00:00:01 Speaker 1: While it's historical story is what creates the West and the eyes of the world, for residents and most visitors today, it's the public lands that now define Western life. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsible New West's Modern West public Lands West. For eighteen years of my life, I live full time in the state of Texas. I'm not a Texan by birth, but rather from old Louisiana families, and living in Texas made me understand that you very likely do need to be born and raised in that state to fully embrace lone Star life. Native born Texans accept at face value things about their history and modern existence there that don't necessarily resonate if you're from somewhere else. I spent the majority of my Texas years in West Texas, but not the Big Bend Country or the trans Pacos as it's known. I lived in the southern high Plains, most of those years in a canyon insized into the state Plain or Yano West Taccado, a giant plateau spreading from the Texas Panhandle across into eastern New Mexico. Was I living in the West in those years? Is Texas part of the West? Is West Texas part of the West. Historically Texas is as much deep South as West. It was Southerners who largely settled it, even West Texas, bringing their culture, religions, and a drawl geographically and ecologically. The High Plains certainly appear as Western, though, as the celebrated writer Joseph wood Krooch put it in his book The Desert Year, as he described driving the Texas Panhandle, the red eroded sandstone and the cactus declare that this is New Mexico, a good many miles before the map makers have recognized the fact. So in High Plains Texas there are canyons and cactus ranches and rodeos and index finger waves on the highway. But as this region the full on modern American West, it never seems so to me. And I'll tell you why. We all should admit that the West's modern story is as impart as it's passed. In terms of what it's like to visit are to live in such a celebrated region. But it's the West, merely a place with a frontier history and the enduring symbols of it. If the presence of cowboy hats and pickup trucks as a replacement for horses is enough to muster the West, then Texas is in, but so is Tennessee. If that's all you need, then Austin and Nashville are both Western cities. On the other hand, when today's historians identify what makes the West as a region different from the rest of America, they put up a ven diagram that includes a list like this number one with a few exceptions, Like the Pacific Coast. The West is defined by aridity, a dryness that exposes geology and opens up views to far distances, which it means that compared to the rest of America, the West is ecologically different or unique. Beyond the ninety eighth meridian of longitude, America is forested only on its high mountain ranges or in deep canyons. Otherwise, sparse moisture produces grassy prairies and plains, cactus, creosote and sagebrush deserts, scattered and dwarfed tree cover of pinion and limber pines and junipers. Aridity also produces dry, clear air, sparkling nights of polysh stars, and oceans of sunshine. Despite the cowboy hats, Nashville fades out rapidly as this kind of Western place. Number two. The West is often thought of as wide open spaces, but it has featured cities like the Great Rock buildings of the Chaco and civilization as far back as a thousand years ago. Unlike much of the rest of the country, the West cities tend to be widely scattered in what geographers call an oasis settlement pattern, with vast open lands between. That's still true along both sides of the Rockies and even along the densely populated Pacific Coast today. Number three. The most western of American places tend to be those that still retain the continent's original diagnostic wild animals and the ecologies they've long shaped with wolf and grizzly bear recovery. In particular, the West is the part of the country that retains more of its wild keynote species than the rest of the country. Number four. The West is still the home of most of America's Native people, whose presence is a notable feature of the region's cultural imprint and human diversity Number five and five. The West is the primary region of America's public lands. Whether there are national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, national forests, or national grasslands are Bureau of Land Management holdings, The vast majority of the country's public lands, wilderness areas, and wild and scenic rivers are in the West. Most importantly of all, the presence of the West's public lands provides residents and visitors and ability to access the natural world to an extent that's rarely a feature of modern life in other American regions. So as for the high plains of West Texas, it is arid, and in the places where its nature is still intact, it is ecologically Western. It has cowboys and pickups and a frontier history, but it lacks the other three characteristics that make up today's American West. The wild bison and wolves and wild horses that made up its keystone animals are almost completely gone, as are its native peoples entirely long since banished to Oklahoma, and the vast percentage of its landscape is not publicly accessible but privately owned and often jealously decorated with those symbols of the not quite West, angry and belligerent no trespassing signs. Next door to Texas, However, in New Mexico, twenty one Native tribes live in the state. Mexican wolf numbers are at nearly three hundred animals and increasing yearly, and compared to Texas is one percent. In New Mexico, forty two percent of the state is federally managed. The vast bulk of that all but Indian reservations and military installations in public and accessible form manage lands in nearby Colorado make up thirty seven percent of that state, and Wyoming the figure is fifty two percent, and in Montana thirty three percent. Arizona's figure is seventy two percent, Utah's sixty four percent, and Nevada's eighty percent. Idaho's is at sixty two percent, California's forty five percent, Oregon's fifty four percent, Washington State's thirty five percent, and Alaska's public lands are at eighty nine percent. Texas's federal lands public are not, as a