At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Around the same time, the National Park Service announced that it aimed to invoke the Wilderness Act to limit the use of fixed anchors on Yosemite’s iconic big wall climbs.

How did a law created 60 years ago to protect nature in undeveloped areas come to do something else entirely—and, in the process, become counterproductive to its own goals? Today, the Wilderness Act of 1964 preserves nearly 175,000 square miles of public land in the United States, largely roadless expanses only accessible on foot or pack animal. We need to preserve such wild spaces more than ever: They are where threatened species and their habitats can best flourish with minimal human impacts.

But the California national parks where environmental stewards are applying to the Wilderness Act are neither remote nor roadless. Instead, the appeals to the Wilderness Act in those parks are part of a shift in approach to the law that may, in the end, run counter to its aims—and that needs to be rethought.

In addition to these cases, the Wilderness Act has increasingly been used to limit scientific research in protected areas. This includes research on habitats being ravaged by the effects of climate change and disease outbreaks that directly affect the biodiversity that the act seeks to protect. Many of the limited activities are essential to understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes needed to manage these lands in the future, but they are not permitted—or are permitted only in highly exceptional cases—under the Wilderness Act.

As conservation biologists, we work in remote natural laboratories around the globe. Dan Blumstein spends his summers studying marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) near Crested Butte, Colorado. Crested Butte is a renowned recreation and nature tourism destination; RMBL is an internationally recognized research station that abuts the 283-square-mile Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Area.

Over the past decade, the RMBL has started to host hydrological and atmospheric studies with staggering possibilities thanks to new, remote-sensing technology that can collect constant data. Small weather stations and sensors create increasingly precise models of the ground growth conditions and help us understand precipitation and snowmelt. Conducting these studies near Crested Butte, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, is essential to understanding the hydrological dynamics that ultimately provide water for 40 million people in the southwestern United States and northeastern Mexico.

However, Wilderness Act protections mean that scientists cannot establish weather stations, deploy semi-permanent sensors, establish remotely triggered cameras to monitor wildlife, permanently mark individual plants with small metal tags, or leave small, plastic rain gauges out on these lands. There is a process to request exceptions, but it is arduous—and the government almost always denies them.

Should there be research in Wilderness Areas, and if so, what degree of research-related impacts are acceptable? Should we, as a society, permit recreational use, but not science in these minimally impacted areas? The government must reevaluate how the Wilderness Act is deployed. We assert this not because we view natural areas as unimportant, but rather because we view them as essential resources that can help us manage biodiversity.

Human-driven change—an unplanned global experiment on the Earth—is happening everywhere in this Anthropocene era. We are living through a global experiment with the planet’s biodiversity. We urgently need wilderness areas with limited human impacts as safe harbors for the biodiversity we depend on. At the same time, it’s futile to pretend that those areas experience no human impacts at all.

Scientific research helps find solutions for restoring habitat and protecting biodiversity while managing the impacts of humans. This includes research on how human activities alter the traits and resilience of existing species. For instance, Thomas Smith researches how climate change will affect biodiversity in Central Africa as species have to move to new habitats or adapt to avoid extinction. He and others used genomics to identify where a given species would be best adapted to future, warmer climates. Then, they worked with conservation officials to select areas for new parks that would best protect species.

In the Anthropocene, we need the Wilderness Act more than ever before, in part because humans’ myriad assaults on the environment have increased the value of minimally impacted land. Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks welcome millions of annual visitors, and they serve an important—but entirely different—purpose than the areas the act protects, which are both repositories of nature and necessary places to study ecological processes.

When people—often with good intentions—invoke the act in ways that hamstring both effective federal management of public lands and scientific research, we’re left with the Wilderness Act being used as a bludgeon against effective natural resource management and a barrier to obtaining necessary scientific knowledge. As we face climate change’s unprecedented changes on our natural surroundings, we also have to rethink how we interpret the laws that protect those surroundings in novel and unexpected ways.

Aldo Leopold, the father of conservation biology, once said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Leveraging the very best science and ecological knowledge gained from wild areas to become better stewards of our small planet is one way to help redress those wounds.

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The West has a checkerboard problem.

According to the company behind the popular hunting app OnX, 530,000 acres of public lands in California alone are inaccessible to the general public. That’s because they alternate with privately owned lands in the shape of a checkerboard.

It’s easy to see the checkerboard and its inaccessible public lands just by looking at a road atlas. The western Mojave Desert, the swath northwest of Lake Tahoe, and the area between Redding and the Oregon border all have alternating square-mile checks of private and public land. But it’s often invisible on the ground because no fences or visible property lines mark the change in land tenure. If private landowners choose to restrict access across their property, as they have in popular hunting areas in Wyoming and Montana, the public can be prosecuted for trespassing if they pass through to get to the adjacent public land—even if they “corner-cross,” moving diagonally between the squares.

Can the public get access to these lands back? In the eastern Mojave Desert, where I’ve conducted research for a decade, the land ownership map remained a checkerboard until 2000, when a groundbreaking purchase added over half a million acres to the public domain. But while this deal improved access to the California desert, it took more than five years of negotiation to achieve. Even with willing sellers, buyers, and millions of dollars on the line, it shows that public access is nearly impossible to secure in a system that privileges private property.

The checkerboard came about in the 1880s, when the federal government—which had claimed California as its own by dispossessing Indigenous peoples—gifted every other square-mile section along the region’s transcontinental corridors to railroad companies. Congress saw the checkerboard as a novel solution to a practical problem: how to help finance transcontinental railroads without paying for them in gold. By checkerboarding the land, the government ensured that the railroad companies couldn’t sell it to rich landholders in large parcels. The people behind these deals likely imagined that the checkerboard would quickly disappear into a landscape of small homesteads, keeping Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream alive while settling the West.

