Transcripts For CSPAN2 Adam 20240704

Covid19 pandemic closed down businesses and schools people across the nation turned to parks and other open spaces. In urban parks and sprawling National Parks. We sought places where we could socially distance and let nature lessen the stress of the day. We enjoy our public lands, but often take them for granted learning how they came about and how theyve been used over time in riches riches are overall understanding of them. Here at the national archives. We preserve the records of the four federal agencies most involved in the management of our nations public lands the bureau of Land Management the Us Forest Service the us fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park service. The written records photographs and Motion Pictures contain the stories of the beginnings of federal stewardship. In his book making americas public lands, adam swords takes us through the history of these lands and examines the changing priorities and c adam southwards takes us through the history of these lands and examines changing priorities and challenges concerning them. Lynn hudson is professor of history at the university of idaho, author of United States west coast, and environmental history, the Environmental Justice and american conservation, and this book from the moon. Reel america edits features for the planet section. The series called life up close, her writing has appeared on publications including National Geographic and New York Times magazine and she is the author of beloved beast, fighting for life. Now lets hear from lynn hudson and reel america. Thank you for joining us today. It is a pleasure to be with you today. I am reel america and im here with lynn hudson to talk about his wonderful new book understanding tornadoes making americas public lands. It is likely you spent some time in the publics land, our National Parks, wildlife refuges, National Forests and on landscapes that make up public land system. One of the things i appreciate about adam sowardss book is it is very nuanced but also accessible and it is, in addition, very alert to the role of public lands today, not only as valuable conservation lands but as a source of some very deep rooted myths and concepts and traditions in our national politics, not only environmental politics but national politics. So adam sowards begins by invoking Henry David Thoreau and the political philosopher hannah arendt. If it were possible to eavesdrop on a conversation between these two human beings i would give up a lot. Adam invokes thoreau because he had a prescient idea that forests could be held for the common good and he invokes hannahs idea, or metaphor of a table as a place, a metaphor for the public sphere, a table being a place where citizens can gather and find something approaching Common Ground. Adam will start with a short reading from the introduction that elaborates on the second metaphor. Thank you. This will be a very short reading. This table metaphor guides us through the history of American Public lands and helps us think about the public land as part of the democratic experiment that is the United States. It takes no great leap of insight to find faults and failures in meeting the promises of democracy when the nation is rooted in the disposition of indigenous land and enslavement of africans. The history of public lands include democratic shortcomings and exclusions just like every other part of us political history. That is partly why thinking about public land as an element in the democratic experiment is helpful, because we can see who defines the nations land and for what purposes. How new ideas supplanted old ones and novel understanding complicated traditional views. With the lands themselves as the common object that focuses peoples attention, we learned that this quintessentially american system, like the nation itself is full of experiments, successes and failures and promises made, broken, and redefined, throughout this history, the table and those gathered around it changed and multiplied, guided by evolving laws in science not to mention shifting political interests was like a growing family at a holiday dinner, incorporating new entrees, the more interests at the table, the more cacophonous and unfamiliar it appeared to those who had been gathering for generations. This book is an account of how the table changed, which is to say it is a history and not a philosophical treatise or a polemic. The book tends to explain how the system came to be and why as well as how and why it changed over time. The consequences of the system on the land itself and for the people who relied on it for whatever purpose remains central to the account vote follows. It draws special attention to where constraints and boundaries were redrawn and new political and legal traditions initiated. These transitions draw attention to novel arrangements of power and the land. Frequently if not always there were contested, demonstrating these lands and the processes that govern the matter to americans who relied on them. Such disagreements are inevitable and healthy in a democracy when participants were allowed to be involved. This involvement has not always been the case but some participants directly excluded, and some merely perceived their exclusion at other times. Thank you for setting the cacophonous table for us. One of the great things about this book, youve studied the history of public land for a long time. I have reported on public land, politics for a long time as a journalist, we both know that this history is populated with countless characters that is very long. Its prehistory is as long or longer than its written history. Youve managed to fit a lot of complexity into volumes that is let me make sure a little over 200 pages. I know