> 00:31:16,240
Speaker 1: roar of color where the Red River carved through the

414
00:31:16,320 --> 00:31:21,920
Speaker 1: high plains. Plateau, was historically a famous Western landscape, a

415
00:31:21,960 --> 00:31:28,040
Speaker 1: Comanche hideaway, and home to legendary Texas ranger Charles Goodnight's Ranch.

416
00:31:28,440 --> 00:31:33,000
Speaker 1: Tommy Lee Jones's Captain Call in Lonesome Dove is a

417
00:31:33,040 --> 00:31:37,120
Speaker 1: portrayal of good Night. By the way, Palo Duro seemed

418
00:31:37,240 --> 00:31:41,960
Speaker 1: a perfect locale for a large Great Plains park. The

419
00:31:42,040 --> 00:31:45,880
Speaker 1: emerging artist Georgia O'Keeffe exhibited paintings of it in New

420
00:31:45,960 --> 00:31:49,320
Speaker 1: York in nineteen seventeen, and when one of its ranches

421
00:31:49,360 --> 00:31:53,520
Speaker 1: opened its gates to the public, fourteen thousand people showed

422
00:31:53,600 --> 00:31:57,360
Speaker 1: up to see the canyon. Texas was planning a small

423
00:31:57,440 --> 00:32:01,240
Speaker 1: state park there, and Palo Duro as a national park,

424
00:32:01,600 --> 00:32:05,000
Speaker 1: had champions in Texas and beyond, one of which was

425
00:32:05,240 --> 00:32:08,840
Speaker 1: Enos Mills, the so called John Muir of the Rockies.

426
00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:13,680
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties, a man named Roger Toll was

427
00:32:13,720 --> 00:32:16,960
Speaker 1: a kind of one man, naked or break it investigator

428
00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:19,720
Speaker 1: for the National Park Service, and in nineteen thirty three

429
00:32:19,720 --> 00:32:22,960
Speaker 1: and thirty four he was touring Texas to assess potential

430
00:32:23,040 --> 00:32:27,960
Speaker 1: national parks. Now, the Park Service had no acquisition budget

431
00:32:28,120 --> 00:32:32,320
Speaker 1: to acquire private lands to create parks. All the existing

432
00:32:32,360 --> 00:32:35,040
Speaker 1: parks had been created from the public lands, but it

433
00:32:35,200 --> 00:32:39,560
Speaker 1: hoped that, as had happened back east for Acadia, Great

434
00:32:39,600 --> 00:32:45,080
Speaker 1: Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah Parks, locals would raise the money

435
00:32:45,120 --> 00:32:49,680
Speaker 1: to acquire the land. As told journey to Texas. In Washington,

436
00:32:49,760 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: park personnel were assembling maps and materials for the creation

437
00:32:53,600 --> 00:32:57,840
Speaker 1: of a million acre National Park of the plains around

438
00:32:58,080 --> 00:33:01,960
Speaker 1: Palo Duro, a huge park half the size of Yellowstone.

439
00:33:02,720 --> 00:33:06,360
Speaker 1: But after spending four days in the canyon, including visiting

440
00:33:06,440 --> 00:33:10,680
Speaker 1: its most scenic and dramatic side gorge, the Tulee Narrows,

441
00:33:11,000 --> 00:33:15,040
Speaker 1: Told decided that Palo Duro would rate below the present

442
00:33:15,160 --> 00:33:19,600
Speaker 1: scenic national parks. He was also concerned about real essate

443
00:33:19,680 --> 00:33:22,920
Speaker 1: values in Texas and whether Texans would come up with

444
00:33:23,000 --> 00:33:27,640
Speaker 1: the money to acquire the canyon. The West Texas Canyon

445
00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:30,640
Speaker 1: had now caught the eye of the National Park Service, though,

446
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:34,800
Speaker 1: and the new idea was for a national monument based

447
00:33:34,840 --> 00:33:39,720
Speaker 1: on Palo Duro's geological uniqueness, a kind of first Chapter

448
00:33:39,880 --> 00:33:44,080
Speaker 1: of Genesis national Monument for tourists heading west on the

449
00:33:44,240 --> 00:33:49,440
Speaker 1: Mother Road Route sixty six. So in October of nineteen

450
00:33:49,480 --> 00:33:53,000
Speaker 1: thirty eight and thirty nine, the Park Service initiated a

451
00:33:53,080 --> 00:33:56,400
Speaker 1: second review of Palo Duro. This time, the idea was

452
00:33:56,440 --> 00:34:00,959
Speaker 1: for a more modest Southern High Plains National mind of

453
00:34:01,320 --> 00:34:05,400
Speaker 1: roughly one hundred and thirty five thousand acres. The final

454
00:34:05,440 --> 00:34:09,920
Speaker 1: report included an estimate of the acquisition costs some two

455
00:34:10,080 --> 00:34:13,400
Speaker 1: hundred ninety four thousand dollars, plus another two hundred and

456
00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:17,400
Speaker 1: sixty four thousand to fold in the fifteen thousand acre

457
00:34:17,480 --> 00:34:22,520
Speaker 1: state park. The monument boundaries excluded Touley Canyon and its

458
00:34:22,520 --> 00:34:27,800
Speaker 1: spectacular gorge, but hopes for future expansion were already eyeing

459
00:34:27,880 --> 00:34:31,040
Speaker 1: that section as The report that hoped to make the

460
00:34:31,080 --> 00:34:33,680
Speaker 1: Texas High Plains part of the Public Lands West put

461
00:34:33,680 --> 00:34:37,879
Speaker 1: it from the standpoint of geology and scenery. Palo Duro

462
00:34:38,080 --> 00:34:41,520
Speaker 1: is well worthy of being made into a national monument.

463
00:34:41,920 --> 00:34:46,080
Speaker 1: It's the most spectacular canyon carved by erosion anywhere on

464
00:34:46,160 --> 00:34:50,680
Speaker 1: the Great Plains of North America. When word of the

465
00:34:50,719 --> 00:34:54,600
Speaker 1: proposal got out, there was public support, all right, but

466
00:34:54,640 --> 00:35:00,160
Speaker 1: it was mostly from Denver, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma City. Texans

467
00:35:00,200 --> 00:35:05,520
Speaker 1: seemed oddly ambivalent. No wealthy oil visionary from the lone

468
00:35:05,600 --> 00:35:09,520
Speaker 1: Star state stepped forward the way the Rockefellers were then

469
00:35:09,680 --> 00:35:13,640
Speaker 1: doing in Jackson Hole to create Grand Tetai National Park.

