Adam Sowards
Interviewee: Adam Sowards
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: Adam Sowards, Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho, joins us to provide context on the American Landscape through four laws, two places, and two people.
Date: 2022-09-23
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Doug Exton: This program is funded through a more Perfect Union, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With me today is Adam Sowards, professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho, to explore the American landscape.
Adam Sowards: Thanks so much for inviting me to do this. It's a pleasure to do so, even if the task to to talk about the American landscape in, in, say, 30 or 40 minutes, that's a big one. And I'll do my best. it's the presentation that I've prepared is very idiosyncratic, to my own interests. And, it's very much also an introduction and only an introduction, but I think there's enough material here.
Some meat here anyway for us to to chew on and think about, in a variety of ways. And I'm calling the presentation, as you can see, the American landscape and introduction through four laws, two places and two people. So the first law that I'm going to talk about today is the Land Ordinance of 1785. And the context for this, what is a theme of national unity?
The American Revolution was over in 1785. but these newly independent states were, did not have necessarily, complete agreement on all the issues or a national, a national identity. Yet, landlocked states on the East Coast had no Western land claims, but other states like Virginia and New York did. And so there was an argument among these states, these newly independent states, who had what to do with these lands.
And Maryland was holding out and saying they were not going to ratify the Articles of Confederation. They argued that the Western lands were, quote, wrested from the common enemy by blood and treasure of all of the colonies. And so it wasn't fair for that to only accrue to, to states that didn't have, hard and fast, western borders.
And so Maryland argued that those western lands should be considered common property and Maryland wins, and that those far western claims became part of the national landscape and controlled by the national government. So what we we were going to do about it, what was the nation going to do about it? And the Confederate, the Confederated Congress, the Continental Congress?
and I'll stress here, this is before the Constitution has been ratified. passed a series of ordinances. and the key one I'm talking about here is in 1785 and among the key elements of this law was the public land survey system. And you can see there on the screen, the idealized form of the landscape. The plan in this survey system was that surveyors would spread forth across the continent, measure everything out, and they would they would, create a township which was six square miles.
every township had 36 sections, which was a square mile each or 640 acres. One section of this would be reserved for schools. Four sections of it would be reserved by the national government to help fund the territories and the States. And this didn't pay any attention to nature. It didn't pay any attention to the landscape at all.
It was just this reproducible, survey, this grid was going to overlay the continent. And once the surveyors had done that, then the land would be able to be auctioned off or sold off to the highest bidder. And that was how, the landscape was going to be put into private property. This was the key idea that animated, these newly independent Americans.
The private property was going to be the thing that made them Americans, that made them independent, that made them virtuous, to use the language of the time. and it was one of the things that was going to make, I guess, them all Americans. Now, this survey system was problematic in a variety of ways. One of the purposes of it had been to provide some, revenue for the federal government, for the national government, and this didn't work out particularly well.
And the plan also had been that surveys would precede, anyone coming in to try to settle. And this also didn't work out very well because Americans moved further west and took up land. and they were considered squatters at the time, legally. And this was constantly causing trouble, conflict between indigenous peoples and those Westerners who were moving ahead of the survey chains ahead of treaties and all of that sort of thing.
So there is a constant conflict, and the survey system did not always, conform to, to the idealized plans that had been made, in Philadelphia in 1785. But, the upshot for the American landscape is it set a stage is set a stage for this, gridded property to overlay and reproduce across the continent. And it set the system for the disposal of this federal national land into individual hands.
the Homestead Act, which is the most famous law that that, that did this was in 1862. So it comes a little bit later. But this sets the stage for that. very much so. This main idea is that here is common land transformed into individual land. and it would be then developed by individual citizens. Let's move forward to place number one and both my places.
I've got two parts to them. So we'll see Yellowstone the second time in this presentation as well. So some context here, we can zoom forward into the 19th century. And the context is the need to preserve certain landscapes or certain animals. So that's the thing I want us to keep in mind on the return trip of Lewis and Clark, one of the members of the Corps discovery peeled off from from the group and headed down to what is what we know as Yellowstone.