from experience the history of the Conservation Movement the writing efficiently and writing short is more difficult than writing long. How do you find a path through the history of public land that captured nuance as well as tell the story at manageable length. Thank you for saying those kind words about the book. Im glad it read that way to you. When you tackle a big project, you cant have an example in every store you uncover. I think about the book a little bit like a key that unlocks the larger history so that if you are reading it and it doesnt include your favorite part or your favorite forest that you go to, read it and understand the larger context in which those things exist. One thing i tried to do in the book that i dont know if it is unique but i tried to write it of the systems at large. Many writers and historians have taken on a single park or taken on the Forest Service. What i tried to do is look at all the public lands. When you look at those many of them are organized, heres a section on the bureau of Land Management, i wanted to try to tell it as a history in more of a stream of time. Looking get for trends the cross all the agencies in the same sort of decades and many, to use examples, the time multiple things together, if i had gone bit by bit, agency by agency, would have been a much longer book. Liz i can see that. You brought out some scenes that were maybe not news to me but i havent quite grappled with directly, they were so big that i couldnt see them because i was down in the reeds of individual agencies or individual places so i found those you make clear the history of public lands begin with the founding of the Forest Service, not the signing of the constitution, the prehistory of public lands is longer, where does the history of public lands truly begin . Great question. As with so many things in american history, the history of public lands begins with the disposition of Indigenous People, the forces of colonization that depopulated much of the continent and changed it the dynamics here. Sets the stage for all that comes after so it is that clash of colonization that precipitates, that leads to the public land system that we see emerging later. Host i want to return to that later. That history is very much with us and there are some there are some modern responses to it that i think are very interesting, sources of hope for all of us but let me move forward in time a little bit in the context of that dispossession, there was a very interesting, complementary role played by jefferson and madison and i wasnt aware of madisons role, his vision was ignored i should say but it was influential in the formation of public lands. Can you say a little bit about their complement revisions and their effect . On the public land system. I would be glad to. The effect is somewhat indirect but jefferson, sometimes called the agrarian philosopher and famously sees virtue embedded in the practices of that sort of waiver in the land and that in part explains why he was enthusiastic to gain the louisiana purchase, to increase the size of the nation, expecting independent yeoman farmers could move west. This land is in the process of dispossession that is happening with that westward movement and independently with their labor transform the raw earth as they imagined it into good productive labor, good productive products that we might sell and have sustenance for. The challenge with this is theres a lot of land in north america and it became easy to mix my metaphors, cut in one as you would imagine in a forest and madison along with others in the early part of the republic thought there is a need to slow down and the need to improve our land and not use it so extensively, stay rather than move and treat the land better and more sustainably, which was in some ways and antislavery position as well, and idea not to keep moving west and moving the slave system west. There are so many paradoxes we could spend the rest of the hour talking about them but both of these men who did not so much live there ideals as right about them. I will stop with that. Those were slave owners we should acknowledge. So really for a long time, the vision that led to the public lands was a commercial fishing. Conservation didnt come in until much later and it is interesting to me what comes out clearly in your book is its a commercial vision very divorced from the reality of the land itself and the reality of the western climate and public land system, i think it could be said in a broad sense that it resulted from a collision between the jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic and the harsh reality of the western climate. Can you tell us what happened when those two visions met . Are those two realities met . Even before the constitution was signed, this system that was in place was all land held in common by the state, the goal was for that to be privately owned and the government under the articles of confederation, under the constitution developed a various means to get that land into private hands, the most famous example is the homestead act of the 1860s but there were predecessors to that. That worked reasonably well one hundred 60 acres, you could make a selfsufficient farm in lots of places like that but as white farmers moved to the west, they found that one hundred 60 acres was too little or too much so it was too dry or also too mountainous. That was something that was not sustainable. And so congress tried adapting these laws, if you plant some trees you could have more land or have irrigation you could have more land and it kept not working. One hundred 60 acres on a steep slope in the Rocky Mountains isnt going to lead you to a very selfsufficient sort of livelihood and many places in the westward too high or too called, to