A 1942 map exaggerated railroad land grant holdings. Courtesy of Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography.

Things didn’t go according to plan. In high-value timber areas in Oregon, railroads worked with so-called “dummy entrymen” to file for the alternating public lands sections, consolidate landownership for the railroad, and sell the lands at high prices to large lumber interests. In low-value areas like the Mojave Desert, meanwhile, no settlers wanted to buy the land. Railroad historian David F. Myrick estimated that in San Bernardino County alone, 853,265 acres remained in railroad hands in the early 20th century.

By the 1970s, the federal government—like the railroad—had largely given up on the project of selling lands to homesteaders. With the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, it moved to permanently retain public lands rather than trying to sell them off. But that didn’t get rid of the checkerboard—the private squares remained in the hands of landowners, posing a problem for federal land management agencies. When Congress created the Bureau of Land Management’s East Mojave National Scenic Area in 1976, for instance, parts of its boundaries surrounded a dense swath of checkerboard, which prevented the agency from building access roads or making improvements to those areas.

This came to a head in 1994, when the California Desert Protection Act changed the East Mojave National Scenic Area into the Mojave National Preserve and handed it over to the National Park Service.

After decades of ignoring its desert lands, the Catellus Development Corporation, the company that had taken over the Southern Pacific Land Company’s holdings, sent teams to survey its lands for minerals and development opportunities, and put up large “For Sale” signs. Conservationists feared that this would result in widespread development across the desert, negating the work that they had done to pass the Desert Protection Act.

The federal government tried to strike a deal with Catellus, and failed. Then, a land trust called the Wildlands Conservancy stepped in to broker a deal. But nothing like it had ever been done before: How would a non-profit go about purchasing a half-million acres of land in a checkerboard?

By 2003, the Wildlands Conservancy acquired over half a million acres of desert land from Catellus Development Corporation, much of it “checkerboarded” decades before. Courtesy of The Wildlands Conservancy.

Even simply surveying the purchase posed a major hurdle—it necessitated someone check all that land—more than 0.5% of California—for dumping, hazardous materials, and development.

Wildlands decided to use aerial surveys, but GPS was still a relatively new technology, and prone to user error. One of the Wildlands’ former employees told me that the first flight ended up being a full quarter-mile off, because the GPS was using the wrong map projection.

In the end, slightly over 100 of the 631 parcels that were part of the acquisition required environmental remediation to clean up dumping and remnants of mining and squatting. Some of the parcels—including one that was part of a railroad “Y” where trains turned around—were so degraded that they couldn’t be remediated in time for the sale.

By the end of 2003, Wildlands had acquired a final total of 560,831 acres of desert land from Catellus. Through a combination of Land and Water Conservation Funds sales and donation, Wildlands turned these lands over to the federal government to become part of the Mojave National Preserve. The massive purchase kept open access to 3.7 million acres of public land that could have easily been eliminated by private landowners.

The purchase was possible, in part, because the acquired lands were surrounded by areas with conservation designations, or recognized as critical habitat for the federally listed desert tortoise. When areas don’t have such designations, it’s harder for land trusts to purchase land, because they have to make a case for their conservation value. It’s especially challenging to justify lands as conservation purchases if they have already been developed or mined.

The most important factor in the Mojave National Preserve deal, though, was that Catellus was willing to sell. That isn’t the case for many of the remaining checkerboards today, which are smaller than they were in the 1990s, owned by more people, and more entrenched as private land.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped groups like the Mojave Desert Land Trust from trying. Each year, they reach out to thousands of owners of land in the East Mojave to try to convince them to sell their lands. But their transactions are tiny in comparison to the Catellus deal, averaging around 100 acres per purchase, and many people just aren’t willing to sell.

Without intervention from Congress to sell or trade other federal lands in exchange for checkerboard lands to ensure the right of public access to all public lands through easements or condemnation or to designate checkerboarded areas as having conservation value, hundreds of thousands of acres of public land aren’t likely to become accessible anytime soon. As long as the checkerboard persists throughout the American West, 19th-century railroad robber barons continue to deny the public access to federally owned lands.

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If you know where to go in Death Valley National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve, Glacier Peak Wilderness, or Bears Ears National Monument, you might come across the remnants of a tramway or a pile of mine tailings or a rusted tank. The artifacts of industrial activity can be startling in the otherwise tranquil natural scene. But there is no mistake. Despite being miles inside a national park, a designated wilderness, or some other conservation area, you can encounter mining claims—they are everywhere. With resource development on public lands once again a matter of national debate, it has become increasingly important to look back and ask: How did protected places and mining get so entangled?

One hundred and fifty years ago, Congress established two foundational precedents for our national landscape a mere 10 weeks apart: the Yellowstone National Park Act, setting in motion “America’s best idea,” and the General Mining Act, which opened public lands to mining exploration. Between March and May, it seems, President Ulysses S. Grant swung from one apex of the pendulum to the other, making it impossible to settle and privatize the public land in Yellowstone while making it easy to extract valuable minerals from almost anywhere they were found without paying a cent. While these decisions seem diametrically opposed, they have shared priorities that ushered in a new land regime in the U.S., based on a fundamental notion of American land defined by a history of Native expropriation, economic liberalism, and segregated land uses.

On March 1, 1872, President Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Act. It “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” some two million acres in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, leaning just a bit into Idaho and Montana. In this remarkable landscape of geysers and bison and bright sulfuric pools, no one was permitted to settle or occupy the land. The resources—timber, minerals, and the like—were to be kept “from injury or spoliation” and all natural spectacles would be retained in “their natural condition.” No “wanton destruction” of game or fish “for the purposes of merchandise or profit” would be permitted.