470
00:35:14,680 --> 00:35:20,279
Speaker 1: So ambivalents or apathy are more likely. Ideological opposition to

471
00:35:20,360 --> 00:35:24,480
Speaker 1: public lands in a state unfamiliar with that idea killed

472
00:35:24,520 --> 00:35:29,760
Speaker 1: this main chance. Texas's State Park Division has since double

473
00:35:29,840 --> 00:35:33,800
Speaker 1: Pallo Duro State Park the thirty thousand acres, although without

474
00:35:33,840 --> 00:35:37,560
Speaker 1: making the wilder parts of it accessible with trails and camps,

475
00:35:38,120 --> 00:35:42,719
Speaker 1: and it's created a second sixteen thousand acre park, Caprock

476
00:35:42,800 --> 00:35:47,120
Speaker 1: Canyon Lands, thirty five miles to the south. Caproc is

477
00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:50,080
Speaker 1: beautiful and wild and has a free roaming bison herd.

478
00:35:50,480 --> 00:35:53,839
Speaker 1: But these state parks just aren't extensive enough to make

479
00:35:53,880 --> 00:35:59,160
Speaker 1: the Texas High Plains a public lands region. In our time,

480
00:35:59,200 --> 00:36:02,120
Speaker 1: the passion for life in the modern public lands West

481
00:36:02,440 --> 00:36:06,280
Speaker 1: is powerfully evident. When the Trump administration in twenty twenty

482
00:36:06,320 --> 00:36:10,240
Speaker 1: five tried to insert a partial dissolution of the Western

483
00:36:10,280 --> 00:36:13,920
Speaker 1: public lands as part of the so called Big Beautiful Bill,

484
00:36:14,400 --> 00:36:18,359
Speaker 1: the outcry in the West was deafening. It came from

485
00:36:18,400 --> 00:36:23,480
Speaker 1: both the left and the right, from hunters, environmentalists, ecologists,

486
00:36:23,520 --> 00:36:27,880
Speaker 1: and day hikers. In Santa Fe, where the Western Governor's

487
00:36:27,960 --> 00:36:31,759
Speaker 1: Conference was held in June twenty twenty five, a pro

488
00:36:31,960 --> 00:36:37,279
Speaker 1: public lands protests of thousands filled the streets and drowned

489
00:36:37,320 --> 00:36:41,719
Speaker 1: out the conference in this Western capital city for hours.

490
00:36:43,320 --> 00:36:47,800
Speaker 1: The conclusion from events like this is inescapable. A century

491
00:36:47,880 --> 00:36:52,000
Speaker 1: of Western lifestyles formed by and built around public lands

492
00:36:52,280 --> 00:36:55,839
Speaker 1: has now entirely transformed this American region and made it

493
00:36:55,880 --> 00:36:59,400
Speaker 1: distinctive in the United States and the world. It turns

494
00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:04,200
Speaker 1: out the public lands have created the American West just

495
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:12,120
Speaker 1: as much as its frontier history ever did.

496
00:37:16,239 --> 00:37:19,600
Speaker 2: I wanted to kick this off with a little personal anecdote.

497
00:37:20,200 --> 00:37:25,320
Speaker 2: When I was in college and finishing up, I wanted

498
00:37:25,320 --> 00:37:28,360
Speaker 2: to go bear hunting, and I looked online and I

499
00:37:28,360 --> 00:37:30,320
Speaker 2: saw I could buy a bear tag in Montana for

500
00:37:30,440 --> 00:37:33,360
Speaker 2: like two hundred dollars, and I thought, where do you

501
00:37:33,400 --> 00:37:35,960
Speaker 2: go hunting? Once you get out to Montana? And when

502
00:37:35,960 --> 00:37:38,360
Speaker 2: I was growing up, you know, we'd in all the

503
00:37:38,520 --> 00:37:41,560
Speaker 2: National parks trips and Benda Glacier and Yellowstone and everything

504
00:37:41,600 --> 00:37:46,160
Speaker 2: like that. But I very distinctly have a moment of

505
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:49,200
Speaker 2: looking at a map and thinking, I wonder if I

506
00:37:49,200 --> 00:37:52,400
Speaker 2: can hunt in these national forests and going online. And

507
00:37:52,880 --> 00:37:55,640
Speaker 2: this is before the days of you know, podcasts and

508
00:37:56,520 --> 00:38:00,640
Speaker 2: online research tools for hunters and everything, and I looked

509
00:38:00,680 --> 00:38:02,440
Speaker 2: up can you hunt in National forces?

510
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:05,200
Speaker 3: And I got the answer yes.

511
00:38:05,560 --> 00:38:08,640
Speaker 2: And then I started looking at all the national forests

512
00:38:08,680 --> 00:38:13,440
Speaker 2: across the West, and it was like, you know, the

513
00:38:13,480 --> 00:38:16,880
Speaker 2: scales came off my eyes or whatever biblical metaphor is appropriate,

514
00:38:16,880 --> 00:38:19,880
Speaker 2: because I was just thinking, holy shit, there's a whole

515
00:38:20,800 --> 00:38:23,759
Speaker 2: world out there that I can just go to and

516
00:38:23,840 --> 00:38:26,600
Speaker 2: check out, you know, having come from a place where

517
00:38:27,040 --> 00:38:30,000
Speaker 2: we deer hunted on ten acre chunks and twenty acre chunks.

518
00:38:30,080 --> 00:38:31,360
Speaker 1: And in this.

519
00:38:32,920 --> 00:38:38,520
Speaker 2: Chapter you talk about how that shapes a person knowing

520
00:38:38,560 --> 00:38:41,000
Speaker 2: that they have access to these spaces and that they

521
00:38:41,040 --> 00:38:44,440
Speaker 2: can go out and sort of discover things and discover

522
00:38:44,520 --> 00:38:47,200
Speaker 2: things about themselves on these landscapes. So I wonder if

523
00:38:47,200 --> 00:38:50,880
Speaker 2: you could just talk about your first moment where you

524
00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:54,960
Speaker 2: sort of realized what the implications of these public lands

525
00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:55,800
Speaker 2: had for your life.