have, an agricultural economy as the founders had expected. Host no matter how many trees you plant. Guest exactly. In the 1870s and 1880s, you have a number of people saying we need to do things different, some of that was maybe the land needed to be the land given away, taken away, would need to be smaller, and make irrigation, manage a smaller amount of land. You need a lot of acreage to run cattle in different parts of colorado as an example so we can make some adjustments there. And the thing about those conversations, one of the ideas that emerges, these big mountain ranges with all these trees shouldnt be owned by individuals. Those trees will not last long so maybe they should be controlled by the federal government. So these ideas start percolating in the 1860s and 1870s but progress moved slowly even them and took a while before congress decided that in 1891 the president could have a right to reserve some of those land so that they would not be cut, they would not be owned by individual people or companies bus would be kept in trust by the federal government and that evolved in a variety of different ways around the turn of the Twentieth Century into what we think of as conservation. Host to emphasize these lands that couldnt be homesteaded were being exploited both by individual landowners and corporations who saw them as 3 treaties, free pasture, tell us what was happening on the landscape. Before these measures go into effect, it is free and open for whoever can get to it and there are large herds of cattle and sheep moving up the mountains, sometimes competing with the other cattle and sheep operators in the valley so that has led to overgrazing and lots of cases. A lot of concern about timber being stolen from federal lands as well. The first forest reserves were created, relatively few regulations and the concern then was about timber trespass, people stealing and to back off one bit of context, there was great fear in American Life that we are going to run out of trees and we are going to run out of lumber. This is the age of wood which provided fuel and building material. The corporations had denuded the upper midwest very very quickly in the last part of the 19th century and there is great concern that that cant be allowed to happen in the sierras, the cascades, the rockies or we wouldnt have enough wood to fuel our nation and our nations economy. So that creates some of the urgency around us. To use any of that pasture, no one paid anything so they are taking from the public land valuable resources and turning a profit from it and that is also part of the concern the develops around conservationists who want to institute reforms as we move into the 20th century. Host these people were echoing madisons warning about soil. We will use up the soil in these trees. This would be early conservation sentiments but also a commercial interest here, the federal government is losing money by giving away, passively giving away these resources. So the federal governments assertion of control over the publics land did create in honest bitterness which ive read some stories about what it was like to be one of the first forest rangers to ride into town as a representative of the newly created Forest Service and be confronted by a bunch of unhappy ranchers who for the first time were going to have to pay grazing fees or manage their cattle in certain ways and generations later, i know from reporting in the real west its not unusual to hear the federal governments presence in the west, and other parts of the country as well referred to as a land grab. So set the record straight for us. It wasnt a land grab but what was it . It wasnt a land grab. Ill have to think about what it was. The vast unclaimed, once the landed didnt dispossessed from native peoples, the unclaimed land was part of what was known as the Public Domain and utah, wyoming, idaho, whatever, as they entered into the union almost everyone, just a couple exceptions explicitly gave up claim to all those Public Domain lands, those are the federal governments. So you will often hear throughout the Twentieth Century and 21stcentury talking about the states should get their land back. It was never theirs to have so it couldnt be taken back. The Forest Service is an example of this. When it is finally created in 1905, a quick note, there is no agency in charge of them until 1905 so there is a little gap in how things are going to be managed. Quickly, some, i would say regulations get imposed, fairly small grazing fees get imposed but if you are a rancher who had grown accustomed over a decade or two decades or 3 decades of running cattle and not paying anything those grazing fees seemed like they are taking money from you, taking your rights away, so there was a great deal of controversy around that and a desire to push back against it. The Supreme Court in 1911, the Forest Service has the right to administer these sorts of fees. In many places i think the record shows that the initial creation of these sorts of places generate a lot of resentment and uncertainty and in a little bit of time it became okay, the fact that the Forest Service was going to help put out fires, did an okay for them to be around now. Many of the restrictions were in the larger context of all the changes happening in the first part of the 20th century not that big a deal. So there is a settling in process where locals got accustomed to what public land agencies are doing because quite frankly they are not doing a lot. They are doing what has existed before but not real restrictive measures quite yet. Host as the Agency Settles into its place, at your metaphorical table, the people already sitting at the table or who had set themselves at the table get used to their presence. Guest thats a good way to describe