He thought he would, make a living trading furs, and he saw some strange things in the Yellowstone area. And others who trickled into that part of the country also saw strange things. And these reports, when they got back to the East Coast, often weren't believed. if you've been to Yellowstone, you know, the strange colors and all the geysers and, the sulfuric pools and burbling mud and all of that sort of thing, it was very hard for people to believe.
But fast forward to the Seven Lakes in the 1860s and early 1870s. Americans are crossing the country and bison are being destroyed on the Great Plains. Railroads are being constructed across this vast continent, and some people stumble into Yellowstone and they again, like I was mentioning before, they're telling stories back East, one of the men who is on an expedition to explore this area is in the employ of the national.
Excuse me, the Northern Pacific Railroad and the railroads not built yet in the Yellowstone country, but it will be soon. And this was, there was an idea that maybe if tourist traffic could be confined to this railroad, the Northern Pacific, that they would be able to have a monopoly on that, which would be a good deal for the Northern Pacific.
And Jay Cooke, who headed that company. And the story goes, and this is, I think, a mythic story. But the attention paid to this place was starting to grow. And the story goes that at this expedition, they saw, people putting up fences and sitting around a campfire. There was a decision made that this this was a landscape that was too grand to be given, to individual people to be settled by individuals and that it should be open to everyone.
and so the story went that they went back to Washington, D.C., and said, this is a place that we should we should withdraw from settlement. I don't think it was quite so, in most historians don't think it was quite so selfless of these folks. but that maybe that railroad was, was important in all of this as well, regardless of the origins of that mythic story.
In 1872, Congress passed a law to create the national park where it says they would withdraw from settlement occupancy or say, oh, Yellowstone, establishing it as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people of the people. This would not be a place to be settled. It couldn't be occupied. People would be excluded from this, as their home.
It would be a place to enjoy. So this is something new. This is something new and important in American history. And initially the army was there to to enact laws and enforce the laws and to keep, poachers out and keep indigenous people out of this homeland of theirs. But beginning with the law that I talked about on the previous slide, the intent had been to take these open lands and turn them into property and here was a place where the federal government said, that's not going to work.
We're not going to do that here. It's a very exceptional landscape. You can see the painting here by Thomas Moran part of it. And this is not the sort of place where we're going to allow regular economic development to occur. And so that was, in a sense a small reversal. We'll have more reversals like that as we move forward through time to.
So let's move to the second law. We'll talk about the General Allotment Act. It's also called the Dawes Act, passed in 1887. And the context for this law is assimilation of native peoples in, North America and the United States. And much of the focus on, assimilation was a cultural assimilation. shedding of indigenous languages and forced, learning of English.
missionary work among Catholics and Protestants throughout the West to bring Christianity into these places where indigenous people had their own spiritual traditions. but by the 1880s, reservations had been, drawn on the map. many native peoples were confined to reservations and the elite, but these reservations were communally held by by tribal groups. And one idea that was central to assimilation was not those cultural elements so much as a property element.
There was a belief that individual land ownership, just like in the first law we talked about, was necessary to what Americans thought of as civilization. Private property would introduce, would require and inculcate the values of citizenship, the values of economic development and independence. Some advocates for the Dawes Act, including Henry Dawes himself, saw selfishness at the root of civilization, and the idea was if individual native people had their own land held by those held by individuals, not by families, not by tribal groups, then they would develop this idea of, of selfishness and, and would learn, I guess, good capitalist values.
and so one way to help do this, to accelerate this, this assimilation idea was allotment taking, taking the reservation at large, dividing it into, individual squares, just like that first law, that I talked about today, looked at and assign them to individual people. And this allotment process did what Teddy Roosevelt said. It was a pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.
He said this with approval rather than regret. So this was, an idea that many American leaders thought was a good idea for native peoples. This goes into effect in 1887, at a time when the reservations are accumulative. held about 140 million acres. When it was over 1934, only 52 million acres remained. And this, of course, is, after already an enormous reduction of land through treaties, through war, through all sorts of fraud and cheating that had been going on since the 15th, late 15th century, all the way into the late 19th.