But on May 10th, President Grant enacted a bill that has facilitated wanton destruction across many of the country’s public lands and created massive wealth for a few. The General Mining Act of 1872 declared all the U.S. public domain where valuable minerals might be found to be “free and open to exploration and purchase.” This legislation legitimized mining on all surveyed or unsurveyed lands for personal or corporate gain. (The mining that preceded it, such as the California Gold Rush of 49er fame, was simply overlooked trespassing.) The law remains in effect, an emblem to the exploitation of natural wealth for profit as the highest possible good assigned to the natural world.

Both laws thrummed with the cadence of dispossession. From the earliest days of the republic, the nation’s land policy was to take from Indigenous peoples—by war, by treaty, by duplicity or fraud, it did not matter—and then transfer into the private hands of yeoman farmers producing food and virtue on homesteads scattered across the continent. These 1872 laws were partly made possible by the fact that the federal government had ended treaty-making in 1871. Underneath the seemingly empty “pleasuring-grounds” of Yellowstone were the forced absences of Apsaalooké and Shoshone peoples and many other Indigenous Nations in Yellowstone and subsequent public parks.

Similarly, the great mineral rushes, both before and after the 1872 law, routinely invaded Indigenous territory, often in explicit violation of treaty agreements. This stripped land, wealth, and health from Native peoples and provoked ongoing violence, exemplifying a common North American story. The 1872 laws made land either a museum or a sacrifice zone, not a place to live. National parks—and later, national forests, monuments, grasslands, or wildlife refuges—and mining sites, once Native homes, quickly redefined those residents as trespassers.

Both laws also hailed to corporate boards. The Northern Pacific Railroad’s tracks were not laid down yet, but the route took it near Yellowstone’s northern boundary. Like many of the transcontinental railroads, the Northern Pacific faced financial trouble and guarded its territory fiercely from competition. Jay Cooke, the head of the company, saw the possible park as a future revenue stream, and used his influence to encourage Congress to create the park, further entangling corporate interests with national parks.

The General Mining Law benefited entrepreneurial and corporate development in a much more straightforward way. Obtaining land for mining was simple: locate valuable minerals; claim and take them. If they wanted, the mineral developers could also pay a low fee of $2.50 per acre for placer claims and $5 per acre for lode claims to buy the land. These easy terms conformed to a guiding belief of nineteenth-century economic liberalism- that the government was supposed to facilitate economic development (and then stand back). The federal government and U.S. taxpayers receive no royalties from the minerals subject to the mining law. Over the next century, an area almost the size of Connecticut dropped into private hands on the cheap. Although popular culture depicts a lone grizzled man with a mule and a pan bent over a creek, mining looked much more like underpaid workers with drills rat-a-tatting in the deep dark of western mountains.

In contrast to the conservation and recreation opportunities offered by the creation of the national parks, the General Mining Law brought about major environmental harms, including terrible waste, and continues to do so. Although few large-scale hardrock mining operations have launched in recent decades, 100 million acres of public land can still be explored and, if minerals are located, the process of claiming and taking them is largely the same as it was in the 1870s. Though Congress put a moratorium on patenting the claims in the 1990s, ending outright ownership, extracting minerals does not require land ownership- and mining claims close off the lands to other uses.

Meanwhile, environmental regulations and the bonds posted to support reclamation often are insufficient. To date, more than 50 billion tons of waste have been left behind after mining and processing, harming all manner of lakes and lands surrounding mines. The law’s rare reforms include a leasing system for some resources (like coal and gas) and improved environmental remediation. But the General Mining Law enjoys strong allies in resource-dependent congressional districts who have resisted the few calls for fundamental reform, such as fair royalties and a fund to clean up abandoned mines, that have popped up from time to time.

How can we square Ulysses S. Grant’s contradictory imperatives—to protect the natural world at all costs versus to exploit it without concern? In addition to the way both laws alienated land from its original inhabitants, they reveal a fundamental idea that animates American culture and law: that land is meant to be owned or controlled. From that perspective, tonnage and tourism, price per ounce and entrance fees, show themselves as simply different forms of commodification. While open-pit mines differ from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, both require, according to the prevailing ethos, an owner or management goals approved by Congress.

One hundred and fifty years later, we find it hard to conceive of any other way. People have inhabited the continent since time immemorial, but this system is only a century-and-a-half old: Change is possible.

The post What Do Mining Claims and National Parks Have in Common? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While I have been going to Yosemite since I was a kid, this month I made my first trip as a father. And I wondered if my city slicker boys could handle a visit to the Sierra wilderness. The Three Stooges are aggressive urbanites who haunt coffee shops, ride the Los Angeles Metro Rail, and are hard to coax outside for any adventure more ambitious than our local playground.

I shouldn’t have worried. Today’s Yosemite has been changed so much by record crowds, and the limits put in place to try to control them, that it no longer feels like a place apart. Indeed, as California has become a state with the highest urban population density in America, Yosemite—with its crowded main valley, choked trails, and tough traffic—fits right in.

For a couple of generations, the National Park Service and other park stakeholders have been trying to reduce the impact visitors have on the park—and with good reason. We humans have been loving Yosemite to death, bearing gifts of everything from pollution to non-native plants.

But the park’s efforts to reduce impacts have followed a familiar California illogic: that restrictions on growth will solve the problems of growth and keep people from coming. Just as state and local limits on traffic and housing haven’t prevented increases in people driving or living in California, Yosemite’s limits on visitors haven’t reduced the number of people who try to get there.

Indeed, visits to Yosemite have soared, from an annual average of 3.6 million in the previous decade to more than five million people in 2016. It’s a safe bet that those numbers will keep going up. The world is experiencing an epic surge in tourism—going from 25 million annual foreign tourist trips in 1960 to more than 1 billion annually these days—that has put enormous strains on destinations from Venice, Italy, and Machu Picchu to America’s greatest national parks.