526
00:38:57,480 --> 00:39:01,200
Speaker 1: Well, I grew up in theis Louisiana, as you know,

527
00:39:01,640 --> 00:39:11,040
Speaker 1: and and I began at some point, and again it

528
00:39:11,640 --> 00:39:14,239
Speaker 1: was out of the same sort of experiences where once

529
00:39:14,360 --> 00:39:18,680
Speaker 1: family takes you off to the West and see to

530
00:39:18,719 --> 00:39:20,759
Speaker 1: see national parks and things like that. But I was

531
00:39:20,800 --> 00:39:24,240
Speaker 1: four years old when I went off on a trip

532
00:39:24,320 --> 00:39:27,479
Speaker 1: like that, so I wasn't really able to comprehend much

533
00:39:27,520 --> 00:39:31,880
Speaker 1: about the world other than while the West sure seems

534
00:39:31,920 --> 00:39:34,439
Speaker 1: to be sunny and beautiful compared to the Louisiana, which

535
00:39:34,480 --> 00:39:39,719
Speaker 1: is so green and close in. But I basically when

536
00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:42,520
Speaker 1: I got to the West, when I first started going,

537
00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:45,880
Speaker 1: and it was in my late teens and early twenties,

538
00:39:45,920 --> 00:39:48,759
Speaker 1: because I was fascinated with the West, and as soon

539
00:39:48,800 --> 00:39:51,359
Speaker 1: as I could drive a car and my parents would

540
00:39:51,400 --> 00:39:54,239
Speaker 1: let me take a car overnight, I mean immediately drove

541
00:39:54,320 --> 00:39:58,960
Speaker 1: off towards New Mexico and Colorado to go see the country,

542
00:40:00,200 --> 00:40:02,160
Speaker 1: and then made that kind of a summer road trip

543
00:40:02,239 --> 00:40:05,400
Speaker 1: every summer from then on all through my twenties and thirties.

544
00:40:06,600 --> 00:40:09,560
Speaker 1: What I began to realize, is that you know? And

545
00:40:09,640 --> 00:40:14,400
Speaker 1: I remember there was a line from an Aldo Leopold passage,

546
00:40:14,440 --> 00:40:16,720
Speaker 1: I think it was probably from a San County almanac

547
00:40:16,719 --> 00:40:20,600
Speaker 1: where he said, of what use are forty freedoms if

548
00:40:20,680 --> 00:40:23,440
Speaker 1: you don't have a world to get into? And what

549
00:40:23,640 --> 00:40:29,319
Speaker 1: I recognized about that statement was that he was describing

550
00:40:29,360 --> 00:40:33,000
Speaker 1: this situation I had grown up in where so much

551
00:40:33,080 --> 00:40:35,960
Speaker 1: of the world is off limits, it's fenced, it's posted,

552
00:40:36,320 --> 00:40:39,080
Speaker 1: you can't get at it. And suddenly, here's a part

553
00:40:39,120 --> 00:40:41,799
Speaker 1: of America, and it seemed like, in some respects the

554
00:40:41,840 --> 00:40:45,880
Speaker 1: best part of America, the grandest mountains, the deepest canyons,

555
00:40:46,160 --> 00:40:51,919
Speaker 1: the most extensive plains, the most starlit skies at night,

556
00:40:52,520 --> 00:40:56,440
Speaker 1: that was open to the world. And so it was

557
00:40:56,640 --> 00:41:00,600
Speaker 1: kind of it was one of those moments, one of

558
00:41:00,640 --> 00:41:06,240
Speaker 1: those precious moments in life, when I suddenly realized, holy cow,

559
00:41:06,880 --> 00:41:09,800
Speaker 1: here is an opportunity and a place in the country

560
00:41:09,840 --> 00:41:11,920
Speaker 1: I grew up in to be able to get at

561
00:41:11,960 --> 00:41:13,759
Speaker 1: the world in a way I've never been able to

562
00:41:13,800 --> 00:41:18,000
Speaker 1: do so. So that was provided by the public lands

563
00:41:18,040 --> 00:41:21,440
Speaker 1: of the West, and that made me really intrigued by

564
00:41:21,920 --> 00:41:25,560
Speaker 1: this topic. And one of the things I did in

565
00:41:25,600 --> 00:41:30,720
Speaker 1: my career as a writer who was interested in environmental

566
00:41:30,800 --> 00:41:33,800
Speaker 1: issues was to try to figure out how that happened.

567
00:41:33,800 --> 00:41:38,319
Speaker 1: How did the West get these public lands and what

568
00:41:38,480 --> 00:41:42,319
Speaker 1: does that mean? Because obviously it produces a different kind

569
00:41:42,320 --> 00:41:45,680
Speaker 1: of lifestyle where you have access to the world than

570
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:51,000
Speaker 1: when you don't. And so that's what this particular episode

571
00:41:51,000 --> 00:41:56,120
Speaker 1: and script are about, is to explain how this happened.

572
00:41:56,120 --> 00:41:59,080
Speaker 1: And it's the kind of thing that didn't happen everywhere.

573
00:41:59,080 --> 00:42:01,799
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the reasons I use Texas, where

574
00:42:01,800 --> 00:42:04,359
Speaker 1: I live for for a number of years as an

575
00:42:04,400 --> 00:42:08,359
Speaker 1: example is Texas was a piece of America that had

576
00:42:08,360 --> 00:42:13,320
Speaker 1: a different history and a different trajectory than the rest

577
00:42:13,360 --> 00:42:16,640
Speaker 1: of the American West did, and it ended up in

578
00:42:16,680 --> 00:42:18,080
Speaker 1: a very different situation.