This, the two visual figures on this slide demonstrate how native land was being advertised to white, because what happened this this important element of how allotment worked, what happened was, as individual plots of land were assigned to heads of households and children, and the rest of the land was considered, quote unquote, surplus. And then it was opened up to, to homestead to white homesteaders.
And that's what this other map shows, all the red areas on this one reservation, the called the reservation in north eastern Washington, is what was opened up after allotment for for non-native people. And this vastly reduces the land holdings, vastly accelerates this dispossession of property in the United States. And it creates something that's often called diminishment on these reservations, where the land is not, not well connected together, and there are all these different land ownership, statuses within it.
One point that I will make out is that some native communities, when the allotments were happening, were sure to reserve not maybe all land right next to each other in a family group, but would ensure that property was taken too, so that seasonal subsistence activities might take place. So a family might make sure that they reserve a fishing site, and they might make sure they reserve a place where they traditionally went.
And burying, during the right time of year. And that sort of thing would happen within a large and extended family group. this is, even at the time towards the end of its of when it was implemented, was widely recognized as a terrible, terrible, policy, and just disastrous in just about every single way for, for most indigenous groups.
So let's move forward to one. The first person and this is President Teddy Roosevelt. And, I'm going to use him, not a biography of him, but as an entree into government, sort of, more broadly. And he has a younger history in the West, that I'm and the landscape. And I'm not going to talk about that so much, but just his presidential time and the context that that is happening here is the context of the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century.
He becomes president in 1901. And progressivism was a political reform movement. We have believed in experts, that tried to minimize waste in all things, whether that was government or business or the use of natural resources. And there was a desire to use this expertise and professionals to plan long term various things. And Roosevelt was in many ways an institution builder.
and for example, in the American landscape, he presided over the creation and the US Reclamation Service that would use government expertise and government government money to build dams and irrigation canals to farmers to make the, quote, make the desert bloom like a rose is a common saying at the time. He also presided over the creation of the Forest Service.
The US had a Bureau of Forestry before this, but while he was president, the Forest Service is created and put into the Department of Agriculture, which is an important and important in practical ways, but also in symbolic ways that it is in agriculture instead of interior. for forest, it were viewed by foresters at the time as a crop to be managed.
and the Forest Service. The first Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, talked about doing the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run. And this really encapsulates well what those progressives are after. But besides just an institution builder, Roosevelt knew how to wield power and to exercise it as a strong executive in Congress in 1891 had granted presidents the power to reserve forests that were called, forest reserves until 1907, when they changed their name to National Forest.
And he used this power. He's not the first, of course, but he is the greatest. he reserve 141 million acres in these national forests, most at this point, all in the West. A little bit later, they're added to the East Coast, to, again, Congress had given the presidents that power. So he's not taking it. he's not taking it without permission.
I guess the one way to put it, Congress also 1906, passed the Antiquities Act, to protect landscapes where there were archeological treasures or historic value or scientific value. And, Roosevelt uses it, to reserve 18 national monuments. some historians see this as the most important conservation law ever passed. And one of the things that it does that allows the president to, bypass Congress when Congress is slow.
So some of these places are being, the artifacts are being stolen. And, this, gave the federal government a little bit of power to act quickly, to try to protect these landscapes before they got too far out of hand. He is sometimes able to go though a little bit past, what the power Congress gave him.
he wanted to protect places for birds and other wildlife, and he asked the lawyers in the executive branch, is there a law that allows him to do that? And the lawyers came back and say, we can't find a law that gives you the power to create bird or wildlife refuges. And he said, well, can you find a law that says, I can't says, no?
Mr. President, we can't. And so he said, well, I'm going to do it. And in his time he, protected 52 bird refuges and four big game refuges. And that's the beginning of our national Wildlife Refuge system. And then lastly, Roosevelt was interested in the long term cooperation with government and business. As he's just about out of office, he convenes a conference of governors where most of the governors in the United States come to Washington, D.C. and not just them, but leaders of businesses as well.
And they're just there to talk about common problems and search for common solutions. and, conservation was the theme for this. it was a pretty successful. And it creates a new commission to inventory the resources of the nation, because the first thing you have to do if you want to manage for long term sustainability, is to figure out what we have in terms of, say, coal reserves.
