Dr. Sara Dant
Interviewee: Dr. Sara Dant
Interviewer: Johanna Bringhurst
Description: In this episode, Dr. Sara Dant explains the history of how we use public lands in the West and how federal land management agencies have stewarded those lands for the public. Dr. Dant’s presentation can best be viewed on YouTube and is geared toward students and teachers.
Date: 2023-10-19
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Johanna Bringhurst: Hello, everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the IHC or the NEH. My name is Johanna Bringhurst. And joining us today is Doctor Sarah Dant. Doctor Dant is the Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and chair of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.
Her work focuses on environmental politics in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. Doctor Dant's latest book is an all new edition of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West, with a foreword by former New Mexico Senator Tom Udall. She is also an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns', The American Buffalo Documentary Film.
The author of several prizewinning articles on Western environmental politics, a precedent setting expert witness report, and testimony on Utah's stream navigability, and coauthor of the two volume Encyclopedia of American National Parks. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us today to share your presentation on the environmental history of the West from the HHC Summer Teacher Institute, called An Environment of Hope Reimagining the Environmental Humanities in the 6 to 12 classroom.
As you know, I am so excited for your presentation today.
Dr. Sara Dant : Thank you. And that was quite the introduction. I am very appreciative, and one of the things that I felt like was really important for the teacher education program, but also just in general for people who may not understand a lot about the West is the public lands. In fact, I get questions all the time about public lands, especially when a president decides to just declare a national monument.
For example, Bears Ears here in Utah was a huge controversy, and a lot of people's opposition to that was that they thought somehow we had lost private lands in some massive federal land grab. And so it's it's part of what has helped me understand that people don't necessarily know what we're talking about when we're talking about the public lands.
So that's going to be the focus of my presentation today is talking a little bit about the public lands. What are they? What is it? What are the different categories and how does that affect us here in the West and particularly, of course, in Idaho. And so let me start by saying that the public lands are federal lands.
And let me show you this kind of astonishing map that will, give you some kind of indication of what we're talking about. Every time I put this map up, people are just kind of gobsmacked by what they see, because the delineation between the West and the East is is nowhere more apparent, I think, than in this map.
And so what you see in the red is the percent of lands that are federal, properties. And so this is the national parks. This is national forests, this is wildlife preserves. There's some defense depot kinds of things in there, too. But we're basically going to talk about the four land management agencies. But, one of the things that you can see from this map is that pretty much most of the West, at least half of the land is, is owned and managed by the federal government.
And people think, oh, that's that's such a loss of, private land. But in fact, what's really interesting and, you know, spoiler alert, this is, where I'm going to go with this, who owns the West? And the answer is, you know, we do because we are the federal government. And if we were all together, I would ask, people to raise your hand if you've been to a national park, a national monument, a forest, a you've been down a wild and scenic river, you visited a historic site, you've gone to Washington, DC, and and I can pretty quickly get every single person in the room to raise their hand.
And then I say, okay, if that was a positive experience, keep your hands up and everyone does. And to me, that's an astonishing, common ground that we get to have as Americans that these public lands, our lands, our, something really unique. So, I want to show you this map of Idaho so you can see what kinds of public lands that we're talking about here.
So you can see, it's very colorful map, for one thing, but the creation of national parks and forest reserves really lay the foundation for the current development of federal agencies with the primary purpose of managing natural resources on federal lands. And so this map shows you lots of different kinds of lands. I'm going to talk first about the four major, land management agencies, and then we can look at some examples.
And of course, I'm going to illustrate them with Idaho examples. But we can look at some examples about what this, what this looks like in more detail. So we start with the United States forest Service. The United States Forest system is administered by the United States Forest Service. And interestingly enough, when it was created, back in 1905, it was located in the Department of Agriculture, which tells you a lot about how we initially thought we needed to manage our forest as, as a, as a crop.