579
00:42:19,960 --> 00:42:24,960
Speaker 2: And you point out early on that public lands or something,

580
00:42:25,760 --> 00:42:29,680
Speaker 2: and the story of public lands sort of bends back

581
00:42:29,719 --> 00:42:35,320
Speaker 2: against what the founding fathers and vision, right, And when

582
00:42:35,360 --> 00:42:38,640
Speaker 2: you think about Jefferson and his vision for the future,

583
00:42:40,080 --> 00:42:43,239
Speaker 2: this is something that was just a blind spot, not

584
00:42:43,400 --> 00:42:47,000
Speaker 2: to you know, be a historical here, but there's sort

585
00:42:47,000 --> 00:42:49,640
Speaker 2: of a blind spot. It's not something that the founders

586
00:42:49,680 --> 00:42:53,320
Speaker 2: would ever have dreamed of, right it And it almost

587
00:42:53,400 --> 00:42:57,799
Speaker 2: runs counter to their values, and yet there's this moment.

588
00:42:57,600 --> 00:42:58,440
Speaker 3: At which.

589
00:43:00,440 --> 00:43:04,239
Speaker 2: Sort of a utilitarian there's like two forces at work

590
00:43:04,280 --> 00:43:08,680
Speaker 2: here that combine to really create the system of public land.

591
00:43:08,680 --> 00:43:12,359
Speaker 2: And there's a utilitarian lens, and then there's also sort

592
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:20,319
Speaker 2: of this more idealistic conservation or preservationist lens as well.

593
00:43:20,440 --> 00:43:24,080
Speaker 1: Bush produces the National Parks on the one hand, the latter,

594
00:43:24,760 --> 00:43:28,520
Speaker 1: and something like the Bureau of Land Management tracts and

595
00:43:28,640 --> 00:43:31,520
Speaker 1: National forests on the other hand. Yeah, I think that's

596
00:43:31,560 --> 00:43:36,239
Speaker 1: a good way to think of it, Randall. From the beginning,

597
00:43:36,320 --> 00:43:39,680
Speaker 1: of course, Jefferson, who designs the first homestead acts with

598
00:43:39,760 --> 00:43:44,040
Speaker 1: the you know, the seventeen eighty five and seventeen eighty

599
00:43:44,080 --> 00:43:47,840
Speaker 1: seven declarations about how we're going to survey land and

600
00:43:47,920 --> 00:43:50,720
Speaker 1: we're going to offer it for sale to the public.

601
00:43:51,840 --> 00:43:56,080
Speaker 1: He envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers, as he said,

602
00:43:56,080 --> 00:44:00,399
Speaker 1: who would sweep across the continent and do this from

603
00:44:00,440 --> 00:44:06,840
Speaker 1: shore to shore. What circumvented that from playing out to

604
00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:13,279
Speaker 1: its logical conclusion where everything gets privatized was the realization

605
00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:19,040
Speaker 1: when people unlike Jefferson, who never saw the west, actually

606
00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:23,320
Speaker 1: were there and began looking at the landscape west of

607
00:44:23,320 --> 00:44:27,080
Speaker 1: the hundredth meridian, which was so completely different from the

608
00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:32,799
Speaker 1: landscapes east of that line, is that this may not

609
00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:36,080
Speaker 1: be a smart thing to do. It may not be

610
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:39,640
Speaker 1: a good idea to put somebody on a homestead, for example,

611
00:44:39,880 --> 00:44:44,400
Speaker 1: out in the sagebrush deserts of what becomes Nevada. And

612
00:44:44,520 --> 00:44:48,200
Speaker 1: what really sort of sparked the whole idea was the

613
00:44:48,239 --> 00:44:53,360
Speaker 1: insight of people like George Perkins Marsh who had traveled

614
00:44:53,400 --> 00:44:58,400
Speaker 1: the world and realized in most of the world, because

615
00:44:58,560 --> 00:45:05,040
Speaker 1: rivers are so important, especially in arid countries, their origins

616
00:45:05,120 --> 00:45:08,279
Speaker 1: in mountains have to be protected. You have to make

617
00:45:08,320 --> 00:45:13,160
Speaker 1: sure that mountains don't end up overgrazesed, overlogged, torn up,

618
00:45:13,200 --> 00:45:17,960
Speaker 1: because that makes it impossible really to regulate the water

619
00:45:18,200 --> 00:45:22,319
Speaker 1: that can function to provide for towns and cities in

620
00:45:22,360 --> 00:45:25,399
Speaker 1: the valleys below them. So it was George Perkins Marsh

621
00:45:25,480 --> 00:45:27,560
Speaker 1: with his I mean, it's a monumental book that all

622
00:45:27,600 --> 00:45:29,840
Speaker 1: Americans I don't know about. It's called Man in Nature,

623
00:45:30,120 --> 00:45:33,239
Speaker 1: published in eighteen sixty four during the Civil War. It's

624
00:45:33,239 --> 00:45:35,880
Speaker 1: the first book that really engages with the kind of

625
00:45:35,920 --> 00:45:39,080
Speaker 1: topics that one would think of as being the history

626
00:45:39,120 --> 00:45:43,600
Speaker 1: of people and the environment and One of the arguments

627
00:45:43,600 --> 00:45:46,200
Speaker 1: that he makes in that book is that while America

628
00:45:46,360 --> 00:45:50,400
Speaker 1: still has the opportunity, and we still do, because settlement

629
00:45:50,480 --> 00:45:53,719
Speaker 1: is just now proceeding to the Rockies, the Cascades, the

630
00:45:53,760 --> 00:45:57,400
Speaker 1: Sierra Nevadas, we should stop and think about whether or

631
00:45:57,440 --> 00:45:59,480
Speaker 1: not we want to privatize that part of the world.

632
00:46:00,040 --> 00:46:03,440
Speaker 1: Should probably try to hold on to it as in

633
00:46:03,480 --> 00:46:08,239
Speaker 1: public ownership and manage it for water, because water is

634
00:46:08,280 --> 00:46:10,680
Speaker 1: so critical in the aired West, and that'll make it

635
00:46:10,719 --> 00:46:14,480
Speaker 1: possible to settle all these valley lands at lower elevation.

636
00:46:15,120 --> 00:46:18,840
Speaker 1: And of course, along with along with George Perkins Marsh,

637
00:46:18,840 --> 00:46:23,840
Speaker 1: there was John Wisley Powell, who was intimately becoming familiar

638
00:46:23,880 --> 00:46:27,799
Speaker 1: with the West, floating the Grand Canyon and taking students

639
00:46:27,880 --> 00:46:32,640
Speaker 1: all over the West, from Colorado to Montana and Idaho,

640
00:46:33,200 --> 00:46:36,640
Speaker 1: and who was putting together as the first director of

641
00:46:36,680 --> 00:46:40,680
Speaker 1: the United States Geological Survey, these kinds of plans where

642
00:46:41,040 --> 00:46:43,560
Speaker 1: here's how we ought to be settling an arid region.