And so this is an attempt to think long term with the conservation of natural resources in the nation. And if you're and ever heard of the National Governors Association, they meet twice annually. Still, this that organization descends from this thing that Roosevelt was trying to do. And so for the upshot of the American landscape of Roosevelt, I think we can see the power of government, the creation of institutions and government bureaucracies, staff by experts with an effort to utilize resources, but also to protect them in a way so that they're available in the long term, in the long run.
so let's keep moving forward. Place number two, part one is New Orleans. And I know New Orleans less than I know, most of these other things. This is the one part of the talk that gets me out of the West, and that's good for me, but, not where my expertise is. And the context here might be, the idea of urban geography and the need of cities to control their environments because of all the people that are living there.
cities are these places that that gather resources together and often concentrate them and redistribute them. And it's these, these points of trade. And early in American history, New Orleans is a really important, center for, for, for that sort of distribution for the American South in the Mississippi River Valley. The other, of course, a huge, component of the urban geography of New Orleans is is below sea level, which is what that one chart is trying to show.
And so one of the ways to protect, is to protect this and other cities along the Mississippi is to build levees. those those would hold floodwaters at bay, except levees break. And that's that top right picture is trying to demonstrate is there's a breach in the levee and flood waters. pour through it there. They broke in 1735, in New Orleans, and they broke in 1849.
They broke in 1874. And they broke in 1882. And these floods all required new engineering, and rebuilding of the city. Then there was a big flood in 1927, huge flood in the Mississippi River valley, 27,000mi², were flooded, something like half $1 billion worth of damage, which today is probably $7 billion. 500 or so Americans died.
The response was to dig in harder on the levees, make them stronger, make them taller, strengthen them, extend them. And that makes a whole lot of sense. but the news in the new scheme, this new management, behind directive was a way to control the river better without those floods. The sediment that the Mississippi River carries didn't get into and onto the land.
And this would have some, ramifications later on down the road that we'll learn about in part two. A little bit. But I think the upshot here is that New Orleans is an engineered city, and all cities are to some degree. But maybe New Orleans is a little more than others, is a place that trust is dependent on technology and dependent on the luck.
Of course, both of those things can fail, and so keep that in mind as we we move forward. So now we're in the mid 20th century, and I want to talk about the Wilderness Act passed in 1964. Context here might be termed overdevelopment. The in over industrialization also overpopulation. These are concerns Americans have in the 1950s and 1960s.
It's also a time of well relative prosperity, more prosperity than Americans had known the by and large than in previous decades. And so for many, many years, proponents for the Wilderness Act worked to get it passed. And finally, in 1964, it does get passed. And I think the definition is important and it's a little long, but let me read it.
A wilderness in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man or man himself. As a visitor who does not remain, an area of wilderness is further divide defined to mean. In this act an area under that land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.
So that's what the Wilderness Act comes to be defined as. And, the law prohibits a variety of things, and it has restrictions in lots and lots of ways about what can and can't be done. There basically no commercial activity, basically no motors, no mechanized travel. This means that these places and initially I think there was a an acreage limitation.
It had to be pretty good sized for it to be reserved. These places would be where evolution was allowed to go forth, undisturbed and where human activity was largely restricted. when this law passed, it immediately protected about 9.1 million acres. But importantly, and this is part of the legacy importantly, it established, a procedure where this could be expanded.
It required both the forest Service and the Park Service, to survey its roadless areas and get back to Congress and make recommendations for new places that would be, included in the National Wilderness Preservation System. and they did. It took a little time, but they did do that. And and through most Congresses, not every single one, but the vast majority of Congresses since 1964, wilderness has been added to the system.
And today we're up, over 111 million acres in preserved wilderness. Four years after the Wilderness Act, 1968, Congress passed a Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which also put restrictions on developing rivers. So we had in these places, places of restraint for human activity. And there were lots of reasons to criticize wilderness. It excludes people and it excludes human activities that, had long been practiced.
