National Parks and public lands are an issue everybody cares about, after they care about everything else— and most people don’t really understand the dynamics of public land policy. This means it’s quite common for very well-intentioned supporters to completely lose their minds over comparatively unimportant things— most recently, the bad-but-not-existential restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service. But how can your average bear tell the difference between a nothingburger and a giant whirling black hole of doom? Certified veteran take-no-prisoners wilderness warrior Wes Siler joins us to suss out some helpful hints and rules of thumb. And with the big budget bills coming up this summer and all the Wile E. Coyote land grab tricks the rustlers are sure to sneak into them, it’s important the public lands movement direct the massive public freakouts to the things that matter most. We could’ve saved the Boundary Waters…

Take a listen and let us know what you think below— questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, etc. etc. etc— and make sure to follow Wes’s excellent SubStack below.

https://wessiler.substack.com

You're listening to Match My Mountains hosted by Luke Nathan Phillips

Everybody knows about the two great American traditions of cOnSeRvATiOn aNd PrEsErVaTiOn (and if you don't, we're exploring it here!) Not many people look backward beyond John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. We all assume American conservation started when the big evil oligarchs cut down too many trees and a few idealists convinced Teddy Roosevelt to stop them. But conservation came from somewhere, and its true roots go deeper into the American past-- back to the romantic artists and writers around the Transcendentalists, back to the scientists and explorers the federal government sent out to map everything, back almost to the beginning of the Republic. These guys wrote their thoughts down as they wandered around the wilderness, and subtly shaped the ideas that the first rangers in the new National Parks and National Forests would bring with them to the great adventures of public land management in the 20th Century.

It's not all hugging trees (even though that's the fun part!) Take a listen and let us know what you think below-- questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. And remember-- if you have ever had a wet dream about the U.S. Forest Service, nobody's judging you.

You're listening to Match My Mountains, with Luke Nathan Phillips.

Some notes:

-George Catlin did paint Native Americans, but the guy who went out west to get healthy was Francis Parkman, and his book was The Oregon Trail.

-"Our Common Ground: A History of America's Public Lands," by John D. Leshy

-"Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and the Creation of America's Public Lands," by John Clayton

-"Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West," by William H. Goetzmann

-"Wilderness and the American Mind," by Roderick Nash

-"Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920," by Samuel P. Hays

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lukenathanphillips.com/MatchMyMountains