reminder, make up one percent of that state. The East and the Midwest, they're the percentage of accessible nature ranges from one percent to nine percent. The larger figure a result of later transplanting of the public lands idea from the West to destroyed cutover forest lands in the east. Texas has about as much publicly accessible landscape as Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, all at one percent or less. Recently, an editor of Outside magazine, long based in Santa Fe, left the magazine and moved to Austin, thinking he was going to a progressive urban part of the West in a state with almost no way to access the natural world. He didn't last six months before moving back to New Mexico. Even among the Great Plain states, which like West Texas, have Western aridity and frontier history going for them and often do retain native populations, only South Dakota, with eighteen percent of its lands federally managed, can claim to be fully a part of the modern American West. How did this happen with respect to the public lands, whose presence or absence plays such a role in how one gets to live in the world. It's time for me to tell you their creation story, from the time of the very first homestead acts designed by Thomas Jefferson in the seventeen eighties. The former Indian lands that made up the public domain the US was adding to the country in the nineteenth century all went into the coffers of the General Land Office or GOLO. The GOLO offered land for sale or later in history as free homesteads or grants to citizens non citizens, and to infrastructure building entities like railroads or canal builders. In the tradition of the Western European countries, General Land Office holding's intended destiny was to become private property through purchases Louisiana, Alaska, the Gadsden purchase, diplomatic agreements with Britain for the Northwest, for example, treaties for Indian lands, or for ending the Mexican War and incorporating the Southwest, and finally annexations like Texas and Hawaii. The US acquired an enormous amount of real estate between eighteen o three and eighteen ninety eight. As various federal expeditions explored those lands and reported on them, a prescient handful of Americans began to wonder about privatization as a blanket policy aimed so bluntly at such an ecologically diverse range of landscapes, even As they did so, evolving homestead laws continued to survey, partition and sell our grant lands to advancing settlement. Very frequently that settlement took place on lands the Indians, who had long owned the ground had barely left. During and after the Civil War, two influential Americans in particular worried about this privatezation tradition in widely read influential volumes. One of those volumes became a best seller, the other one a widely discussed congressional report. The author of the best seller was an American diplomat named George Perkins Marsh, a polymath New Englander who read twenty languages and as a result, received diplomatic appointments all over the globe. Marsh wrote a book in eighteen sixty four he called Man and Nature. In effect, this was the first modern history of the environment any writer had ever attempted. Although Marsh took on a huge range of topics relating to humanity's relationship with the natural world, Man in Nature became most famous for its description of a pattern the author had observed in places as disparate as France, Turkey, and China. Rivers had always been crucial to human civilization, he wrote, and almost everywhere their origins were in mountains. But privatizing mountains the well springs of water that were so critical to human development had been a disaster almost everywhere. Countries that let it happen. Private interest that logged and grazed mountains had destroyed their watersheds and created landscapes that, Marsh stead looked like the surface of the moon, ruining the possibilities to settle inhabitable valleys below. As a brand new country, the US still had time to avoid such a mistake. Marsh believed the solution was to remove its mountain landscapes from private settlement that would invite overlogging and overgrazing, to retain them instead as public preserves to protect the West Snow Fountain watersheds, critical for providing water to the surrounding arid country. Marsh's book went through eight printings and appeared in a new edition in eighteen seventy one, and its success brought his argument to the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, which in eighteen seventy three endorsed Marsh's new policy recommendation. The other author was a one armed Civil War veteran who became the most famous American explorer of the post war era and eventually the most powerful bureaucrat in government in the late century. John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, but that couldn't prevent him from leading the first party to take on the dangerous and unknown descent of the Grand Canyon, which he did not once but twice, even serializing the account of his adventures in the most popular magazines of the day. Then, in eighteen seventy eight, the year before he became the director of the new US Geological Survey, Powell laid before Congress his masterpiece for rethinking public domain policies in America. The lands of the arid region of the United States. Didn't exactly endorse Marsh's plan, Powell focused more on the diversity of public domain landscapes and why Congress should tailor different settlement plans for valleys, foothills, and mountains. He even offered up a map of the West, projecting a bile regional future for it, with settlement and governments organized around rivers and watersheds. Yet, by emphasizing the special difficulty settlers were facing in a West that was far more desert like than any place Americans had ever tried. The homestead. Powell added yet another layer of reasoning why protecting the mountain sources of western water was so crucial. Powell did point out that press ccidents were already in place for public lands in the West from its beginnings in the early sixteen hundreds, Spanish colonization in New Mexico had made land grants in the high elevation mountains to communities settling the valleys below them. These land grants, known