Say the setting of fires in certain landscapes is one example. but it does provide, a lot of habitat for endangered species, where, where there's there's less competition, with human activities. outdoor recreation, of course, is really important in, in these wild spaces as well.
Last law that I'm going to talk about is the National Environmental Policy Act, which was signed by Richard Nixon on January 1st of 1970. The previous January 1969, there was a blowout on Unocal platform drilling for oil outside of Santa Barbara. 300 million gallons leaked and covered over 800mi², including eight miles of ocean of beach. Excuse me.
Killed thousands of animals and really shocked Americans. Americans had had long sort of imagined, pollution to to be able to be avoided in affluent areas like Santa Barbara. But this demonstrated that, these industrial accidents and byproducts could, could happen anywhere. And it's one of the things, not the only thing, but it's one of the things that shocked Americans into and members of Congress into trying to pass a truly national environmental policy Act.
And the 1970s were going to be the decade of the environment when he signed the law. that's what Richard Nixon said. America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment, he said. It's live literally now or never. And if you look at and I'm, I'm just skimming the surface here.
But if you look at the amount of laws passed dealing with environmental and landscape issues between about 1960 and about 1976, there's an enormous amount. They're overwhelmingly popular, all bipartisan passing with very few objections. And this is this environmental decade, although here I think that Nepa, as we call the National Environmental Policy Act, is sort of looking ahead for all the 1970s.
The environmental decade really probably starts in about 760 and goes to about 76. So this is a larger period. Now, the law itself, Nepa has, has was really important. It does a variety of things and creates a Council for Environmental Equality that is going to advise the president and issue some guidance and regulations for the federal government. But it also announces about a sets a set of values, and then it institutes a procedure.
Let me talk about these very briefly and separately. The values early on. The law says that, there's a need to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony. Now, this was a, I think, an optimistic moment in American history where the belief that we could protect the environment, we could continue to have economic growth, and there was never going to be any problems with between those two sorts of things.
It's a very optimistic, and I think that's characteristic of that age, to do that, to make sure that there is that, that, that productive harmony between humans and the non-human world. There was a procedure that was going to be put in place. And this I will pause this for a second. So those values that I just mentioned, I think that that's the, the what the policy is, this is the aim of the people writing this law was to imagine that this is the nation's environmental policy.
Is this productive harmony. So the procedure to how to get that in place, that's embedded in the law and maybe some of the reports account that it's almost an after thought to get this in here. And it's a very small, line. And so we need, whenever the federal government is going to take on a major action, there needs to be some sort of detailed statement looking at its impact.
We now call those environmental impact statements. And this process means that whenever the federal government is going to enter into a big project, that an interdisciplinary team of experts need to examine that project, identify what its potential impacts are outlined, potential alternatives to that, and their impacts, and then give the public a chance to weigh in and talk about it.
Now, none of the agencies that are building these things has to do what the public says. But the important thing is the public gets to say it. They get to, say what their preference is. And by establishing the different alternatives, it has force. It forces the conversation open. A federal agency wanting to do something 20 years before people could just make the decision and go and do it.
Nepa changes that profoundly and is supposed to be guided by that overall idea of, productive harmony. this is a transformative process. So the upshot here for the American landscape is that more people get involved studying an issue of development. This means that biologists now have to talk to engineers and vice versa, and it means that the public is involved as well.
This makes the process more litigious. It also makes it more democratic. it's, it's controversial because it slows things down. It's controversial because most things in a democracy can become controversial when the public weighs them. Moving on to place one part two and we'll talk about Yellowstone. I have to go back in time just a little bit here.
Earlier in the 20th century, the federal government and ranchers and others, agreed that predators should be removed. And so they killed off all the wolves in Yellowstone by the 1920s. And one of the results was that was, eruption of elk. And the picture in the black and white picture, it's kind of hard to see here on the on the PowerPoint is of an overgrazed range.
And in the northern part of Yellowstone, this became a huge problem as the elk population grew bigger than the, the rangeland could support. And Yellowstone, working with local people and local governments, tried to reduce the number of those elk. In the winter of 1961 to 1962, the Park Service itself killed more than 4000 elk in Yellowstone Park.