it. It wasnt just the conflict did continue. There was acceptance of the presence of the Forest Service but arguments continue between the agency and land users and our august so arguments between land users themselves. People may have heard of the conflicts between the cattle ranchers and the sheep grazers which actually got quite they are legendary in a negative sense in the region. Tell me a little bit about why that was so passionately fought. Thats a real complicated story and it depends on the location where you are. Part of it has to do with scarce resources. When the forage declined and a lot of animals were trying to each, that scarcity generates conflict. If you are pastoralist and you have animals, you move them and you move them across land and so that system is doesnt work super well on private property and that can generate challenges as well, the labor that ran many of these animals across the mountain ranges and valleys in wyoming or the southwest were not always white and that could be associated with conflict as well, and associations regarding who has a legitimate homebuilder which was a term that was used often at the turn of the 20th century. Many of those sorts of economic conflict sort of emerge and also the conflict between someone who runs thousands of catalan someone with a small homestead, just trying to make it work and the more powerful Political Economic interests can really run what you might call the little guy out and there were in fact, there was violence. Over these sorts of issues, they are not divorced from the land or larger political questions, they are not divorced from cultural preferences and issues like that either. You sometimes hear them referred to as the cattle and sheep wars and might not have been on the scale we usually think of as wars but they did, as you say sometimes result in violence, but that is a good point, its not simply a conflict between two ways of using the publics land but it is economic perhaps racial and cultural conflict as well. So as this is happening, as we can call them customary users of public land are grappling with the presence of newly created federal agency there is also in the nation as a whole a growing interest in conservation. We mentioned this briefly but how is that affecting the work of these agencies and what was happening to the landscape itself . Great question and lots of elements of conservation. For example, one element that is involved is recreation. We want to protect beautiful places people could visit and enjoy as a tourist and this comes to be seen as americas equivalent of visiting alps in europe. We want to protect the use usually they are unusual landscapes. These get protected because it would be a place to recreate and recreate ourselves and think about ourselves as americans, as something distinct in the world. Thats one element of this. Thats different at this point from lets protect the trees from getting all cut down. There are other elements of the Conservation Movement that are interested in making sure theres water to be irrigated or to go to cities and that relates very closely to the National Forest, the early ones are almost always in urban watersheds can we dont normally think about it this way but that is what many of those National Forests are about, to protect the watershed of seattle. When the watershed these things start to work together. At this time as well, there are other concerns about wildlife which you know more about than i do. Where certain animals are either going extinct or very nearly so and the necessity to protect some habitat where these animals might be able to survive or have places where they wouldnt be hunted, this was a simplistic notion that it was just hunting and if we stop hunting all the animals come back, but that was how managers were starting to think about this in the early part of the Twentieth Century or to create more of this type of wildlife and less of that type of wildlife so there would control, campaigns to get rid of the wolves will reduce the coyotes so we could have the animals that we want, so what is starting to emerge in the early part of the 20th century and intensifies as we move to the middle of it is lots of management, lots of fingers trying to get is the system and tinker with them, this is the place where we can have tourism, this is the place where we have this sort of animal or that other kind of animal that might cause a problem and manage these forests for water but also timber later down the road. Theres longterm thinking but also sort of narrow range of options that are in the imagination of the people starting to do the tinkering. Host such an interesting point, the rise of the Conservation Movement, there are these different threads that are working on separate threads to a large extent, the sports and trying to protect the animals that loved to hunt, the urban reformers who want clean water in the cities, people trying to protect scenic landscapes, people who recognize, starting to recognize the ecological importance of forests and wanted to protect them for that reason. They were all fighting on separate fronts but they all converged in the public lands and they were all either sitting at the table or trying to get a seat at the table and as you say, the managers themselves who had tentatively sat down and said dont worry about us, we will just charge modest grazing fees and perhaps limit the number of cattle you run on public lands and prevent timber poaching, we are going to have a much extended move over, space at the table and get much more involved in what happens on the landscape so that brings us, i know you thought a lot in particular about the 60s and 70s, especially important chapter in public land and this was new to me as well. We have all Conservation