as aheitos, were used in common for firewood stock grazing, hunting, and irrigation of mountain rains and snowpacks by all of the residents of the valley towns. Powell also admired a different pattern of public lands Mormon settlers in Utah were trying. The Mormon approach involved communal sharing of high mountain resources carried out through church sanctioned monopolies like the one granted to Parley Pratt in the Salt Lake Highlands that still today is known as Parley's Canyon. Those managers then made the public use of grass, timber, and water available in the upland when the interior Department proclaimed US Forest reserves in the New Mexico and Utah Mountain Ranges. Both those precedents ended up abandoned, although not without a fight. In New Mexico, Spanish land grants had passed intact to the Republic of Mexico during the twenty seven years that Mexico controlled the Southwest. An Article eight of the treaty that ended the Mexican War with the US promised full protection for those land grants, which by eighteen forty eight blanketed almost eighty percent of New Mexico. But American law, with its elaborate protections for individual property rights, had little experience with the property rights of communities. In the eighteen ninety seven Sandivil Decision, the US Supreme Court decided that land grants to communities implied such public use that the lands granted had actually remained in legal possession of the Spanish and Mexican governments, thus were now part of the public domain of the United States. The twelve million acres of land grants the US did approve in New Mexico were those that had gone exclusively to individual grantees. Hence the Southern Rockies was cleared for the designation of the Pacos and Santa Fe Forest Reserves as part of America's public lands. Pacos Forest Reserve, in fact, was already designated before the Sandevil case even went before the court. Here's how all this public lands happened. In eighteen ninety one, Republican President Benjamin Harrison's administration passed an Appropriation's Bill for the General Land Office that included a writer that by eighteen ninety three would place thirteen million acres of the West Mountains off limits to homes and privatization. As has been the case for a great many conservation and environmental policies, the idea was embraced by both political parties. Before he left office. In eighteen ninety seven, Democrat Grover Cleveland added another twenty one million acres to the West Forest Reserves. By this point, twenty forest reserves lay across the forested mountains of every Western state except Nevada, and stretched from the Rockies to the Pacific coasts. While private home setting continued on the Great Plains and in the Western Valleys. These new high elevation public lands, designed originally to protect the West Snow Fountain sources of water, now included a total of thirty four million acres. This was the beginning in the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, the Rockies, and numerous detached island mountains in the desert west of what evad into America's National Forest system. There were still steps remaining in establishing the full foundation. Appointed Chief Forester of the Reserves in eighteen ninety eight, Yale Gifford Pinchot began work on what became the multiple use principle. These lands of many uses, as Pinchot told audiences all over the West, wouldn't simply be locked away. Planning both for the future and for democratic use. Pinchot underlined that the Forest Service would regulate the reserves, but they would not be closed off. Instead, they would be used for watershed protection, for grazing, for logging, for recreation, and since many of the West's remaining animals had fled to the mountains, for wildlife habitat, to emphasize that these lands now belonged to the American citizens, no matter where in the country they lived. In nineteen oh seven, Pinchot and President Roosevelt decided to rename them the National Forests. This conversion of so much of the American landscape from potential private entry to public ownership and federal management had already shocked conservatives, who began calling the new policy pink tea socialism. So maybe the new National Forests designation lubricated the hit somewhat when Roosevelt stunned conservatives by dramatically adding one hundred and twenty five million more acres to the system, bringing the totals by the time he left office to fifty one national forests covering a whopping one hundred fifty nine million acres, all of it in the West, and Roosevelt wasn't done. The public land system for the West and increasingly for small parts of the the rest of the country included a new designation made possible by the nineteen oh six Antiquities Act, to protect archaeological sites and those unusual geologic features like the Grand Canyon. Unlike the more complicated creation of national parks, this Act allowed the president to make designations out of the public domain, so Roosevelt himself proclaimed eighteen of these new national monuments, several of which, like the Grand Canyon, went on eventually to become national parks. While the United States had pioneered the idea and reality of the national park. We had never created a National Park Service. Whether the existing national parks were intended to last was called into question when, with Theodore Roosevelt's blessing, the hetch Hetchy Valley of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolomie River and Yosemite National Park became the destination of a dam and reservoir to provide water for San Francisco. That led to calls for the creation of a National Park Service to manage the parks, which Congress finally created in nineteen sixteen. By nineteen thirty two, the Park Service was administering twenty two National parks and thirty six National monuments focused on America's most monumental and most vertical scenery, the overwhelming number of the so called crown jewels parks like Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Sequoia, Rocky Mountain, Grand Canyon, Zion, Mount McKinley, or in the American West. The same was true of the monuments, the wildlife refuges, the national forests. This was the public land system that has made life in