643
00:46:43,600 --> 00:46:46,640
Speaker 1: The east is not aird, this country is arid, and

644
00:46:46,719 --> 00:46:48,319
Speaker 1: here's how we ought to do it. I mean one

645
00:46:48,320 --> 00:46:50,640
Speaker 1: of the things, of course that he comes up with,

646
00:46:50,719 --> 00:46:53,120
Speaker 1: which we didn't implement, but I mean a lot of

647
00:46:53,160 --> 00:46:56,920
Speaker 1: people have looked at those maps that Powell drew in

648
00:46:57,000 --> 00:47:00,239
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight and eighteen seventy nine for a kind

649
00:47:00,280 --> 00:47:06,600
Speaker 1: of a bioregional West where everything political is evaluated and

650
00:47:06,680 --> 00:47:10,600
Speaker 1: based on water. I mean, you have what he sort

651
00:47:10,640 --> 00:47:14,279
Speaker 1: of put together as little commonwealths on the Arkansas River,

652
00:47:14,400 --> 00:47:18,080
Speaker 1: on the Platte River, on the Missouri River. I mean

653
00:47:18,560 --> 00:47:22,399
Speaker 1: it was a remarkable kind of way to and what

654
00:47:22,440 --> 00:47:24,799
Speaker 1: you realized out of it is, well, this is a

655
00:47:24,880 --> 00:47:29,759
Speaker 1: brand new opportunity to do something completely different from what

656
00:47:29,880 --> 00:47:32,480
Speaker 1: has prevailed and the rest of the United States. And

657
00:47:32,520 --> 00:47:35,520
Speaker 1: so we ended up with, you know, with a more

658
00:47:35,719 --> 00:47:40,239
Speaker 1: George Perkins marsh kind of plan. But I think Powell's

659
00:47:40,840 --> 00:47:43,800
Speaker 1: input into it was really critical, and that of course,

660
00:47:43,920 --> 00:47:46,560
Speaker 1: as you said at the outset, this is all a

661
00:47:46,640 --> 00:47:49,600
Speaker 1: very different plan than what the founders had in mind,

662
00:47:49,600 --> 00:47:52,440
Speaker 1: where they thought that we were just going to privatize

663
00:47:53,040 --> 00:47:56,240
Speaker 1: all the pieces of land that we got from wars,

664
00:47:56,400 --> 00:48:00,960
Speaker 1: from annexation, from treaties with native people. We were just

665
00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:04,680
Speaker 1: going to privatize it all and turn it over to settlement. Instead,

666
00:48:04,680 --> 00:48:06,920
Speaker 1: we ended up with something very different. Yeah, and.

667
00:48:09,239 --> 00:48:11,480
Speaker 2: Use the word plan a couple times there, but I

668
00:48:11,520 --> 00:48:14,320
Speaker 2: think One of the more interesting aspects of this story

669
00:48:14,560 --> 00:48:21,160
Speaker 2: is how sort of piecemeal and fitfully developed our public

670
00:48:21,239 --> 00:48:26,120
Speaker 2: lands system is. You know, it's like you look at

671
00:48:26,160 --> 00:48:28,440
Speaker 2: it and aggregate and you're like, God, this is the

672
00:48:28,560 --> 00:48:32,160
Speaker 2: foresight to have all this together. But really, you know,

673
00:48:32,239 --> 00:48:36,560
Speaker 2: you're reading along and these people aren't thinking more than

674
00:48:37,320 --> 00:48:40,960
Speaker 2: five or ten years ahead of themselves in terms of institutionally,

675
00:48:41,000 --> 00:48:43,560
Speaker 2: how does this work and legally how does this work?

676
00:48:43,600 --> 00:48:46,359
Speaker 2: And so you know, I wonder if you could speak

677
00:48:46,400 --> 00:48:50,000
Speaker 2: to that, Like the Park Service isn't established till nineteen sixteen,

678
00:48:50,040 --> 00:48:54,279
Speaker 2: but obviously Yellowstone goes, yeah, predates that by you know,

679
00:48:54,360 --> 00:48:55,520
Speaker 2: forty five years or so.

680
00:48:55,640 --> 00:48:56,440
Speaker 3: Forty years or so.

681
00:48:57,400 --> 00:48:59,799
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean that's so. One of the things you

682
00:48:59,800 --> 00:49:02,399
Speaker 1: have to recognize about the public lands is that they

683
00:49:02,440 --> 00:49:05,160
Speaker 1: constitute a lot of different kinds of parcels. I mean,

684
00:49:05,160 --> 00:49:08,440
Speaker 1: we've been talking about in the George Perkins Marsh Angle

685
00:49:08,960 --> 00:49:12,080
Speaker 1: is what becomes the National Forest, which are in the

686
00:49:12,200 --> 00:49:15,920
Speaker 1: mountains of the West and are designed to protect stream

687
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:19,160
Speaker 1: flow and water. In the beginning, and as you mentioned,

688
00:49:19,200 --> 00:49:21,960
Speaker 1: it's a piecemeal way of doing it. We start with

689
00:49:22,120 --> 00:49:27,759
Speaker 1: thirteen million acres in about a dozen forest reserves, as

690
00:49:27,800 --> 00:49:33,120
Speaker 1: their first call under the Benjamin Harrison administration, and then

691
00:49:33,640 --> 00:49:36,800
Speaker 1: we run the number up to about thirty four million

692
00:49:36,920 --> 00:49:39,840
Speaker 1: before the turn of the century. And then Teddy Roosevelt

693
00:49:39,840 --> 00:49:43,760
Speaker 1: comes in, of course, and he just dramatically expands that system.