This was hugely unpopular. across the nation, but especially in local states like Montana and Wyoming. And so to solve this public relations disaster, the Secretary of the interior, who is in charge of the Park Service, ultimately, does want a government agency. You know, a government bureaucrat always does. And he creates a commission. A committee was headed by a man named Starker Leopold, and he and a group of other scientists studied this and came up with the report.
We always call it the Leopold Report. It was issued in 1963. And rather than just looking at, the the elk question in Yellowstone, the Leopold Report looks more broadly and says that national parks should, should have a new mission, in effect, to recreate their, their languages vignettes of primitive America. they argue that the parks should represent the same biotic associations that had been present at the time.
The first white people showed up into these places. This is an arbitrary date, of course, and there's some problematic ways of thinking about nature in these these ways. But the Leopold Report really lays down the line and says we need to reintroduce predators. They didn't think they could do wolves initially. They just thought that was a sort of a political nonstarter.
But there was a need to do that and to re to favor native species and reintroduce them if possible. So the direction of the Park Service was to protect these lands as and these biotic associations as they had existed at the time of first contact with white people. And if you if those couldn't be preserved, they were to be reintroduced.
So it's an attempt to be a more ecologically minded agency and a little bit less of a zoo, which is what some of the national parks sort of ended up being like museums and zoos, if they sort of, if they promote it, they promoted tourism a bit too much. But it also, in trying to be more ecological, was giving the Park Service the green light to more intensively manage things in this context, predators ultimately were reintroduced.
You see a wolf. There's one of the first wolves that was brought back to Yellowstone in 1995. One of the other things that the Leopold Report specifically told us that we needed to do, in managing the national parks was to reintroduce fire where it had been a natural part of the landscape. and so the Park Service takes the lead in the federal government applying fire to new places.
testing that out, experimenting with that. and if not applying it themselves, allowing certain fires to burn for many decades at this point, federal agencies had all been, trying to stamp out fires as quickly as they could when they were discovered. And now, under certain circumstances, it was going to be the the role of the agency is to allow fires to burn and become, quote unquote, more natural.
This sort of plays out in disaster way. In 1988 with the Yellowstone fires. that's what the picture there on the PowerPoint slide is depicting. and as structures are threatened and as thousands and thousands of acres are being burned in national parks. but the Leopold Report more broadly, inspires not just, the National Park Service but inspires federal land agencies of all around.
It's really part of the design guys that comes out of the 1960s with the Wilderness Act and different ecological values framing how agencies are going to do their job. And so it really there's an effort to this is sort of a strange concept, but an effort to be more natural and to allow more ecological processes to, to be allowed to proceed within these landscapes that are protected in these, these big federal agencies.
So let's go to place number two, part two. And this is New Orleans again in the context here, I just want to emphasize is, is how bound up the American landscape in the American nation is with petrochemicals. And there's a particular spot called Cancer Alley between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where there's more than 150 petrochemical plants, and what cancer rates are about 50% higher than they normally would be.
if you know anything about American history, you're probably not surprised to recognize that Cancer Alley is, is inhabited largely by African-Americans, too. So people of color here are in a very polluted landscape and a very unhealthy landscape. That's been the case for quite some time. there's organizing, by grassroots organizations in Cancer Alley. And this is, I think, also an element of the American landscape that's really important to look at, is the, the, the grassroots organizing to oppose pollution, health risks, public health risks.
led often, if not mostly by women in their communities to to fight against this sort of pollution and health. The health risks. The cancer alley is one key part of southern Louisiana. But another one, of course, is flooding, because this is, this is because it's the southern Louisiana, and it's really, really low in Katrina in 2005.
Hurricane Katrina, of course, is a disaster with nearly 2000 who die and billions of property damage. This is a governing failure and an engineering failure. If you're if you remember back when I was on New Orleans part one, I said technology and luck is is what the city depends on. And both of those things can fail. And they both failed for sure.
In 2005. And the rebuilding has been a difficult process ever since. In the last part of New Orleans is really outside of New Orleans. And is that that black and red figure, which is the picture of a southern Louisiana, and the red is land that has been lost, and or is projected to be lost. And this is for a couple of reasons.