the modern West distinctive from life elsewhere in America. It was the system that provided the habit possible to retain most of the historic bestiary of the West's original animals, particularly as big predators, And it was the system that made access to the natural world a reality for Western citizens, and in the nineteen sixties would make setting aside vast wilderness areas and scenic wild rivers possible. There would be farms, ranches, and towns located around the borders of all these vast expanses of public forests and parks, but not within them, despite roads, trails, campgrounds tourists within them. Big nature prevailed. Instead of replicating the East with the public land settlement in the western third of the country, we had angled off on a new historical trajectory. Of course, into the nineteen thirties, homesteading and private entry continued in some places in the West. In fact, there were more Western home stays taken up after nineteen hundred than before that year. But with most of the West mountains and canyons now public lands, private lands were largely at low elevation, and a great many were out in the open plains country of states like Colorado and Montana. Many of the counties on the Great Plains reached their highest all time populations with homesteading in the nineteen twenties. But when agricultural prices dropped precipitously after the Great War, followed by wind and drought across country now plowed and stripped of its protecting grasslands, the policy of continuing to privatize the Western public domain began to seem like a bad bet and an open invitation for human disaster, as the dust Bowl rage from West Texas and Oklahoma all the way to eastern Montana and hundreds of thousands of people abandoned their homesteads and the words of the Woody Guthrie song of the time, so long It's been good to know you. In nineteen thirty three, the Franklin Roosevelt administration elected to call an end to homesteading. It was the end of a grand American tradition that was almost one hundred and fifty years old. Whatever further privatization of the Western public domain happened was now limited to irrigation developments around some of the new Western dams and reservoirs. In fact, the US went so far as to turn back the clock on a Western ownership society. The FED actually resettled thousands of people elsewhere and bought back homesteads and a few of the worst wind whip and eroded areas, then laboriously replanted them and incorporated them back into the public domain in the form of the National Grasslands. As for all the unsettled leftover low elevation country in the West, two hundred and forty five million acres of it, In fact, much of it was true desert that the Fed retained in ownership, to be administered by a new agency called the Grazing Service, which by mid century had become yet another of the West public land agencies, the Bureau of Land Management. Like many of us who grew up in other regions and when we got to live in the public lands West, decided we'd died in gone to Heaven. I've done my best to take advantage of my unprecedented access to the West natural world. I've done three week float trips down the Grand Canyon, week long backpacks through the Tuolomy Canyon in Yosemite, packed across Montana's Glacier Park from its western boundary to its eastern one, and traversed the wilderness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming in the opposite direction east to West. I've done a twelve day raft trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, canoe the wild and Scenic Missouri River, climbed Santa fe Baldi in the Southern Rockies and the National Forest there, and watched wolves and grizzlies in Yellowstone Parks Lamar Valley. Had history turned out differently, I guess I could have had experiences like that on the Texas High Plains too. The truth is I did do such things when I lived in Texas, but I had to trespass and outlaw hike to do them. Why that was the case requires a story, and I'll close here by telling it. The reasons that Texas High Plains fall short of being a part of the modern West have to do with things that happened in Texas long ago. Unlike much of America prior to US annexation in eighteen forty five, Texas existed as an independent country for nearly a decade. The eighteen thirties was the time when Indian removal from the South and East was US policy, and the Texas population was almost wholly from the Deep South. What followed is the kind of history that just doesn't remain in the past, the Republic of Texas committed itself to the entire removal of its native population. That's a step we'd call ethnic cleansing today. Doing so required considerable military effort, which cost money. Texas ended up borrowing from Britain and France. So Texas's annexation brought into the US a state that had largely banished its Indians, and owed so much money for doing so that the United States refused to take on the debt. The only solution to that was to permit to to retain title to its lands and privatize virtually every acre to raise revenue. This history is why of the Texas High Plains has no comanches, caiawas Cheyennes or apaches all long ago removed to Oklahoma. It's why ranches and farms protected by no trespassing signs occupy almost every parcel of ground. Why there was little or no habitat for buffalo and none at all for wolves. And it's a powerful reason why the Texas High Plains missed out on its one grand chance to join the public Lands West. And it did have a chance. In the nineteen thirties, National park personnel looking for new parks began to pay attention to ecologist interest in the overlooked Great Plains. No landscapes on the Great Plains measured up to the monumental scenery of a Yosemite or Grand Canyon, and most of the plains was now in private hands. But the Park Service hoped to overcome those obstacles, and Palo Duro Canyon, a sixty mile long, thousand foot deep roar of color where the Red River carved through the high plains. Plateau, was historically a famous Western landscape, a Comanche hideaway, and home to legendary Texas ranger Charles Goodnight's Ranch. Tommy Lee Jones's Captain Call in Lonesome Dove is a portrayal of good Night. By the way, Palo Duro seemed a perfect