In Yosemite, you’ll find about 90 percent of visitors crammed into Yosemite Valley, which is less than 5 percent of the park’s 750,000 acres. In the summer, the massive crowds can create traffic jams worse than those on the 405.

The park relies on reservations and permit systems to control access to everything from hiking routes to campgrounds. But reservations fill up fast, discouraging people from staying overnight, or coming at all. Costs can be a further deterrent; a room at the low-frills Yosemite Valley Lodge is now running $270 per night, and entrance fees for the park itself are $35 per vehicle.

If you do manage to get to the park, you’ll get advice that might be familiar if you’ve been to jam-packed Disneyland—arrive early, avoid the most popular places, and, above all, be patient with the crowds.

I took my family—the Three Stooges, my wife, and her parents—to Yosemite at a time you’re supposed to visit: early spring, before the hordes turn the valley into a parking lot. But the spring imposes its own limits on visitors. Some trails were impassable because of snow. Half Dome Village was shut for repairs from winter storms. Meanwhile, the park had put up signage warning visitors to stay away from El Capitan because of nesting peregrine falcons.

Roads—like Tioga and Glacier Point—were closed for the season. So, except for the sequoia groves, we spent almost all our time in the crowded valley. The 2 1/2 mile Mariposa Grove trek would be the longest hike we managed—and completing that one involved enduring some Stooge whining. Otherwise, we kept things easy, with small walks up to Mirror Lake (with its awesome Half Dome views), through meadows, over to Yosemite Falls, and into the other-worldly mists of Bridalveil Fall.

Just like back home, we were never far from a Starbucks, this one at Yosemite Valley Lodge. To get around the valley, we squeezed into the free shuttle buses, which are even more cramped than BART at rush hour. 21st-century Yosemite is not for claustrophobes.

My favorite part of Yosemite’s wilderness might have been the lack of reliable internet access; my phone only really worked in the village. By the second day, my two older boys, missing internet video games, started asking when we could “return to the Wi-Fi world.”

My family, of course, was just the latest in a long line of tourists. Visitors had already infiltrated Yosemite by 1864, when Abraham Lincoln protected it by signing the country’s first preservation land grant. Congress went further in 1890, establishing Yosemite National Park as a forest reservation. Just over a decade later, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt camping in Yosemite to convince him even more protections were needed.

I had reread Muir before the trip, but the naturalist who gave us Yosemite has never felt more dead. Muir encouraged direct contact with nature—he climbed a huge wall of ice beneath Yosemite Falls, rode an avalanche, and explored every inch of the place. In today’s Yosemite, you’re constantly reminded to stay on the trails, because your very presence in the place, combined with the carbon-producing existence of humanity, is damaging.

Some of the wonder Yosemite inspires has been replaced with guilt: Should we even be here in the first place? The most recent management plan for the park, from 2014, is full of detailed limits, including capping the number of people in Yosemite Valley to just over 20,000 days, but media reports suggest that actual attendance often exceeds that. The park, unfortunately, lacks a truly forward-thinking plan, either to make it vastly wilder or more accessible.

Perhaps the park service could dust off its 1980s plans to tear down buildings, prohibit vehicles, and rely on futuristic trains to move people around. Or maybe humanity and Yosemite, like partners in a rocky marriage, need a break from each other.

Closing the park for a stretch—5 years? 10 years?—would draw protests. But it would give the park a little time to heal, and to develop more extensive plans to better protect this wonderful California place from my family and yours.

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On August 21, 1915, the Conklin family departed Huntington, New York on a cross-country camping trip in a vehicle called the “Gypsy Van.” Visually arresting and cleverly designed, the 25-foot, 8-ton conveyance had been custom-built by Roland Conklin’s Gas-Electric Motor Bus Company to provide a maximum of comfort while roughing it on the road to San Francisco. The New York Times gushed that had the “Commander of the Faithful” ordered the “Jinns… to produce out of thin air… a vehicle which should have the power of motion and yet be a dwelling place fit for a Caliph, the result would have fallen far short of the actual house upon wheels which [just] left New York.”

For the next two months, the Conklins and the Gypsy Van were observed and admired by thousands along their westward route, ultimately becoming the subjects of nationwide coverage in the media of the day. Luxuriously equipped with an electrical generator and incandescent lighting, a full kitchen, Pullman-style sleeping berths, a folding table and desk, a concealed bookcase, a phonograph, convertible sofas with throw pillows, a variety of small appliances, and even a “roof garden,” this transport was a marvel of technology and chutzpah.

For many Americans, the Conklin’s Gypsy Van was their introduction to Recreational Vehicles, or simply, RVs. Ubiquitous today, our streamlined motorhomes and camping trailers alike can trace their origins to the time between 1915 and 1930, when Americans’ urge to relax by roughing it and their desire for a host of modern comforts first aligned with a motor camping industry that had the capacity to deliver both.

The Conklins did not become famous simply because they were camping their way to California. Camping for fun was not novel in 1915: It had been around since 1869, when William H.H. Murray published his wildly successful Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, America’s first “how-to” camp guidebook.

Ever since Murray, camping literature has emphasized the idea that one can find relief from the noise, smoke, crowds, and regulations that make urban life tiresome and alienating by making a pilgrimage to nature. All one needed to do was head out of town, camp in a natural place for a while, and then return home restored in spirit, health and sense of belonging. While in the wild, a camper—like any other pilgrim—had to undergo challenges not found at home, which is why camping has long been called “roughing it.” Challenges were necessary because, since Murray’s day, camping has been a recapitulation of the “pioneer” experience on the pre-modern “frontier” where the individual and family were central and the American nation was born.