When we look at the kind of lands that the Forest Service manages, we're talking about national forests, the National Grasslands. Again, we'll talk more specifically about these and various other designations, some wilderness areas, things like that. The vast majority of the National Forest Service lands are concentrated in the West. About 87%, as a matter of fact.
And the Forest Service administers more federal land, in the East, actually, than all of the other land management agencies combined. So most of the land, most of the forests are in the west. But even those that are in the east constitute the largest single federal land management agency in that part of the country. And this agency manages these lands for, multiple use.
So we're talking about things that that we all enjoy doing on the public lands camping, hiking, fishing, hunting, sightseeing, all of those things, as well as, of course, timber harvesting, watershed protection, fish and wildlife, management, those sorts of things. So it was in 1905 that President Theodore Roosevelt created the National Forest Service to administer at that point in time, a number of millions of acres of national forests.
And as I said, it's rather significant that it's located in the Department of Agriculture. Today the Forest Service protects, almost 200 million acres. There are more than 150 national forests. There are 20 grasslands, and these are located in 43 states and the District of Columbia. So almost every state in the Union has this, wonderful asset.
And the Forest Service also promotes, especially today, sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation, all of those things. Oops, there we go. So Gifford Pinchot was the first chief of the Forest Service, and he really summed up, I think nicely, the mission of the Forest Service, as it says here, to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run.
And so you can really hear that kind of multiple use, ideology expressed there. The second agency that we're going to talk about is the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Land Management manages about 245 million acres of land. It makes it the largest overall land manager in the West in the nation.
Excuse me, the largest land manager in the nation. Again, most of the land that it manages are in the West. So thinking back to that map, for example, and about a third of the total lands that it manages are in Alaska. So the Bureau of Land Management, manages things like, again, grasslands, forests. There are some high mountain reserves, Arctic tundra, deserts.
These have incredible diversity of resources, including fuels and minerals. This is where a lot of our grazing lands are. So it was the creation, of the Bureau of Land Management, in the Department of Interior in 1946 that merged two federal agencies that existed back then, the General Land Office and the United States Grazing Service. And today the BLM manages about just think about this for a minute.
Today, the BLM manages about one in every ten acres of land in the United States. But that's amazing to me. About one in every ten acres of land in the United States, and about 30% of the nation's subsurface minerals. So, it's it's an extensive, responsibility that it has. These lands and minerals are found in every state in the country.
They, as I said earlier, encompass all kinds of different, land, forms, certainly. And like the Forest Service, there is a multiple use, mandate for the Bureau of Land Management. So they have responsibility to do things like renewable energy development, conventional energy development, hardrock mining, outdoor recreation, some timber harvest, lots of grazing, of course, in particular.
And, within the Bureau of Land Management. Again, we'll look at this in a little bit more detail later. But there are some specially designated areas for conservation. They protect wild horse and burro rangelands, for example. They can serve fish and wildlife in some cases preserve native and Old West artifacts, paleontological resources. You name that.
They kind of are a little bit of everything agency. So we have the United States Forest Service, we have the Bureau of Land Management, and we have something called the Fish and Wildlife Service, which I know this will come as a huge shock, manages fish and wildlife. It is, the premier federal agency that, is dedicated to the conservation, protection and enhancement of fish and wildlife and also plants and their habitats.
So this was originally back in the 1870s, the United States Fish Commission. But we combined that with the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1940. And it like, the BLM is located in the Department of Interior. So since, President Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt first designated Florida's Pelican Island as Wildlife Refuge in 1903, that was the first.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service today manages more than 560 refuges. They also do some wetland management, fish hatcheries. And so lots of these diverse again, kinds of federal holdings. There's at least one national wildlife Refuge in every state and territory, and really kind of within an hour's drive of most major metropolitan areas. So these guys are the ones who are protecting, species of birds, mammals like bison, for example, reptiles, amphibians, these lands are really very, very critical.