locale for a large Great Plains park. The emerging artist Georgia O'Keeffe exhibited paintings of it in New York in nineteen seventeen, and when one of its ranches opened its gates to the public, fourteen thousand people showed up to see the canyon. Texas was planning a small state park there, and Palo Duro as a national park, had champions in Texas and beyond, one of which was Enos Mills, the so called John Muir of the Rockies. In the nineteen thirties, a man named Roger Toll was a kind of one man, naked or break it investigator for the National Park Service, and in nineteen thirty three and thirty four he was touring Texas to assess potential national parks. Now, the Park Service had no acquisition budget to acquire private lands to create parks. All the existing parks had been created from the public lands, but it hoped that, as had happened back east for Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah Parks, locals would raise the money to acquire the land. As told journey to Texas. In Washington, park personnel were assembling maps and materials for the creation of a million acre National Park of the plains around Palo Duro, a huge park half the size of Yellowstone. But after spending four days in the canyon, including visiting its most scenic and dramatic side gorge, the Tulee Narrows, Told decided that Palo Duro would rate below the present scenic national parks. He was also concerned about real essate values in Texas and whether Texans would come up with the money to acquire the canyon. The West Texas Canyon had now caught the eye of the National Park Service, though, and the new idea was for a national monument based on Palo Duro's geological uniqueness, a kind of first Chapter of Genesis national Monument for tourists heading west on the Mother Road Route sixty six. So in October of nineteen thirty eight and thirty nine, the Park Service initiated a second review of Palo Duro. This time, the idea was for a more modest Southern High Plains National mind of roughly one hundred and thirty five thousand acres. The final report included an estimate of the acquisition costs some two hundred ninety four thousand dollars, plus another two hundred and sixty four thousand to fold in the fifteen thousand acre state park. The monument boundaries excluded Touley Canyon and its spectacular gorge, but hopes for future expansion were already eyeing that section as The report that hoped to make the Texas High Plains part of the Public Lands West put it from the standpoint of geology and scenery. Palo Duro is well worthy of being made into a national monument. It's the most spectacular canyon carved by erosion anywhere on the Great Plains of North America. When word of the proposal got out, there was public support, all right, but it was mostly from Denver, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma City. Texans seemed oddly ambivalent. No wealthy oil visionary from the lone Star state stepped forward the way the Rockefellers were then doing in Jackson Hole to create Grand Tetai National Park. So ambivalents or apathy are more likely. Ideological opposition to public lands in a state unfamiliar with that idea killed this main chance. Texas's State Park Division has since double Pallo Duro State Park the thirty thousand acres, although without making the wilder parts of it accessible with trails and camps, and it's created a second sixteen thousand acre park, Caprock Canyon Lands, thirty five miles to the south. Caproc is beautiful and wild and has a free roaming bison herd. But these state parks just aren't extensive enough to make the Texas High Plains a public lands region. In our time, the passion for life in the modern public lands West is powerfully evident. When the Trump administration in twenty twenty five tried to insert a partial dissolution of the Western public lands as part of the so called Big Beautiful Bill, the outcry in the West was deafening. It came from both the left and the right, from hunters, environmentalists, ecologists, and day hikers. In Santa Fe, where the Western Governor's Conference was held in June twenty twenty five, a pro public lands protests of thousands filled the streets and drowned out the conference in this Western capital city for hours. The conclusion from events like this is inescapable. A century of Western lifestyles formed by and built around public lands has now entirely transformed this American region and made it distinctive in the United States and the world. It turns out the public lands have created the American West just as much as its frontier history ever did. 00:37:16 Speaker 2: I wanted to kick this off with a little personal anecdote. When I was in college and finishing up, I wanted to go bear hunting, and I looked online and I saw I could buy a bear tag in Montana for like two hundred dollars, and I thought, where do you go hunting? Once you get out to Montana? And when I was growing up, you know, we'd in all the National parks trips and Benda Glacier and Yellowstone and everything like that. But I very distinctly have a moment of looking at a map and thinking, I wonder if I can hunt in these national forests and going online. And this is before the days of you know, podcasts and online research tools for hunters and everything, and I looked up can you hunt in National forces? 00:38:03 Speaker 3: And I got the answer yes. 00:38:05 Speaker 2: And then I started looking at all the national forests across the West, and it was like, you know, the scales came off my eyes or whatever biblical metaphor is appropriate, because I was just thinking, holy shit, there's a whole world out there that I can just go to and check out, you know, having come from a place where we deer hunted on ten acre chunks and twenty acre chunks. 