Camping’s popularity grew slowly, but got more sophisticated when John B. Bachelder offered alternatives to Murray’s vision of traveling around the Adirondacks by canoe in his 1875 book Popular Resorts and How to Reach Them. Bachelder identified three modes of camping: on foot (what we call “backpacking”); on horseback, which allowed for more gear and supplies; and with a horse and wagon. This last was most convenient, allowing for the inclusion ‘of more gear and supplies as well as campers who were unprepared for the rigors of the other two modes. However, horse-and-wagon camping was also the most costly and geographically limited because of the era’s poor roads. In short order, Americans across the country embraced all three manners of camping, but their total number remained relatively small because only the upper middle classes had several weeks’ vacation time and the money to afford a horse and wagon.

Over the next 30 years, camping slowly modernized. In a paradoxical twist, this anti-modern, back-to-nature activity has long been technologically sophisticated. As far back as the 1870s, when a new piece of camping gear appeared, it was often produced with recently developed materials or manufacturing techniques to improve comfort and convenience. Camping enthusiasts, promoters, and manufacturers tended to emphasize the positive consequences of roughing it, but, they added, one didn’t have to suffer through every discomfort to have an authentic and satisfying experience. Instead, a camper could “smooth” some particularly distressing roughness by using a piece of gear that provided enhanced reliability, reduced bulk, and dependable outcomes.

Around 1910 the pace of camping’s modernization increased when inexpensive automobiles began appearing. With incomes rising, car sales exploded. At the same time, vacations became more widespread—soon Bachelder’s horses became motor vehicles, and all the middle classes started to embrace camping. The first RV was hand built onto an automobile in 1904. This proto-motorhome slept four adults on bunks, was lit by incandescent lights and included an icebox and a radio. Over the course of the next decade, well-off tinkerers continued to adapt a variety of automobiles and truck chassis to create even more spacious and comfortable vehicles, but a bridge was crossed in 1915 when Roland and Mary Conklin launched their Gypsy Van.

Unlike their predecessors, the wealthy Conklins modified a bus into a fully furnished, double-deck motorhome. The New York Times, which published several articles about the Conklins, was not sure what to make of their vehicle, suggesting that it was a “sublimated English caravan, land-yacht, or what you will,” but they were certain that it had “all the conveniences of a country house, plus the advantages of unrestricted mobility and independence of schedule.” The family’s journey was so widely publicized that their invention became the general template for generations of motorhomes.

When the Conklin family traveled from New York to San Francisco in their luxury van, the press covered their travels avidly. Courtesy of the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress.

The appeal of motorhomes like the Conklins’ was simple and clear for any camper who sought to smooth some roughness. A car camper had to erect a tent, prepare bedding, unpack clothes, and establish a kitchen and dining area, which could take hours. The motorhome camper could avoid much of this effort. According to one 1920s observer, a motorhome enthusiast simply “let down the back steps and the thing was done.” Departure was just as simple.

By the middle of the 1920s, many Americans of somewhat more average means were tinkering together motorhomes, many along the lines made popular by the Conklins, and with the economy booming, several automobile and truck manufacturers also offered a limited number of fully complete motorhomes, including REO’s “speed wagon bungalow” and Hudson-Essex’s “Pullman Coach.”

In spite of their comforts, motorhomes had two distinct limitations, which ultimately led to the creation of the RV’s understudy: the trailer. A camper could not disconnect the house portion and drive the automobile part alone. (The Conklins had carried a motorcycle.) In addition, many motorhomes were large and limited to traveling only on automobile-friendly roads, making wilder landscapes unreachable. As a consequence of these limitations and their relatively high cost, motorhomes remained a marginal choice among RV campers until the 1960s. Trailers, by contrast, became the choice of people of average means.

The earliest auto camping trailers appeared during the early 1910s but they were spartan affairs: a plain device for carrying tents, sleeping bags, coolers, and other camping equipment. Soon, motivated tinkerers began to attach tent canvas on a collapsible frame, adding cots for sleeping and cupboards for cooking equipment and creating the first “tent trailers.” By mid-decade, it was possible to purchase a fully equipped, manufactured one. In 1923’s Motor Camping, J.C. Long and John D. Long declared that urban Americans were “possessed of the desire to be somewhere else” and the solution was evident—trailer camping. Tent trailering also charmed campers because of its convenience and ease. “Your camping trip will be made doubly enjoyable by using a BRINTNALL CONVERTIBLE CAMPING TRAILER,” blared an advertisement by the Los Angeles Trailer Company. The trailer was “light,” incorporated “comfortable exclusive folding bed features,” and had a “roomy” storage compartment for luggage, which left the car free to be “used for passengers.”

Tent trailering, however, had some drawbacks that became clear to Arthur G. Sherman in 1928 when he and his family headed north from their Detroit home on a modest camping trip. A bacteriologist and the president of a pharmaceutical company, Sherman departed with a newly purchased tent trailer that the manufacturer claimed could be opened into a waterproof cabin in five minutes. Unfortunately, as he and his family went to set it up for the first time, a thunderstorm erupted, and claimed Sherman, they “couldn’t master it after an hour’s wrestling.” Everyone got soaked. The experience so disgusted Sherman that he decided to create something better.

The initial design for Sherman’s new camping trailer was a masonite body standing six-feet wide by nine-feet long and no taller than the family’s car. On each side was a small window for ventilation and two more up front. Inside, Sherman placed cupboards, icebox, stove, built-in furniture and storage on either side of a narrow central aisle. By today’s standards, the trailer was small, boxy and unattractive, but it was solid and waterproof, and required no folding. Sherman had a carpenter build it for him for about $500 and the family took their new “Covered Wagon” (named by the children) camping the following summer of 1929. It had some problems—principally, it was too low inside—but the trailer aroused interest among many campers, some of whom offered to buy it from him. Sherman sensed an opportunity.