And finally, the one that most people I think are actually familiar with is the National Park Service. In 1872, the United States created the first ever national park. It was not just a new park. It was not just a new concept for the United States. It was a new concept in the world. And the first park ever created was Yellowstone, which of course is in the then territories of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
And Yellowstone in particular was created as. And this is the the quote in the legislation as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. So when Yellowstone was authorized in 1872, there was no plan for how do we manage a national park? We just created this idea. There was no agency to do that.
We knew that we had these spectacular wonders, in the weird place that was Yellowstone. And we can see you could see in the the picture here, there was poaching going on, particularly of buffalo. So we needed to come up with some way to, protect these lands. In 1906, Congress created something called the Antiquities Act. In 1906, Congress created something called the Antiquities Act.
And the Antiquities Act still exists today. It authorizes, as the president, as it said, to declare by public proclamation, historic, and prehistoric structures or other objects of historic or scientific interest as a national monument. So a national monument is something that a president can simply declare, it takes it an act of Congress to create a park, but a president can just make a monument with the use of the Antiquities Act.
So it's, usually smaller than a national park. It tends not to have the diversity of, attractions that a national park does, but it's also a lot more efficient designation process. So in the years following the establishment of Yellowstone, national parks and monuments were authorized by Congress parks or proclaimed by presidents, monuments. And these will come out of the public domain.
What that means is that when Congress declares a park, or when a president sets aside a monument, they're designating already public lands as something different. So it's not that these were private lands that are now being taken or seized by the federal government to make a park or a monument. Rather, these are lands, typically, that are bureau of land managed and or Forest Service lands that get re designated as a park or a monument.
And since we were doing all of this, we realized, okay, shoot, we better create an agency to manage all of these holdings. So in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson created, the National Park Service, signed the legislation to create the National Park Service. This two is in the Department of Interior. So we have Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service there in interior.
And then you have, the National Forest Service, which is in the Department of Agriculture. Those are the big four, but they're three agencies in interior, one in agriculture, and of the four land management agencies, the Park Service manages the most diverse collection of units. And there are there are all kinds of designations, ranging from, of course, national parks and monuments to scenic rivers and historic trails and battlefields and seashores and lakes, shores and all these, all these different things sort of, fall under the umbrella of the National Park Service today, the National Park Service system includes more than 400 different units, that covers about 85 million acres in the United
States. Generally, of course, the national parks are kind of these superlative areas like the Tetons or Yellowstone. So looking at these four agencies, then we can see that these are the primary managers of the public lands. Much of those big chunks, red chunks on that, first map. But let's sort of, do a bit of a deeper dive here and, and see what kinds of, land designations fall under the management of these four different agencies.
So we'll start, at the top with the Forest Service and National Forests. National parks may be some of the best known national landmarks, but national forests have, as you well know, in Idaho, some pretty remarkable landscapes. So there are currently 154 national forests managed, as we said a minute ago, with this idea of multiple use.
So lots of different uses for the national forest. Obviously timber harvest is part of that, grazing is part of that. Mineral extraction is part of that. Recreation is part of that. So national forests tend to be located, often near national parks. They're often kind of the boundaries outside of the park boundaries. They're frequently less crowded than national parks.
That's always a nice thing. So forests often act like a protective buffer for the national parks. But the national, Forest Service, United States Forest Service also manages a number of other kinds of lands. One of them is grasslands. So, in the United States, there are 20 designated, federal grasslands. And these are kind of interesting. Their history is interesting.
At least it's interesting to me. They were created in 1960 from many of the reclaimed and restored lands that had been devastated by the Homestead Act. Devastated by the Homestead Act, so over, farming, etc. and also by the Dust Bowl, many of those lands abandoned in that time period were reclaimed by the federal government and then set aside as, the grasslands.
The Curlew National Grassland in southeast Idaho is the only grassland in the entire Intermountain West. So you know that in that Idaho gets to be unique for so many reasons. There are also things called the national conserved Lands. National conservation lands are, almost all of them managed by the Bureau of Land Management. They are set aside, as the language says, for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations.