Movement and professionalized system of land managers and we have continued use of the public land so how did that conversation unfold in a 50s through the 70s . That is great. A quick preface that i think is important. In 1930s, theres a great depression, one of the most popular programs of fdrs new deal was the civilian conservation corps so public land agencies had unemployed men to do projects so trails got built and roads got built and fire lookouts got built and wires got strung between places in the backcountry. That helped set the stage for what happens after world war ii because so much had been built by these programs. Host sorry to interrupt but there was an economic stimulus purpose to that, not only to employ people but to stimulate tourism, correct . Right. On the public lands. On the grounds. All sorts of things. That infrastructure, if you will is created then during the 1930s or expands what had been there before and as they move into the postworld war ii era, on the one hand, we have a big chunk of American Society with pentup demand and they have some money. We have surplus from the military so people start acting like they havent before and all these new trails and the infrastructure kit to these places so on the public side there is this large and growing group of people who want to experience the outdoors, want to experience the public land and they are going to scenic places and seeing magnificent landscapes, unquestionably magnificent, cant argue with that. At the same time some of the land managers are trying to manage, they are getting involved, they are intensifying their management of these places and intensifying everything, intensifying recreational use, intensifying how they are going to manage the grasses the animals are going to eat, how they are going to manage the forest themselves and at the same time, part of that consumer demand i mentioned a moment ago included building a lot of new houses and a lot of private timberlands had been if not entirely exhausted before world war ii, were cut pretty good so at this point in the post world war ii era, the public forest is a source of lumber. So timber sales on National Forests increased dramatically. So a bunch of stuff is happening here. Theres intensifying management in the National Parks, in the National Forests, on the bureau of Land Management, even intensifying more ducks we can hunt so theres lots of things not just managing it but we are going to maximize the use of these places and these resources and at the same time all the use americans going out and driving their big cars into the National Parks, going camping in the National Forest and starting to see stuff, starting to see overgrays rangeland and starting to think maybe the Forest Service is doing too much. Maybe the park service has brought julie to many visitor centers. So emerging in the 1950s then, havent even mentioned the dams being put in. There is an emergent Wilderness Movement with a desire to protect places from commercial development more or less and entirely. And fat coalesces in the 1950s and pushes toward what becomes the wilderness act which passes in 1964. That is not the first law in this era but from 1964, and 1976, a whole handful a couple handfuls of laws passed congress, overwhelmingly bipartisan, some of them unanimous in the house or the senate. Endangered species act. Endangered species act, wilderness access four vote against them. Overwhelming bipartisanship at this time to vastly change what happens on public lands and what some of the purposes are, not only that, wilderness has a different purpose that was codified for the first time through congress, the other thing that emerges during this year that so important is the process of Management Change so that when changes to wilderness areas or timber sales going up, there will now be beginning in 1970s a place for the public to not only objective but to weigh in and the Forest Service would have to say we are planning a timber sale, here are the options for proposals, and republic could have a lawsuit, created opportunities and and a lot of people sitting at the table that are going to represent salmon and rafters and those who say we shouldnt be cutting trees for these purposes so if you are someone that sad at the table when there were only ten people and now there are 20, you have power and that becomes concerning. People used to listen to you and now you have to wait longer to speak and you are not the only voice. That really changes how the system has been functioning. Host what used to look like a fool table is looking a little thin. People reach out to get what they want. Host may be this is a good time to take a breath and look back at how far we have come during our discussion in the last few minutes. I am struck by the contrast between what was happening a century earlier, the federal government had these lands that were almost in some sense a burden to the federal government, they couldnt give them away because they were not suitable for homesteading. They had some commercial value but really, they were kind of unwanted land and now the period we are discussing in the 70s these lands are expected to provide timber, provide clean water, provide pasture, provide water through reservoirs and provide all sorts of recreation, motorized and nonmotorized and then provide all the values that we attribute to wilderness, the Legal Definition of wilderness. This is just a huge, this is a huge shift in our perception of these lands and what we expect from them. Absolutely. Within the career of one person in one of those agencies they would have seen just a radical change in what was being asked of them. Thats an important way to think about it. If you are a young person born the year the Forest Service was created in 1905 