One, those sediments that used to come down the Mississippi River and then when it would overtop its banks, that helped build land with that, not happening with the levees, now that replenishment doesn't happen. And the other half of that is rising sea level as well as part of climate change. As as we're moving into the 21st, well into the 21st century at this point.
So Louisiana or New Orleans is, is is a very industrialized place that that is dealing with some of the worst consequences of the petrochemical dependent nature of society and economy that we have developed by this point in our history. So the lecture title was An Introduction to the American Landscape through Four Laws, two places and two people and the last people.
The last person is us. And I think that it's important for us to recognize that at this point in 2022, we have a place we as citizens have a place to sit around a table like that one depicted, or to show up at a public hearing like that, or to go out with family and friends across generations and look at the landscape like the other photo on the slide.
And in these contexts, in boardrooms and public hearings, among friends, we can develop and share what we want, the sense of values that we might have and use our our power as citizens to contact our elected officials to, insist on our values being represented in Congress and on the land. When we look back at this long history that I've done in a very short amount of time, we see that over time there are more opportunities for that to happen.
it is not a perfect system. It's not today. It never has been. but it is the system that we have and our participation is absolutely central to making sure that the landscape that we share as Americans, we get to have an input on what that looks like and who gets to participate in it. And with that, I'll stop and see if there are any questions that I can answer for you.
Doug Exton: Yeah. Thank you so much for, you know, such an abbreviated history. I know talking about the entire US as a country, let alone such a detail heavy topic in such a short amount of time is a very hard task. So I think you did that extremely well. The first question that I have for you is when you were talking about Roosevelt, you mentioned the comment making the desert bloom like a rose and how the forests were viewed as crops, essentially, with those kind of ideals and notions floating around at that time, did that impact how other landscapes were viewed in the public eye, whether, you know, either the American citizenry or the federal government?
I'm thinking about places that are, you know, more area like deserts or, you know, even though Alaska wasn't part of the country yet, you know, those, you know, colder climates, stuff like that, that weren't that typical lush, more East Coast style environs, so to speak.
Adam Sowards: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that it takes a while for Americans to, break out of their habits of imagining 160 acre homestead that could support a family. And so one of the ways they do break out of that is by by the failure of that vision, especially when they hit the West and when they hit the desert part of the West or the mountainous part of the west, or eventually, the cold part of the west in Alaska, those hundred and 60 acres can't be transformed really quickly and easily into, a farm that can, support a family at the same time that that realization is slowly coming to
bear. we're becoming an industrial nation where we don't all need 160 acre farms to raise our cattle and pigs and crops. and so that becomes maybe less and less important. but as that happens, I think we have we rely on those greater technological, interventions in the landscape, whether it's dams or eventually long range transmission wires to get power to our homes or water from the mountains or where it's wet, to the cities like Los Angeles, where it's not so wet.
and that, sort of changes the nature and the scale, I think, of the landscape changes that are happening.
Doug Exton: And you mentioned the Leopold Act and how one of the main focuses of that was, you know, let's restore these areas to a time, you know, pre-contact, where, you know, white people and to me, and I know it's very easy for me to sit here in 2022 and have this perspective. was there any explicit reason on why the Park Service didn't look to, you know, the native nations, you know, with, forest management such as the fires?
You know, because I know, especially in the last two years, there's been a lot of talk publicly about, you know, let's make that transition back to these indigenous management practices, especially after all the fires that went up and down, the West Coast region, Portland.
Adam Sowards: Yeah. So I suspect that you could find pockets where some listening happened. But I think overall in 1962 and 63, when the Leopold Committee was meeting, they just they weren't thinking about this. They weren't listening to indigenous people. Indigenous people were not in, positions of power in the Park Service or the Forest Service at this time. and I think, I mean, part of it is just not listening.
And not recognizing, the long standing history of people on these places. So it's really a naive view that the scientists have sort of boils down to or put a, you know, a figurative fence around this landscape and exclude everything, and it'll go back to the way it used to be. And that's not, of course, how it used to look and how it used to work.