00:38:30 Speaker 1: And in this. 00:38:32 Speaker 2: Chapter you talk about how that shapes a person knowing that they have access to these spaces and that they can go out and sort of discover things and discover things about themselves on these landscapes. So I wonder if you could just talk about your first moment where you sort of realized what the implications of these public lands had for your life. 00:38:57 Speaker 1: Well, I grew up in theis Louisiana, as you know, and and I began at some point, and again it was out of the same sort of experiences where once family takes you off to the West and see to see national parks and things like that. But I was four years old when I went off on a trip like that, so I wasn't really able to comprehend much about the world other than while the West sure seems to be sunny and beautiful compared to the Louisiana, which is so green and close in. But I basically when I got to the West, when I first started going, and it was in my late teens and early twenties, because I was fascinated with the West, and as soon as I could drive a car and my parents would let me take a car overnight, I mean immediately drove off towards New Mexico and Colorado to go see the country, and then made that kind of a summer road trip every summer from then on all through my twenties and thirties. What I began to realize, is that you know? And I remember there was a line from an Aldo Leopold passage, I think it was probably from a San County almanac where he said, of what use are forty freedoms if you don't have a world to get into? And what I recognized about that statement was that he was describing this situation I had grown up in where so much of the world is off limits, it's fenced, it's posted, you can't get at it. And suddenly, here's a part of America, and it seemed like, in some respects the best part of America, the grandest mountains, the deepest canyons, the most extensive plains, the most starlit skies at night, that was open to the world. And so it was kind of it was one of those moments, one of those precious moments in life, when I suddenly realized, holy cow, here is an opportunity and a place in the country I grew up in to be able to get at the world in a way I've never been able to do so. So that was provided by the public lands of the West, and that made me really intrigued by this topic. And one of the things I did in my career as a writer who was interested in environmental issues was to try to figure out how that happened. How did the West get these public lands and what does that mean? Because obviously it produces a different kind of lifestyle where you have access to the world than when you don't. And so that's what this particular episode and script are about, is to explain how this happened. And it's the kind of thing that didn't happen everywhere. I mean, one of the reasons I use Texas, where I live for for a number of years as an example is Texas was a piece of America that had a different history and a different trajectory than the rest of the American West did, and it ended up in a very different situation. 00:42:19 Speaker 2: And you point out early on that public lands or something, and the story of public lands sort of bends back against what the founding fathers and vision, right, And when you think about Jefferson and his vision for the future, this is something that was just a blind spot, not to you know, be a historical here, but there's sort of a blind spot. It's not something that the founders would ever have dreamed of, right it And it almost runs counter to their values, and yet there's this moment. 00:42:57 Speaker 3: At which. 00:43:00 Speaker 2: Sort of a utilitarian there's like two forces at work here that combine to really create the system of public land. And there's a utilitarian lens, and then there's also sort of this more idealistic conservation or preservationist lens as well. 00:43:20 Speaker 1: Bush produces the National Parks on the one hand, the latter, and something like the Bureau of Land Management tracts and National forests on the other hand. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think of it, Randall. From the beginning, of course, Jefferson, who designs the first homestead acts with the you know, the seventeen eighty five and seventeen eighty seven declarations about how we're going to survey land and we're going to offer it for sale to the public. He envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers, as he said, who would sweep across the continent and do this from shore to shore. What circumvented that from playing out to its logical conclusion where everything gets privatized was the realization when people unlike Jefferson, who never saw the west, actually were there and began looking at the landscape west of the hundredth meridian, which was so completely different from the landscapes east of that line, is that this may not be a smart thing to do. It may not be a good idea to put somebody on a homestead, for example, out in the sagebrush deserts of what becomes Nevada. And what really sort of sparked the whole idea was the insight of people like George Perkins Marsh who had traveled the world and realized in most of the world, because rivers are so important, especially in arid countries, their origins in mountains have to be protected. You have to make sure that mountains don't end up overgrazesed, overlogged, torn up, because that makes it impossible really to regulate the water that can function to provide for towns and cities in the valleys below them. So it was George Perkins Marsh with his I mean, it's a monumental book that all Americans I don't know about. It's called Man in Nature, published in eighteen sixty four during the Civil War. It's the first book that really engages with the kind of topics that one would think of as being the history of people and the environment and One of the arguments that he makes in that book is that while America still has the opportunity, and we still do, because settlement is just now proceeding to the Rockies, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevadas, we should stop and think about whether or not we want to privatize that part of the world. Should probably try to hold on to it as in public ownership and manage it for water, because water is so critical in the aired West, and that'll make it possible to settle all these valley lands at lower elevation. And of course, along with along with George Perkins Marsh, there was John Wisley Powell, who was intimately becoming familiar with the West, floating the Grand Canyon and taking students all over the West, from Colorado to Montana and Idaho, and who was putting together as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, these kinds