694
00:49:44,080 --> 00:49:47,359
Speaker 1: But that's just one version, and that becomes kind of,

695
00:49:47,880 --> 00:49:52,040
Speaker 1: in a way, the poster public lands, because the national

696
00:49:52,080 --> 00:49:56,440
Speaker 1: forests are managed for multiple uses. As Gifford Pinchot, that

697
00:49:56,560 --> 00:49:59,600
Speaker 1: forester comes in and develops the idea of multiple use,

698
00:49:59,640 --> 00:50:02,640
Speaker 1: we're going to used the national forests for We're going

699
00:50:02,719 --> 00:50:04,759
Speaker 1: to log some and we're going to use We're going

700
00:50:04,800 --> 00:50:07,920
Speaker 1: to have regulated grazing, and we're going to have a

701
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:11,600
Speaker 1: variety of different uses. Of course, wildlife, habitat and recreation

702
00:50:12,160 --> 00:50:16,160
Speaker 1: become the ones that are really important for the modern West.

703
00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:20,719
Speaker 1: But that's just one form of public lands. Because you

704
00:50:20,800 --> 00:50:24,480
Speaker 1: have the national parks, which had existed before, we end

705
00:50:24,560 --> 00:50:29,640
Speaker 1: up with a National Park Act and a National Park system.

706
00:50:30,360 --> 00:50:34,120
Speaker 1: You have in nineteen oh six, the Antiquities Act produces

707
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:38,800
Speaker 1: what's called the opportunity for the President by presidential edict

708
00:50:38,960 --> 00:50:44,680
Speaker 1: to create national monuments, and the National Monument system, which

709
00:50:44,719 --> 00:50:47,960
Speaker 1: is managed by the Park Service, ultimately is going to

710
00:50:47,960 --> 00:50:52,040
Speaker 1: be another one of these dramatic pieces of public lands

711
00:50:52,080 --> 00:50:55,440
Speaker 1: in the West out of the dust Bowl from the

712
00:50:55,520 --> 00:50:58,480
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, when a lot of the homesteads end up

713
00:50:58,520 --> 00:51:02,880
Speaker 1: being bought back from homesteaders as failures by the federal government,

714
00:51:03,200 --> 00:51:05,040
Speaker 1: you get a kind of public lands out on the

715
00:51:05,040 --> 00:51:08,279
Speaker 1: plains called the National Grasslands. And then, of course when

716
00:51:08,320 --> 00:51:10,919
Speaker 1: you get to the nineteen thirties, and we've determined after

717
00:51:10,960 --> 00:51:14,040
Speaker 1: the dust bowl has hit that it's really a kind

718
00:51:14,080 --> 00:51:17,000
Speaker 1: of a crime and a tragedy to allow people to

719
00:51:17,040 --> 00:51:20,040
Speaker 1: continue to try to settle some of these really arid

720
00:51:20,120 --> 00:51:23,920
Speaker 1: planes and desert regions of the West. During the Franklin

721
00:51:23,960 --> 00:51:28,200
Speaker 1: Roosevelt administration, we end home setting there's still two hundred

722
00:51:28,239 --> 00:51:32,839
Speaker 1: and forty five million acres of public domain left, and

723
00:51:32,960 --> 00:51:37,720
Speaker 1: that land ultimately ends up as Bureau of Land Management tracks.

724
00:51:38,400 --> 00:51:41,520
Speaker 1: So it's a bunch of obviously there are a bunch

725
00:51:41,600 --> 00:51:46,360
Speaker 1: of different kinds of public lands in that mix, but

726
00:51:46,560 --> 00:51:51,440
Speaker 1: the whole of it ends up. As I was writing

727
00:51:51,520 --> 00:51:54,200
Speaker 1: this particular script, and I don't think this had ever

728
00:51:54,239 --> 00:51:56,800
Speaker 1: occurred to me before, but it did when I was

729
00:51:56,840 --> 00:51:58,440
Speaker 1: writing this script, and I think it's one of the

730
00:51:58,520 --> 00:52:02,840
Speaker 1: last lines I use in the script itself. It seems

731
00:52:02,880 --> 00:52:07,239
Speaker 1: to me that the existence of the public lands in

732
00:52:07,280 --> 00:52:11,960
Speaker 1: the West is as important, maybe more important, than the

733
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:16,640
Speaker 1: existence of a frontier history that sort of defines what

734
00:52:16,760 --> 00:52:21,880
Speaker 1: the West is. One is obviously more nineteenth century phenomenon,

735
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:25,680
Speaker 1: the other twenty first and more modernist kind of phenomenon.

736
00:52:25,719 --> 00:52:28,320
Speaker 1: But I think the public lands may be more important

737
00:52:28,560 --> 00:52:30,400
Speaker 1: for the West than even the frontier.

738
00:52:30,840 --> 00:52:35,799
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's also, as you mentioned earlier, there's the

739
00:52:35,840 --> 00:52:39,200
Speaker 2: Texas story where it has a very different history, and

740
00:52:39,239 --> 00:52:42,360
Speaker 2: then if we look east across the Mississippi, there's a

741
00:52:42,480 --> 00:52:46,759
Speaker 2: very different story there. But in the West we think

742
00:52:46,800 --> 00:52:50,480
Speaker 2: of public lands as these places that were left behind,

743
00:52:50,560 --> 00:52:53,520
Speaker 2: whereas in the East they had to sort of, after

744
00:52:53,560 --> 00:52:56,920
Speaker 2: the fact assemble national forests. Yes, and you have the

745
00:52:57,000 --> 00:53:02,120
Speaker 2: Weeks Act, and it's a very deliberate the model of

746
00:53:02,160 --> 00:53:07,640
Speaker 2: construction that had to be sort of invented to reconstitute

747
00:53:07,640 --> 00:53:10,239
Speaker 2: what once was. Yeah, that's exactly right.