and you start working for the Forest Service when youre 25 in 1930 and you spend 30 or 40 years and that Forest Service it is going to look pretty radically different by the time you retire. Host the landscape probably looks very different and the process, all of a sudden where you use to as a forest ranger might have gone out and talked with a few people about what was going to happen in the forest you now have a formal system of public consultations that are participated in by people all over the country, a number of federal laws that need to be considered as you plan for the forest and these are all, these are all great conservation victories but they certainly changed the conversation about the public lands in play significantly. Absolutely. Host so this you talk about how in a lot of ways this, shall we say crowding over the table, dont mean to make it sound negative, this inclusion of more people at the table without necessarily making the table bigger, that led to, in some ways led into the Political Polarization we saw during the reagan years, talk about the connection there and im interested in the polarization not just an environment of politics which you and i are familiar with but to some extent the public lands started to become, started to play a significant role in national politics. Guest part of it is about sharing power. 1979 the assembly of nevada declared the public lands within nevada where theres an Congress Never had the right to take them. That starts the sagebrush rebellion and weve seen various forms of it pop up every half decade or so. When Ronald Reagan did run for president in 1980, the first time he declared count me in as a rebel, trying to associate himself with the sagebrush rebellion. What it does at this time, it is one more representation of the federal government and federal overreach and all our problems, most of our problems are being caused by government from that perspective in the 1980s and if you look back the previous couple of decades, you see increased responsibility for federal lands but also a variety of other things being done in American Society at this time and as i was speaking of in the last few minutes, its a bewildering change to a lot of people, one way to resist change is to say lets go back the way things were and not have it or lets go back to the way we imagine things were. States will take over. States, most state lands are required to maximize resource potential and that is not consistent with the wilderness act and other such things, so caused by western states to return the land to states was a way of saying we want to have more control, we want washington dc to have less control, and what the ramifications of that might be we never found out because most of those things did not go into effect. One of the things that did go into effect, it ramps up the environmental movement. One thing you see happening in 1980s is a shifting radicalism from the environmental side and shifting radicalism from the anticonservation side if you will, neither label is exactly correct about it gets my sense here. Theres spectacles that both sides participate in, theres protests that both sides participate in, civil disobedience both sides participate in and over the next 40 years those things wax and wane, violence is involved as we move into the 1990s, the day after the Oklahoma City bombing, local Forest Office was torched. You will be greeted with 100 men with guns, something we saw in the 21stcentury as well so this is an accelerating trend that happens out of a reaction to those changes that happened in the middle of the 20th century. Host as you say, to emphasize that point, there is perhaps on both sides a nasty algia for a past that never quite was, because the public lands were never the public land system was never envisioned as a place vote was purely to protect land undisturbed and it was never envisioned as a purely commercial enterprise. There was always an element of sustainability from the beginning. There was always an element of commercialism. I think that is right, that is true. And there was never a time when everyone was getting along and getting exactly what they wanted. But there were times when people were, perhaps, had more of a voice because other people were being left out and thats a real change though perhaps not quite the change that perhaps the way it is characterized by people doesnt technology a reason they felt like they had more of a voice was other people didnt have a voice. And of course the polarization we are talking about does continue today. I remember clearly as a wildlife field researcher in the mid1990s, hearing these conflicts over management of endangered species on public lands that got quite heated and violent as you say with threats and actual violence towards Forest Service and bureau of Land Management employees and that has continued, the same people and factors, continued that kind of rhetoric into the modern era. So perhaps you could talk a little bit about what we have seen in the past few years and the connection back to the origins of the public land system. There have been anticonservationists from the beginning of these public lands being reserved and retained by the federal government and i think they pop up during different times. There was a big movement after world war ii, a hope that a bunch of the land could be returned again to the states, most critics of the movement said this isnt about that. It is about not supporting the Conservation Movement at all, so it was trying to undermine that with the idea, less idea of sustainability and more maximization of private profit to make it easier and the polarization we are living through, we have seen this and we see it play out on conservation issues where wildlife refuges are taken over by