of plans where here's how we ought to be settling an arid region. The east is not aird, this country is arid, and here's how we ought to do it. I mean one of the things, of course that he comes up with, which we didn't implement, but I mean a lot of people have looked at those maps that Powell drew in eighteen seventy eight and eighteen seventy nine for a kind of a bioregional West where everything political is evaluated and based on water. I mean, you have what he sort of put together as little commonwealths on the Arkansas River, on the Platte River, on the Missouri River. I mean it was a remarkable kind of way to and what you realized out of it is, well, this is a brand new opportunity to do something completely different from what has prevailed and the rest of the United States. And so we ended up with, you know, with a more George Perkins marsh kind of plan. But I think Powell's input into it was really critical, and that of course, as you said at the outset, this is all a very different plan than what the founders had in mind, where they thought that we were just going to privatize all the pieces of land that we got from wars, from annexation, from treaties with native people. We were just going to privatize it all and turn it over to settlement. Instead, we ended up with something very different. Yeah, and. 00:48:09 Speaker 2: Use the word plan a couple times there, but I think One of the more interesting aspects of this story is how sort of piecemeal and fitfully developed our public lands system is. You know, it's like you look at it and aggregate and you're like, God, this is the foresight to have all this together. But really, you know, you're reading along and these people aren't thinking more than five or ten years ahead of themselves in terms of institutionally, how does this work and legally how does this work? And so you know, I wonder if you could speak to that, Like the Park Service isn't established till nineteen sixteen, but obviously Yellowstone goes, yeah, predates that by you know, forty five years or so. 00:48:55 Speaker 3: Forty years or so. 00:48:57 Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean that's so. One of the things you have to recognize about the public lands is that they constitute a lot of different kinds of parcels. I mean, we've been talking about in the George Perkins Marsh Angle is what becomes the National Forest, which are in the mountains of the West and are designed to protect stream flow and water. In the beginning, and as you mentioned, it's a piecemeal way of doing it. We start with thirteen million acres in about a dozen forest reserves, as their first call under the Benjamin Harrison administration, and then we run the number up to about thirty four million before the turn of the century. And then Teddy Roosevelt comes in, of course, and he just dramatically expands that system. But that's just one version, and that becomes kind of, in a way, the poster public lands, because the national forests are managed for multiple uses. As Gifford Pinchot, that forester comes in and develops the idea of multiple use, we're going to used the national forests for We're going to log some and we're going to use We're going to have regulated grazing, and we're going to have a variety of different uses. Of course, wildlife, habitat and recreation become the ones that are really important for the modern West. But that's just one form of public lands. Because you have the national parks, which had existed before, we end up with a National Park Act and a National Park system. You have in nineteen oh six, the Antiquities Act produces what's called the opportunity for the President by presidential edict to create national monuments, and the National Monument system, which is managed by the Park Service, ultimately is going to be another one of these dramatic pieces of public lands in the West out of the dust Bowl from the nineteen thirties, when a lot of the homesteads end up being bought back from homesteaders as failures by the federal government, you get a kind of public lands out on the plains called the National Grasslands. And then, of course when you get to the nineteen thirties, and we've determined after the dust bowl has hit that it's really a kind of a crime and a tragedy to allow people to continue to try to settle some of these really arid planes and desert regions of the West. During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, we end home setting there's still two hundred and forty five million acres of public domain left, and that land ultimately ends up as Bureau of Land Management tracks. So it's a bunch of obviously there are a bunch of different kinds of public lands in that mix, but the whole of it ends up. As I was writing this particular script, and I don't think this had ever occurred to me before, but it did when I was writing this script, and I think it's one of the last lines I use in the script itself. It seems to me that the existence of the public lands in the West is as important, maybe more important, than the existence of a frontier history that sort of defines what the West is. One is obviously more nineteenth century phenomenon, the other twenty first and more modernist kind of phenomenon. But I think the public lands may be more important for the West than even the frontier. 00:52:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's also, as you mentioned earlier, there's the Texas story where it has a very different history, and then if we look east across the Mississippi, there's a very different story there. But in the West we think of public lands as these places that were left behind, whereas in the East they had to sort of, after the fact assemble national forests. Yes, and you have the Weeks Act, and it's a very deliberate the model of construction that had to be sort of invented to reconstitute what once was. Yeah, that's exactly right. 