So there's similar to national parks, conservation areas have to be designated by Congress, and they typically feature scientific, historical, recreational features. This is certainly just one part of the Bureau of Land Management, but, some pretty spectacular landscape. And of course, because it's not doesn't have the park name on it, often you get to recreate in these areas with a whole lot fewer people.
There are more than 900 of these. They, range across, 12 of the western states. Another kind of designation, many of you are probably familiar with these is a National Wildlife Refuge. And, if parks, you know, people have said, the national parks are America's best idea. I think one could make a really good argument that the national wildlife refuges are America's best kept secret.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service manages wildlife refuges to conserve. As you might imagine, wildlife. The first of these, as I mentioned a minute ago, was created in 1903 by Theodore Roosevelt, Pelican Island in Florida. But, today there are more than 560 of these sites. There's at least one in every state. And they offer a chance for urbanites.
I think, to connect with nature. There's all kinds of usually recreation opportunities hiking trails, canoes, kayaking, some of them allow hunting and fishing. These are, I think, real, national treasures. And a lot of people don't know that they're there. And, so now you do know that you've been let in on that tip. So probably the the crown jewel of the public lands system is, of course, the parks, iconic locations, Yellowstone, the Tetons, Glacier.
These attract visitors from all over the world. But, but the National Park Service is more than just these spectacular parks. But believe me, I'm not trying to diminish these parks. They're amazing. But there are lots of different, options here. So the national parks tend to be these big chunks of land that protect a variety of resources.
National parks can only be created by Congress, and they're managed by the National Park Service. National Historic Parks, which we also have in, Idaho National Historic Parks, strive to protect unimpaired landscapes, for future generations, you know, and trying to keep people out of the hot pot. That's always a big challenge. For them.
So the national parks, are these kind of big, iconic America's best idea. But the National Park Service manages many other kinds of lands as well. For one, again, here in Idaho, there are national preserves like craters of the moon. And by the way, craters of the moon is also a national monument. So it gets to double dip.
These two are established by acts of Congress. They protect areas that often have resources associated with national parks, but where perhaps mining has been happening. And would like to continue to happen. So these kind of manage both of those. There is still some extraction allowed. That's typically not the case in national parks. But so too are then the natural values preserved.
So craters of the moon is both a natural preserve that is protected by, the National Park Service and national monuments. So it gets both of those, talking about national monuments. Then again, we're going to use Idaho because we can use Idaho for almost every, kind of designation that we're talking about here. National monuments. Again, those are the ones set aside by the president using the antiquities Act tend to protect some, usually something more specific, a specific natural, cultural or historic features.
So these can be something like craters of the moon or as pictured here, the Hagerman Fossil Beds. Some places like the Grand Canyon, for example, Zion, these were first set aside as monuments and then enlarged and expanded into, parks. And so since 1906, since the passage of the Antiquities Act, there have been 120 national monuments created.
And it really depends. The management of them really depends. Some of them are Park Service, some of them are Forest Service, some of them are BLM. So the management of these monuments really kind of depends on which federal agencies lands got re designated as monuments. So if it was a Forest Service to start with and then it's re designated as a national monument on those Forest Service lands, then typically the managing agency would be the Forest Service.
The National Park Service also protects some of our country's most inspiring landscapes. It's America's story teller, and one of the things we see is the protection, then, of National historic parks. They protect places and commemorate people and events and activities that are key to our history. So, for example, historic sites like Minidoka, which was part of the Japanese internment, camp system in the United States during World War two, national historic parks like Nez Perce
These discuss multiple stories from different times, and they tell very iconic stories about the United States that help, people understand who we are and what we stand for as a nation. One of the other aspects that the National Park Service is usually well known for, and I apologize, I couldn't do this in the Idaho is the the national memorials.
There are currently 31 of these. And these commemorate a historic person, or a tragic event. Many of these, of course, are located, in or near Washington, D.C. so we're talking things like the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, but several others are scattered around the country, like Rushmore pictured here, or, Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
That's also, a national memorial. Beyond that, there are national battlefields. National battlefields are, commemorating sites of significance in the American past. And they protect places that, so that Americans can learn about how our country developed over time. And, you know, it's one of the great ironies, I think, that some of the most tragic and awful, events in our past happen in some of the most achingly beautiful places that it's possible to, imagine.