748
00:53:10,239 --> 00:53:12,800
Speaker 1: I mean, the Weeks Act of nineteen ten basically takes

749
00:53:12,840 --> 00:53:15,920
Speaker 1: the idea of the public lands in the West and

750
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:19,840
Speaker 1: applies them when possible to the east, particularly the mountains

751
00:53:19,840 --> 00:53:24,279
Speaker 1: of the East. In this case, it's the kind of

752
00:53:24,320 --> 00:53:27,920
Speaker 1: phenomenon where you're taking lands that had usually been ruined

753
00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:31,520
Speaker 1: by timber companies and had been cut over, and the

754
00:53:31,560 --> 00:53:36,240
Speaker 1: government will then acquire those lands and create national forests

755
00:53:36,239 --> 00:53:38,680
Speaker 1: around them. So that's how we get the national forests,

756
00:53:38,680 --> 00:53:44,200
Speaker 1: for example, up and down the Appalachian Crest, the Shenandoah

757
00:53:44,760 --> 00:53:49,440
Speaker 1: into upstate New York, obviously in the Adirondacks, along with

758
00:53:49,480 --> 00:53:51,880
Speaker 1: the State Park and the Aarandacks. And then there of

759
00:53:51,960 --> 00:53:57,399
Speaker 1: course are some parks that because the Park Service did

760
00:53:57,440 --> 00:54:01,960
Speaker 1: not have an acquisition budget creating these national parks and

761
00:54:02,040 --> 00:54:06,240
Speaker 1: national monuments out of free public domain land. Park Service

762
00:54:06,280 --> 00:54:09,680
Speaker 1: didn't have a budget to acquire lands that had already

763
00:54:09,680 --> 00:54:13,880
Speaker 1: been sold to somebody. What you got in parts of

764
00:54:13,920 --> 00:54:17,520
Speaker 1: the East, and this is what I told the story

765
00:54:17,560 --> 00:54:22,440
Speaker 1: of in Texas, in West Texas that was a failure

766
00:54:22,719 --> 00:54:27,480
Speaker 1: to do is the public got behind the idea of

767
00:54:28,239 --> 00:54:32,440
Speaker 1: producing the money to buy up lands to create Akkadian

768
00:54:32,520 --> 00:54:38,359
Speaker 1: National Park in Maine, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah

769
00:54:38,880 --> 00:54:43,600
Speaker 1: in West Texas, though we had this wonderful opportunity to

770
00:54:43,760 --> 00:54:49,200
Speaker 1: take a landscape that was western in its psychology, frontier

771
00:54:49,480 --> 00:54:53,040
Speaker 1: in its history. I mean to be sure, in Texas.

772
00:54:53,400 --> 00:54:55,439
Speaker 1: All the Indians had been driven out, so you didn't

773
00:54:55,480 --> 00:54:59,239
Speaker 1: have that opportunity for a modern West. But there was

774
00:54:59,320 --> 00:55:02,840
Speaker 1: the opportunity for creating a big public lands on the

775
00:55:02,880 --> 00:55:07,840
Speaker 1: high plains of West Texas, but it didn't happen. And

776
00:55:07,880 --> 00:55:12,400
Speaker 1: it's an interesting kind of miss to me in American history.

777
00:55:13,480 --> 00:55:15,640
Speaker 1: You know, I don't I can't speak to how the

778
00:55:15,719 --> 00:55:19,480
Speaker 1: people of the southern high Plains feel about that miss,

779
00:55:19,560 --> 00:55:22,279
Speaker 1: if they even know about it or remember it. And

780
00:55:22,320 --> 00:55:24,560
Speaker 1: I suspect a lot of people don't even know about it.

781
00:55:25,520 --> 00:55:29,000
Speaker 1: But when I was living there, I mean, I thought

782
00:55:29,000 --> 00:55:31,719
Speaker 1: it was one of the great historical misses that had

783
00:55:31,760 --> 00:55:36,520
Speaker 1: ever taken place in that particular world. Yeah.

784
00:55:36,280 --> 00:55:39,400
Speaker 3: And I think.

785
00:55:41,239 --> 00:55:43,160
Speaker 2: We've talked about how if you look at the public

786
00:55:43,239 --> 00:55:47,400
Speaker 2: lands as they exist now, it's almost like this perfect system.

787
00:55:48,600 --> 00:55:52,720
Speaker 2: It's hard not to celebrate it. But it is controversial,

788
00:55:53,400 --> 00:55:57,480
Speaker 2: and it has always been controversial. Yeah, And it's a

789
00:55:57,560 --> 00:56:02,920
Speaker 2: product of power struggle between competing interests, and so I think,

790
00:56:03,880 --> 00:56:06,600
Speaker 2: you know, that's another aspect of the story that you

791
00:56:06,760 --> 00:56:09,319
Speaker 2: touch on at points, and I think the Texas case

792
00:56:09,400 --> 00:56:13,440
Speaker 2: brings it up again. It's like Roosevelt had his critics,

793
00:56:14,280 --> 00:56:17,160
Speaker 2: just as today we have the Mike Leaves of the

794
00:56:17,200 --> 00:56:20,040
Speaker 2: world and those who don't see value in the public lands.

795
00:56:20,040 --> 00:56:21,040
Speaker 1: So yeah, I.

796
00:56:20,920 --> 00:56:23,560
Speaker 3: Wonder if you can speak to how conflict has shaped

797
00:56:23,600 --> 00:56:24,200
Speaker 3: this story.

798
00:56:24,520 --> 00:56:30,480
Speaker 1: Well, from the very beginning, as you mentioned Randal, public

799
00:56:30,600 --> 00:56:37,319
Speaker 1: lands were controversial. I mean, conservatives in the time of

800
00:56:37,440 --> 00:56:44,240
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt called the creation of new national forests pink

801
00:56:44,280 --> 00:56:48,960
Speaker 1: tea socialism, and their idea was you had and I

802
00:56:49,000 --> 00:56:52,120
Speaker 1: think Texas actually when George Bush was President of the

803
00:56:52,200 --> 00:56:55,680
Speaker 1: United States, Texas and George Bush used this term, we

804
00:56:55,760 --> 00:57:00,080
Speaker 1: believe in an ownership society, and that, of course, this

805
00:57:00,239 --> 00:57:04,160
Speaker 1: kind of the ultimate capitalist's idea is everything is owned

806
00:57:04,800 --> 00:57:07,960
Speaker 1: by individuals, and the idea of a kind of a

807
00:57:08,080 --> 00:57:12,839
Speaker 1: communal shared resource is foreign to that particular ideology. So

808
00:57:13,200 --> 00:57:16,160
Speaker 1: from the very beginning, there was a constituency of people

809
00:57:16,160 --> 00:57:19,920
Speaker 1: who thought creating public lands for the public to have

810
00:57:20,000 --> 00:57:24,160
Speaker 1: access to this is just not right. So there's been