00:53:10 Speaker 1: I mean, the Weeks Act of nineteen ten basically takes the idea of the public lands in the West and applies them when possible to the east, particularly the mountains of the East. In this case, it's the kind of phenomenon where you're taking lands that had usually been ruined by timber companies and had been cut over, and the government will then acquire those lands and create national forests around them. So that's how we get the national forests, for example, up and down the Appalachian Crest, the Shenandoah into upstate New York, obviously in the Adirondacks, along with the State Park and the Aarandacks. And then there of course are some parks that because the Park Service did not have an acquisition budget creating these national parks and national monuments out of free public domain land. Park Service didn't have a budget to acquire lands that had already been sold to somebody. What you got in parts of the East, and this is what I told the story of in Texas, in West Texas that was a failure to do is the public got behind the idea of producing the money to buy up lands to create Akkadian National Park in Maine, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah in West Texas, though we had this wonderful opportunity to take a landscape that was western in its psychology, frontier in its history. I mean to be sure, in Texas. All the Indians had been driven out, so you didn't have that opportunity for a modern West. But there was the opportunity for creating a big public lands on the high plains of West Texas, but it didn't happen. And it's an interesting kind of miss to me in American history. You know, I don't I can't speak to how the people of the southern high Plains feel about that miss, if they even know about it or remember it. And I suspect a lot of people don't even know about it. But when I was living there, I mean, I thought it was one of the great historical misses that had ever taken place in that particular world. Yeah. 00:55:36 Speaker 3: And I think. 00:55:41 Speaker 2: We've talked about how if you look at the public lands as they exist now, it's almost like this perfect system. It's hard not to celebrate it. But it is controversial, and it has always been controversial. Yeah, And it's a product of power struggle between competing interests, and so I think, you know, that's another aspect of the story that you touch on at points, and I think the Texas case brings it up again. It's like Roosevelt had his critics, just as today we have the Mike Leaves of the world and those who don't see value in the public lands. 00:56:20 Speaker 1: So yeah, I. 00:56:20 Speaker 3: Wonder if you can speak to how conflict has shaped this story. 00:56:24 Speaker 1: Well, from the very beginning, as you mentioned Randal, public lands were controversial. I mean, conservatives in the time of Teddy Roosevelt called the creation of new national forests pink tea socialism, and their idea was you had and I think Texas actually when George Bush was President of the United States, Texas and George Bush used this term, we believe in an ownership society, and that, of course, this kind of the ultimate capitalist's idea is everything is owned by individuals, and the idea of a kind of a communal shared resource is foreign to that particular ideology. So from the very beginning, there was a constituency of people who thought creating public lands for the public to have access to this is just not right. So there's been a battle over that for a very long time. I mean this so called sage brush rebellions. I didn't talk about that in this particular episode, but from the nineteen twenties through the nineteen fifties, and in fact even as late as the nineteen eighties, we have had these kind of many revolts on the part of some people in the West who want the public lands, as they often say, returned to the states. And of course, the problem with that, for one thing, is in the language, the public lands never belonged to the states to start with. The states were created out of those lands. But so those lands had always been federal from the beginning. But there's always been controversy around it. And of course, in the instance here in the last six or eight months, as I describe at the end of this episode, and in the Big Beautiful Bill of last spring, Mike Lee of Utah wanted to start disassembling the public lands in states like Utah. And I mean I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now we have something like thirty three million acres of public lands in New Mexico. Mike Lee's plan wanted to privatize fourteen million acres of that like forty percent of the public lands in New Mexico. And so one of the things that I mentioned at the end of this particular script and certainly provided some images of as well as when the Western governors met in Santa Fe in June, I mean, there was a gigantic street protest on behalf of saving the public lands and retaining them, of which my wife Sarah and I were certainly in the midst of which lasted literally all day long and drowned out the governor's conference. In fact, they had to call off most of the afternoon because they couldn't hear inside the hotel where they were. But that particular protest, and it's one of the things that struck me about it looking at the signs, looking at the people, it had no political kind of definition. There were people from the left, there were people from the right. There were signs that said tree huggers and rednecks. Unite everybody from every side because we have grown up with the public lands and we know what it's like to have this wonderful access to the world. Everybody from every side who lives in the West did not want the public lands dissolved. 00:59:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's I mean, I think that gets to another point you made. It's that they're not some abs tracked thing. It's part of daily life. 01:00:02 Speaker 1: Absolutely. 01:00:03 Speaker 2: It's like everybody wants, you know, cheaper food, and everybody wants bamba clans. 01:00:08 Speaker 3: You don't they're not. 01:00:09 Speaker 2: You might disagree on how to get there, or how they should be managed or what what, you know, whatever the disagreement might be. 01:00:15 Speaker 3: But in the West, it's just it's part of life. 01:00:19 Speaker 1: It's part of life and uh and we love it and uh, as I said, if you grow up somewhere else and you come to the West and realize what kind of access you have to the world, it's like you've died and gone to heaven. 01:00:31 Speaker 3: Well, couldn't end it at a better spot than that.