And it wasn't going to work that way. and with the diversification of the agencies themselves, with the diversification that, you know, also includes diversification of, of the knowledge that goes into the the science involved and the management involved. Soon more and more questions get asked and more and more answers become more sophisticated and do incorporate. I mean, this takes a long time.
well, I think we're still barely scratching the surface here, but, there's an an attempt to gradually include, what's sometimes called traditional ecological knowledge into these management schemes. but we're, I think just getting going, to see where that's where to see where we'll be in 50 years is, is anyone's guess. But I think it's a quite different looking ahead than if we look back 50 years.
Doug Exton: And in your opinion, since the U.S does have such a diverse landscape, you know, not just with the continental US but including all of our territories, you go from the tropical islands in the Pacific, you know, to the cold tundras of Alaska, to the lush forests scattered throughout. In your opinion and your experience, have all of those landscapes been used as a, you know, symbols of unity, you know, to bring such a large geographic country together, you know, and create that sense of a union or, you know, has that aspect not really been, you know, utilized in terms of, you know, a national rallying cry, so to speak.
Adam Sowards: Yeah, that's a great question. And, I don't think I mentioned it, although I should have, the preservation of Yellowstone National Park or Grand Canyon National Park was very much, that that American landscape was very much, a form of American identity. in the 19th century, the United States was fairly insecure as a nation. we don't have big old cathedrals here the way they do in Europe.
And so what was going to be our, our great unifying identity? And the landscape was one of them. Look at these amazing mountains. We have. Look at the geysers in Yellowstone. Look at this huge canyon that there is in the middle of the Arizona desert. I don't know that all Americans I don't know if all Americans see that as part of their birthright.
I think some very much do. yeah, I think it was. And Abby, who is an important to kind of a kind of classic writer in the 1960s who said, you know, I may never get to Alaska, but I'm glad it's there. And we should protected a lot of it as wilderness. I don't have to be there to identify with that place.
And I think that that is common across a lot of Americans. Not all. The other thing is, though, I think that many people get very attached to their local landscape, and that may be enough to know your own place, the place that matters most to you, and the ins and outs of it, and to recognize that it's part of a larger nation, that we do share with 330, 340 million other people, something like that, can be a pretty powerful thing that that we can be connected to that local landscape, part of a larger national landscape and then part of a globe, because we all knit together, through a shared atmosphere, for example.
Doug Exton: And the last question I have for you today is this program has been funded in part by the more perfect union initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And that initiative really focuses on celebrating America with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and, you know, that sense of creating a more perfect union.
And what steps can we do as citizens and as Americans, you know, regardless of race, gender, creed, all of that to create a more perfect union. Do you see any ways on how the American landscape can be used to help push that needle closer towards that line of creating a more perfect union?
Adam Sowards: Yeah. another good question. It taps into my idealism, which I am sometimes embarrassed to have because I think we're supposed to be all cynical, in 2022. But, I believe pretty strongly in democracy. And, my last book, which is on the public lands, uses a metaphor of the table, which is why I've got it here on this final slide to.
And I think that the land themselves that we do share in common can be the table around, which can be one of the things that we can all gather around together. And I talk a lot about the table throughout the book, and the way I think it is useful is early on. If we're using this metaphorically or not, that many people got to sit at the table, and then more and more people got together at the table.
And as more and more people are there, if they're able to share that space and to and they have to share it, they can't be dominated by one person. If it is a round table, like as in the picture on the on the final slide, it shows that we can all see it. We can see it from our own perspective, because we're going to be sitting in a different spot at that table, and we bring our own unique values to those places.
But one of the problems we have is that the table becomes long and skinny rather than round, because if it's long and skinny, then we can't see the people at the other end. We won't be able to recognize what what their values are and what they're trying to say. So I do believe that one of the places then we can, as Americans gather together, is around the land as the table that that unites us all.
that doesn't mean we all share the same thing. It really doesn't. It's just not the nature of democracy. But if we can share space and listen and, offer our own authentic perspectives and values, and if we can hear each other, we can make incremental improvements. and sometimes incremental improvements is all we're after. All. All we can expect.
even though many of us want more now. But I think that I think there's a path.