811
00:57:24,200 --> 00:57:26,320
Speaker 1: a battle over that for a very long time. I

812
00:57:26,400 --> 00:57:29,320
Speaker 1: mean this so called sage brush rebellions. I didn't talk

813
00:57:29,400 --> 00:57:33,320
Speaker 1: about that in this particular episode, but from the nineteen

814
00:57:33,440 --> 00:57:36,440
Speaker 1: twenties through the nineteen fifties, and in fact even as

815
00:57:36,520 --> 00:57:39,160
Speaker 1: late as the nineteen eighties, we have had these kind

816
00:57:39,160 --> 00:57:44,200
Speaker 1: of many revolts on the part of some people in

817
00:57:44,240 --> 00:57:48,280
Speaker 1: the West who want the public lands, as they often say,

818
00:57:48,680 --> 00:57:51,920
Speaker 1: returned to the states. And of course, the problem with that,

819
00:57:52,080 --> 00:57:54,680
Speaker 1: for one thing, is in the language, the public lands

820
00:57:54,720 --> 00:57:57,360
Speaker 1: never belonged to the states to start with. The states

821
00:57:57,400 --> 00:58:01,800
Speaker 1: were created out of those lands. But so those lands

822
00:58:01,840 --> 00:58:05,280
Speaker 1: had always been federal from the beginning. But there's always

823
00:58:05,280 --> 00:58:08,040
Speaker 1: been controversy around it. And of course, in the instance

824
00:58:08,080 --> 00:58:11,160
Speaker 1: here in the last six or eight months, as I

825
00:58:11,240 --> 00:58:14,720
Speaker 1: describe at the end of this episode, and in the

826
00:58:14,840 --> 00:58:18,560
Speaker 1: Big Beautiful Bill of last spring, Mike Lee of Utah

827
00:58:19,120 --> 00:58:25,440
Speaker 1: wanted to start disassembling the public lands in states like Utah.

828
00:58:25,600 --> 00:58:27,920
Speaker 1: And I mean I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

829
00:58:28,080 --> 00:58:32,000
Speaker 1: Now we have something like thirty three million acres of

830
00:58:32,040 --> 00:58:36,120
Speaker 1: public lands in New Mexico. Mike Lee's plan wanted to

831
00:58:36,160 --> 00:58:40,880
Speaker 1: privatize fourteen million acres of that like forty percent of

832
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:43,720
Speaker 1: the public lands in New Mexico. And so one of

833
00:58:43,800 --> 00:58:46,160
Speaker 1: the things that I mentioned at the end of this

834
00:58:46,200 --> 00:58:50,919
Speaker 1: particular script and certainly provided some images of as well

835
00:58:50,960 --> 00:58:55,440
Speaker 1: as when the Western governors met in Santa Fe in June,

836
00:58:56,160 --> 00:59:01,400
Speaker 1: I mean, there was a gigantic street protest on behalf

837
00:59:01,440 --> 00:59:05,400
Speaker 1: of saving the public lands and retaining them, of which

838
00:59:06,160 --> 00:59:08,400
Speaker 1: my wife Sarah and I were certainly in the midst

839
00:59:08,440 --> 00:59:12,360
Speaker 1: of which lasted literally all day long and drowned out

840
00:59:12,440 --> 00:59:15,120
Speaker 1: the governor's conference. In fact, they had to call off

841
00:59:15,520 --> 00:59:18,120
Speaker 1: most of the afternoon because they couldn't hear inside the

842
00:59:18,120 --> 00:59:22,600
Speaker 1: hotel where they were. But that particular protest, and it's

843
00:59:22,640 --> 00:59:24,840
Speaker 1: one of the things that struck me about it looking

844
00:59:24,920 --> 00:59:27,680
Speaker 1: at the signs, looking at the people, it had no

845
00:59:28,040 --> 00:59:31,880
Speaker 1: political kind of definition. There were people from the left,

846
00:59:31,920 --> 00:59:34,840
Speaker 1: there were people from the right. There were signs that

847
00:59:35,000 --> 00:59:40,720
Speaker 1: said tree huggers and rednecks. Unite everybody from every side

848
00:59:41,440 --> 00:59:44,040
Speaker 1: because we have grown up with the public lands and

849
00:59:44,080 --> 00:59:48,240
Speaker 1: we know what it's like to have this wonderful access

850
00:59:48,240 --> 00:59:50,840
Speaker 1: to the world. Everybody from every side who lives in

851
00:59:50,880 --> 00:59:53,880
Speaker 1: the West did not want the public lands dissolved.

852
00:59:54,120 --> 00:59:57,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's I mean, I think that gets to

853
00:59:57,320 --> 00:59:59,960
Speaker 2: another point you made. It's that they're not some abs

854
01:00:00,120 --> 01:00:02,520
Speaker 2: tracked thing. It's part of daily life.

855
01:00:02,680 --> 01:00:03,280
Speaker 1: Absolutely.

856
01:00:03,280 --> 01:00:07,320
Speaker 2: It's like everybody wants, you know, cheaper food, and everybody

857
01:00:07,400 --> 01:00:08,520
Speaker 2: wants bamba clans.

858
01:00:08,920 --> 01:00:09,680
Speaker 3: You don't they're not.

859
01:00:09,880 --> 01:00:12,160
Speaker 2: You might disagree on how to get there, or how

860
01:00:12,160 --> 01:00:14,760
Speaker 2: they should be managed or what what, you know, whatever

861
01:00:14,800 --> 01:00:15,760
Speaker 2: the disagreement might be.

862
01:00:15,880 --> 01:00:19,160
Speaker 3: But in the West, it's just it's part of life.

863
01:00:19,560 --> 01:00:22,160
Speaker 1: It's part of life and uh and we love it

864
01:00:22,440 --> 01:00:25,200
Speaker 1: and uh, as I said, if you grow up somewhere

865
01:00:25,280 --> 01:00:27,800
Speaker 1: else and you come to the West and realize what

866
01:00:27,920 --> 01:00:29,760
Speaker 1: kind of access you have to the world, it's like

867
01:00:29,800 --> 01:00:30,880
Speaker 1: you've died and gone to heaven.

868
01:00:31,600 --> 01:00:33,640
Speaker 3: Well, couldn't end it at a better spot than that.