That fall, Sherman built two additional Covered Wagons. One was for a friend, but the other one he displayed at the Detroit Auto Show in January 1930. He set the price at $400, which was expensive, and although few people came by the display, Sherman reported that they were “fanatically interested.” By the end of the show, he had sold 118 units, the Covered Wagon Company was born, and the shape of an RV industry was set.

Over the next decade the company grew rapidly and to meet demand, trailers were built on an assembly line modeled on the auto industry. In 1936, Covered Wagon was the largest trailer producer in an expanding American industry, selling approximately 6,000 units, with gross sales of $3 million. By the end of the 1930s, the solid-body industry was producing more than 20,000 units per year and tent trailers had more or less disappeared.

Arthur Sherman’s solid-body trailer quickly gained acceptance for two principal reasons. First, Sherman was in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea. Detroit was at the center of the Great Lakes states, which at that time contained the country’s greatest concentration of campers. Furthermore, southern Michigan was the hub of the automobile industry, so a wide range of parts and skills were available, especially once the Depression dampened demand for new automobiles. And, a solid-body trailer took another step along the path of modernization by providing a more convenient space that was usable at any time.

Today’s 34-foot Class A motorhome with multiple TVs, two bathrooms, and a king bed is a version of the Conklin’s “Gypsy Van” and fifth-wheel toy haulers with popouts are the descendants of Arthur Sherman’s “Covered Wagon,” and these, in turn, are modernized versions of Bachelder’s horse-and-wagon camping. Between 1915 and 1930, Americans’ desire to escape modern life’s pressures by traveling into nature intersected with their yearning to enjoy the comforts of modern life while there. This contradiction might have produced only frustration, but tinkering, creativity, and a love of autos instead gave us recreational vehicles.

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Ever since, the Park Service has guarded some of the planet’s most spectacular scenery, leaving it, at least seemingly, unimpaired. To be sure, park officials invited guests in as they promoted “the enjoyment of future generations,” but human enterprise was meant to be confined to the hotels, visitor centers, and roads that dominated small portions of parks—the very places where, today, crowded park gift shops overflow with stuffed animals, and gas-guzzling RVs, SUVs, and minivans circle crowded parking lots. Beyond the traffic and tourist zones, parks have become critical nurseries for threatened biodiversity, as well as repositories for a uniquely American sense of national identity that is invariably expressed by photos of vast, empty vistas with grizzlies scattered in the foreground, hawks hovering skyward, and mountain crags holding the rest of the world at bay.

In this telling of the tale, America’s national parks remain wild and untouched. But that story is too simple. Parks always have been imperfect vehicles for noble protectionism—and few places demonstrate this as well as the Rocky Mountain region of northwestern Montana known today as Glacier National Park. This special place has glaciers, of course, and also rugged peaks, hundreds of lakes, and almost 3,000 miles of streams; it spans more than a million acres and straddles the Continental Divide. For many Americans, Glacier has long represented a wilderness frontier where unadulterated nature reigns.

But, in fact, human history and culture permeate Glacier, a place shaped by Native Americans’ dependence on the land, conservationists’ efforts to enshrine its beauty, and corporate America’s exploitation of its treasures. The Blackfeet have for centuries called it the “Backbone of the World,” the source of spiritual power and life forces that animate indigenous life and tradition. The American conservationist George Bird Grinnell dubbed it the “Crown of the Continent” and considered it an ideal place to preserve for national identity and culture. Louis Hill, the president of the Great Northern Railway, sold it as “everybody’s Park,” a symbolic place where Americans might encounter the source of the nation’s greatness. In broad outlines, Glacier’s unnatural natural history is shared by many of the nation’s beloved wilderness parks.

In large part, Glacier owed its establishment to Grinnell, a scientist, writer, and conservationist from New York who first visited northwestern Montana in 1885. Grinnell knew magnificent scenery—he had explored Yellowstone National Park with the U.S. Army in 1875—but Montana’s Rockies awed him. Launching from the state’s St. Mary country, he climbed into the mountains, hunted bighorn sheep and fished trout, met a party of Kootenais traveling from their homeland west of the divide, saw glaciers (including what is now known as Grinnell Glacier), and basked in the colorful “artist’s palette” of the wilderness.

In his writings, Grinnell ignored plain evidence of the human impacts that had been wrought there by native peoples, choosing instead to wax poetic about nature, and nature alone. As the historian Mark David Spence revealed in his book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Grinnell relied on Blackfeet guides to accompany him over ridges and along Indian trails, but in his journal, he wrote of these places as “absolutely virgin ground … with no sign of previous passage.” A short time later, Grinnell wrote about the native hunting camps in the area. That Grinnell could both describe and share in indigenous presence and not acknowledge its role in shaping the land represented cognitive dissonance of a high order. His rhetorical erasure of obvious human impact became a model for how Americans thought of national parks: unpeopled, untouched—in short, pure nature.

Newspaper ad from a St. Paul, Minnesota newspaper, 1909. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Grinnell wanted to create a nature reserve to protect the eastern flank of the Rockies. Doing so, however, would require wresting the land from the Blackfeet. During a trip in 1891, he hit upon a way to smooth the process: get the U.S. government to obtain the land in a would-be bid for its natural resources. At the time, many prospectors were clambering through the mountains, hoping to find rich mineral deposits. Grinnell, who did not believe such riches would materialize, saw these men as a threat to his park vision. U.S. government officials, too, were suspicious of the miners, whose disorderly behavior posed a threat to tenuous peace on the Blackfeet Reservation.