protesters or wilderness study areas have roads carved into them to prevent them becoming wilderness areas. Once one set of radicalism one set of radicalism leads to another and these things ratchet up and i think the antidote to that is hard work, it is sitting down at the table, i imagine this table most of the time in this book being around the where you sit at this roundtable and we can see each other, we are all in a different position that have different values but we can all see each other but as we move into the period closest, feels more like a long skinny table where we cant see everybody anymore and we just continue to face off rather than share and i think that is one of the challenges because i think one of the solutions is a lot of hard work getting to know what you want, what i want, where we might be able to compromise and collaborate. Examples of this in a variety of locations, but not a lot of examples of it and it is behind us and it is costly and the conservation challenges we are faced with our expensive and interconnected because of these lands are connected with one agency and another across private land so it takes so much time and so many resources and it is a lot easier to just yell at each other. Host i like the metaphor that i dont like it, a long table where we cant quite see each other or cant see each other fully and are just i often feel that way when i report on these conflicts, that people are just standing up and pontificating from great distance to the other people who have a stake in these plans and very little listening going on but as you say there are some examples of these roundtables exist at the local and reasonable level. May be you could leave us with some inspiration. These stories especially that involve indigenous conservation are very heartening and are examples of things that we could follow in the future. Guest we dont know these stories well enough but in the american southwest there have been examples for decades now of environmentalists working with Traditional Land users to figure out better ways. A partnership is what it is called in eastern oregon, worked really hard. In the neighborhood where the wildlife refuge was taken over in 2016 in the 1990s tensions were really really aldehyde point, not hot and violent and there was a determination in this community to solve this and make it theres been some Research Done that suggests the reason the wildlife takeover did not have a greater effect affect is there have been long hours, neighbors getting to know neighbors and solve these problems and i look to things like the Intertribal Coalition that comes together to protect bears heres and turn it into a National Monument where they will be comanagers with the federal government involved in this and this is some sort of whole circle, something happening here with Indigenous People reaching out and being part of this rather than being left out deliberate they were having land taken deliberately so i am hopeful where that might go as it moves forward and develop their management plans. Host we started this conversation talking about the history of public land, rooted in dispossession and a story like bears years gives me hope that there is, certainly that history cant be reversed or made up for but there is a way forward from it and we should say for those who dont remember, the National Walk National Wildlife refuge takeover was an armored takeover by extremists. Antigovernment extremists. It lasted 40 days and i think the reason the community was not more supportive of the ideals of these interlopers was unbeknownst to these extremists from out of state, local people and local land managers had done decades of work to find their places at the table and to have a conversation with one another. Exactly. Host we can take heart those conversations are not easy but are possible. Host and upper reading, what they are talking about. Guest trying to find Common Ground and governing public land in the future will be, can be or should be easy, it never has been. Living in an environmental constraint is the most complicated and important path, with the complicated society with citizens for decisionmakers to set up interest, and broader public interest, to make matters even harder, the 21st century includes global problems. And and public lands can and should play a central role, and credited in the introduction. It depends on public process, this demand an honest reckoning with history and includes the exploitation of people and the land that protect places and democracy, and the land on which we stand, would be a source of shared identity and common cause, the task before us is to ensure the range lands and refuges scaled across the nation function as the public land, not to preserve one group or another. For that undermines the promise of a democratic and ecological citizenship that might bind the nation together. One way we might begin to repair the earth and our politics is with public land. Host thanks for this conversation today, great to hear your insights. Adams book is called making americas public lands and it is out now. I hope you will pick it up and read it. It is really full of very thoughtful commentary on very complicated story that affects all of our lives and the landscapes. Thank you for joining us today and hope you will join the next event at the national archives, take care, adam. Cspan now is a free mobile apps featuring your unfiltered view of what is happening in washington live and ondemand. Keep up with todays biggest events with live streams of proceedings from the u. S. Congress, white house events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. Stay current with the latest episodes of washington journal land by scheduling information for cspans tv networks and cspan r