Certainly, Gettysburg is like that. Certainly, little Bighorn tragedy and beauty. But there's interpretation there that helps people understand what the historic significance of these places has been. Here's one that, again, I could not use Idaho for, as an example, but national seashores and national Lake Shores, preserve shorelines and sometimes surrounding islands. There are ten national seashores and three national lake shores.
These are, of course, amazing places for water based recreation. Lake shores can be any freshwater lake. Basically the three that exist are around the great, the Great Lakes. But the ten national seashores are on all three of America's coasts. Point Reyes is the only one, on the Pacific coast. So these these protect, extensive beaches for recreation, but also and usually, extend inland to wetlands, marshes, that sort of thing.
Dunes. Sometimes they feature lighthouses, estates, things like that. Back to Idaho. So we have national recreation areas. Originally, national recreation areas in the park system were units surrounding reservoirs that were impounded by dams. So something like Hells Canyon, for example. And there are currently 40 of these national recreation areas. They are located in 26 states. California and Washington have the most.
Each of them has four. But the concept of the National Recreation Area has really grown to encompass other lands and waters set aside for recreational uses by Congress, and it now includes major areas, even in urban centers. And so one, good example again in Idaho, Idaho is great for illustrating these things is, the sawtooth, Sawtooth, is something that is pretty accessible for a lot of people in Idaho.
If you're interested, I wrote an article about the long campaign to maybe have this become a national park. As you well know, that didn't happen. But, these national recreation areas preserve, spectacular areas, but not as, parks. There's also, of course, then the wilderness preservation system, the wilderness preservation system. And so we're going to talk about some different kinds of, of designations often now within recreation areas and parks, etc..
So in 1964, the United States Congress passed the wilderness Act. It defines wilderness as undeveloped federal land. Again, really important to understand that when wilderness gets set aside, it's not being taken out of private hands, but it's a re-designated, a re-designation, excuse me, of already existing federal lands, public lands that are just re-designated from, say, Forest Service to wilderness managed by the Forest Service.
So wilderness generally consists of federal land that is primarily affected by the forces of nature that is relatively untouched by human activity, so valued then for solitude, primarily for recreation, and so lands eligible for inclusion in the wilderness system, generally larger 5000 acres or more that can be managed in a way that preserves, their natural integrity, permanent improvements, things like buildings and roads, activities that would significantly alter natural conditions like timber harvesting generally are prohibited.
But there are some, exclusions to that. The Wilderness Act also specified that existing livestock raising, motorboat or airstrip use would be allowed to continue. And that's something that a lot of people don't realize about wilderness in addition, Congress has included exceptions to, the Act's management limitation. In subsequent laws, wilderness fires are places generally sort of un as the language of the act said, untrammeled by man.
But the Wilderness Act allowed Congress to designate these relatively pristine that I'm don't like that word particularly, but relatively undeveloped lands in a way that would be, maintained across, future generations. So altogether in the United States, there are more than 800 wilderness areas in 44 different states. Idaho has 15 wilderness units, approximately 4.8 million acres of the state's land, which is about 9% of the total land in the state, is managed as wilderness.
So that's, you know, Frank Church had a lot to do with that. And if we had lots more time, I would talk extensively about Frank Church. But exceptions often, allow for things like airstrips or jet boats on, the, the Salmon River, things like that. Speaking of rivers, then another designation that offers levels of protection is Wild and scenic rivers.
The National Wild and Scenic Rivers System was established in 1968, and it established sort of three tiers of management. There are wild rivers that are typically don't have a lot of impoundment. There are scenic rivers that largely be free of impoundment, but they are accessible by road, for example. And then there is the recreational river, where readily accessible by road, may have some developmental along the shoreline.