On behalf of the federal government, which wanted to stay involved to keep prospectors in check, Grinnell helped negotiate the cession of Blackfeet lands to open some 800,000 acres to prospecting. In short, but tense, negotiations in September 1895, the Blackfeet got the government to raise its payment for the cession to $1.5 million and ensured that tribal members could continue cutting timber, hunting, and fishing in the ceded area while it remained public land. Selling the land without maintaining access to such resources would have been unthinkable for tribal leaders, according to historian Louis Warren in The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America. Bison were nearly extinct, and the Blackfeet had been losing territory to the United States for decades. They relied on what this coveted bit of land provided them, spiritually and materially.

Within two years of completing the negotiations, the land became part of the Lewis and Clark Forest Reserve; by 1902, as Grinnell had predicted, the hoped-for mineral boom busted, and the miners had cleared out. With new boundaries etched on the map, the mountains’ glaciers and streams now were wrapped in a federal mantle, not a tribal one, and soon nature lovers began debating and restricting the Blackfeet’s rights to continue cutting timber and taking animals from the reserve. Disagreements continued for decades, intensifying once Congress fulfilled Grinnell’s long-held dream and made Glacier a national park in 1910. Again, the United States ignored the centrality of human activity on the lands.

The cognitive dissonance would only amplify as time went on—thanks, this time around, to the efforts of the Great Northern Railway to popularize the park. When completed in 1893, the Great Northern line connected St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington. Louis Hill, the railroad’s president, knew and adored the northern Rockies, much like Grinnell. He believed they could serve as a salve for multiplying social problems in America. Like many white men of wealth, Hill, who lived in St. Paul, thought early 20th-century society had become over-civilized, with too many meaningless tasks filling time, and he searched for a more authentic life. Wilderness symbolized authenticity, because nature, by its essential definition, was the antithesis of the artificial. He joined Grinnell in lobbying Congress to create Glacier National Park.

Portrait of George Bird Grinnell. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hill’s motives weren’t entirely lofty. Glacier National Park’s backcountry trails, glacier-fed streams, and dominating peaks made it ideal for well-heeled tourists who wanted to be rejuvenated by wild mountain air and water—and the Great Northern, which traveled through miles and miles of undeveloped land, was ready and able to provide a way for nature seekers to get there. Glacier National Park made for a perfect marketing opportunity. According to historian Marguerite Shaffer, Hill adopted what had been a regional tourist slogan and nationalized it, plastering “See America First” on promotional material all across the nation.

Hill made certain that well-heeled tourists were comfortable amid a raw wilderness landscape. Visitors might hike or fish, but they rarely ventured far from the Great Northern’s orbit of influence. The newly built Glacier Park Hotel and Many Glacier Hotel offered first-class accommodations with rustic touches, including giant logs commanding the so-called Forest Lobby. Hotels blended local materials with cosmopolitan touches, including a Japanese couple serving tea—a not-so-subtle nod to the railway’s Oriental Limited line and its steamship company with commercial interests throughout the Pacific Rim. Chalets modeled on Alpine designs provided relative comfort (slightly) further away from the rail lines and lakefront lodgings. Blackfeet imagery and artifacts were ubiquitous. A teepee village on the hotel lawn offered families four beds and an authentic Western outdoors experience for $0.50 a night.

Hill regularly invited writers and artists into Glacier, generating good copy for the park and for his corporation, a practice that continued even after he retired. Many visitors, predictably, framed the park as an idyll. Writer and educator Margaret Thompson ended her 1936 book High Trails of Glacier National Park with a typical sentiment. “No other temple of worship has the power to bring one more truly into harmony with the sublime,” she wrote. We can recognize this rhetoric of nature today in the suggestion that Glacier—and perhaps all national parks—assert consensus amid seas of consternation, and that true wilderness rises above the fray of human activity and ambition.

Today, Glacier National Park faces many threats, not least among them climate change, which is shrinking the region’s namesake ice sheets. Ten of the park’s 39 named glaciers have shrunk by more than half in the last 50 years. Some scientists predict that Glacier National Park will be glacier-free by the time a child conceived today is eligible to drive a car. Tourists, hoping to see the glaciers before they’re gone, flock to the park, consuming fossil fuels that accelerate the warming that melts the glaciers away. As always, when tourists go to consume nature, they see a side of culture with their main dish.

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For three days, we encountered no one. Rattlesnakes slipped across the trails. A dust storm whooshed into camp one night and seasoned the spaghetti with grit. We glided past badgers, bighorn sheep, prairie dog towns, bald eagles, and abandoned homesteads.

Years earlier before the boys were born, I had floated the 110-mile stretch but wanted to return when they were prepared for primitive camping and could appreciate the austere landscape and its human history.

Afterward, we drove to the railroad in Glasgow, met the Amtrak carrying their mother, and headed south to Wyoming to witness the total solar eclipse—an event anticipated for years, partly because it occurred on our youngest son’s 18th birthday.

It was a remarkable trip—how often does one see the sun blotted out at midday?—but not entirely unusual. The boys have been on such journeys since they were toddlers, seeing iconic landmarks and natural marvels and camping on the vast public lands of the United States.

A parent never knows what sinks in with children, but as we drove home to Michigan—where the boys attend college—they reminisced about previous adventures.

In Oregon’s high desert, we once saw lightning stampede a herd of cattle. At Hoover Dam, border patrol agents rummaged the overhead luggage carrier looking for smuggled aliens. In the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma, we scrambled through head-high grasses and conjured the Great Plains hundreds of years ago.

Camping on the edge of Albuquerque, we heard odd hissing sounds and voices from above and stepped from the tent to see the sky jam-packed with hot air balloons. Once a herd of bison invaded our campground along the river bottom at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the rutting males—the size of Mini Coopers—slammed into one another and threw themselves down into dust wallows. The day before, we had puzzled over those odd grassless depressions a few feet from the picnic table. Now we knew what they were, and kept a watchful eye while eating breakfast cereal.