The idea was that rivers were this in, especially in the West, an incredibly valuable resource that needed protection. And we didn't want to get stingy about giving that protection. Again, this is another major accomplishment of Frank church. He was the architect of this legislation. And, it protects a variety of rivers, in whatever state they are currently in.
So rivers can come into this system either by congressional designation, or the state itself can nominate a river or a stretch of river for inclusion in the system. As of March and 2019, that was the last time there were new designations. The National Wild and Scenic River system protects more than 13,000 miles of rivers. Those stretches are on more than 200 different rivers, across the United States.
But this is not very much actually of the nation's river system. It's, less than one half of of 1% just to give you, a bit of a comparison. By comparison, there are more than 75,000 large dams in this country that have modified at least 600,000 miles of rivers or, you know, probably just under 20% of the nation's rivers.
Idaho, if you want to know about Idaho in particular, Idaho has approximately overall, about 107,000 miles of river. And in the state, 891 of those, 107,000 are protected as Wild and scenic rivers. So Idaho certainly has some, but it's not a huge amount of the state's river system. Then there's also, I promise, we're getting close here to the end.
Then there's also the National Trail system. This was created in 1968. The National trail system, established that big trails, the Appalachian and Pacific crest National Scenic Trails and then authorize a whole national system of trails to provide, as you might expect, outdoor recreation opportunities and access to areas of historic and scenic importance and cultural significance to the United States.
So, we see some of them follow routes of national historic significance, like the Lewis and Clark Trail. National Recreation Trails usually are reasonably accessible to, urban areas. Here's another example. Congress designates these, think of the famous 1200 mile Pacific Northwest Trail along the Continental Divide. This is a little segment of it. Congress designates these.
And, if you ever got really, really ambitious, you could do the Lewis and Clark Trail that extends from wood River, Illinois, to the mouth of the Columbia River near Astoria, Oregon, and follows the outbound and inbound routes of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It connects 11 states, through this, this one historic resource is a really cool thing.
And so what I'm going to conclude today with a little extra special something, it's not, a national public land designation, but it is a remarkable asset that Idaho has that makes it extra special. And the Sawtooth National Recreation Area boasts a rather rare and unique distinction. Perhaps I would suggest maybe even more special than a park label.
It was the first dark sky reserve set in the United States, and it remains one of only two in the entire country. The Idaho International Dark Sky reserve, is part of this larger system. It's a global system, actually. So again, that's one of the things that makes, what we have in Idaho all the more special.
But this Dark Sky Reserve is defined as a public or private land possessing exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment. And it's then specifically protected for its scientific, for its natural, educational, cultural heritage, public enjoyment. And so reserves typically consist of a core area meeting a minimum criteria for sky quality and natural darkness, and then a peripheral area that supports dark sky preservation in the core.
So reserves like this one are, protected and formed through a partnership of multiple land managers who all recognize the value that something like this, brings to, the world. Really. And by gosh, right here in Idaho, we have the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. So to circle back to where we began, a bit ago, who owns the West?
We do. We all do. And we have these wonderful, assets that, make it a real privilege to be a citizen of the United States. And as you see, particularly those of us living in the West have an unprecedented and unparalleled access to them in ways that folks maybe back there in West Virginia, which they might have a little bit more.
Thank you so much for tuning in with me today. And, I wish we were all together so that we could have some questions and answers. But, don't hesitate to reach out to me at Weber State, if you do.
Johanna Bringhurst: Think you so much. Sarah, I love that you finished with the dark sky. Preserve that something so special, wonderful about Idaho and something that brings all Idahoans together is our love for the land here. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr. Sara Dant : My pleasure. Absolutely.
Johanna Bringhurst: I also have to give a shout out to Sara's wonderful book, Losing Eden: Environmental History of the American West. There's an all new edition out. It's one of the best books I read this last year. Give it, give it a read, everybody. Thank you. Sarah.
Dr. Sara Dant : Thank you. It's my pleasure.