There were priceless moments. I bought tickets to a paleontology museum in Montana, not realizing it was run by creationists and showcased illogical dioramas. “Look Dad, a caveman is spearing a dinosaur.” In Las Vegas, an Elvis impersonator paraded into a crosswalk wearing a sandwich board advertising: Colon Cleansing. “Dad, what’s a colon cleaning?” On an overlook at Mt. Shasta, one son yanked my shirtsleeve. “Hey, remember that SpongeBob episode when Squidward….” I reminded him, “Remember, let’s be in the moment.” In the gift store at Mount Rushmore, the boys bought cheap jackknives from a display of personalized trinkets. One son regarded his name on the handle and asked, “But how did they know I was coming?”

Because I’m a teacher, summers were free to be with the boys. Mom hustled off to the office while we shuttled between science camps, baseball, and soccer practices, fishing lakes and the beach. We erected a treehouse, painted basketball lines on the driveway, and glued together model rockets. My kitchen window framed a neighborhood of children swarming our trampoline, rope swing, and playset. The gang rifled the refrigerator for snacks, plopped down for cartoons, and fought over Gameboys.

By late July, routine infested us all.

Tired of policing electronics and playing counselor, I stowed camping gear in the minivan and set off for a month. Mom, with stingier vacation time, met us along the way.

A few times, I drove to the East Coast or south to Texas but usually pointed toward the empty spaces of the West. We crossed the Great Plains where the sky expanded like the inside of a blue balloon, and rolled bales of hay resembling oversized biscuits of shredded wheat scattered on the prairie. Thunderstorms edged the horizons and dropped a curtain of purple rain. We shunned the interstates mobbed by vacationers like us, elderly retirees piloting RVs as big as tour buses, and convoys of Harley motorcyclists roaring their way to Sturgis. We scooped up brochures and roadmaps in rest areas and meandered the state highways. Plans were indeterminate. Occasionally we hit the big national parks—Yellowstone/Grand Teton, Glacier, and Grand Canyon—but mostly explored quieter regions—the Arizona strip, Washington’s scablands, the Niobrara Valley in Nebraska, the Mojave Preserve and anyplace West Texas.

I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in community parks, looked for playgrounds, and stopped for ice cream in little burgs. We overnighted in RV parks. The boys tore around on bikes, brought new friends back to the campfire, and splashed in the pool. I fished a cold one from the cooler, made mac and cheese, and kept watch with the other parents.

Just as often, we ventured onto public land—national forests, national parks, national monuments, national recreation areas, national wildlife refuges, state parks, Bureau of Reclamation domains, conservation preserves, and the marginal sagebrush and desert country watched over by the Bureau of Land Management. We took day hikes to petroglyphs, climbed mountains, biked slick rock trails, searched for fossils, watched birds, and went to ranger talks.

A third of the United States is held in common by all Americans. It belongs to you and everyone else, I explained. I wanted my sons to experience the country’s sheer size and diversity, grasp its opportunities, and understand its injustices, too. We passed migrant pickers working lettuce fields in the Salinas Valley, gazed down on homeless encampments from highway overpasses, waved to hobos riding freight trains, and wandered through border towns on the Rio Grande. Travel is the great educator, the cure for provincialism and obliviousness.

Photo courtesy of James McCommons.

And I tried to make sense of it all—expounding on Manifest Destiny, natural history, weather in tornado alley, ranching, No. 2 field corn, 19th-century Indian genocide, western water policy, bird migration, the Dust Bowl, and tidbits gleaned from a liberal arts education and a lifetime of reading and curiosity. There was family lore to pass on, too—anecdotes about growing up, meeting their mother, and the grandparents they never knew. We had the time and inclination for discourse.

Unquestionably, my verboseness and the pedagogy grew tiresome. “Please don’t stop at any more roadside historical markers,” and, “Dad, you read everything,” and, “We heard that story before.” Eventually we’d detour to an airport and pick up my wife. “Yay, Mom’s here, now.” We stopped at amusement and water parks, took excursion train rides, and tubed in rivers.

Today, the kitchen window holds the souvenirs—a fist-sized piece of granite blasted off the Crazy Horse Memorial, a miniature Empire State Building, a preserved fish skeleton from Fossil Butte National Monument. The boys are young men now holding summer jobs and college classes and social lives. More trips may lie ahead but it won’t be the same.

They’ll have favorites memories and I have mine.

One August in Arizona while the kids wrestled in the tent, I perused the Flagstaff newspaper under the light of the Coleman lantern. That night, I read, would be peak viewing of the Perseid meteor shower when Earth annually sweeps through dusty debris left by a passing comet.

About 3 a.m., I shook the boys awake. “There are shooting stars out. Lots of them.”

We held hands and walked away from camp and into the dark desert of the Colorado Plateau. Coyotes yipped from the sagebrush and semi-trucks whined out on Interstate 10. Streaks of cosmic dust—no larger than grains of sand—arced and vaporized in the friction of the atmosphere.

The next day we drove over to Meteor Crater and stood on the lip of a mile-wide, 600-foot deep hole blasted out 50,000 years ago by a meteorite just 50 yards across but moving 20 times the speed of a bullet.

There could be no better science lesson.

The post What America’s National Parklands Taught My Three Boys About Their Country appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have annual passes to both the U.S. and the California Parks and Recreational Areas. So when someone asks what we need in terms of parks, my visceral answer is always: More! But others view the National Monument and National Park systems differently. Right now, the Trump administration is re-evaluating them with an eye towards shrinking some and opening up others to mining and development.

The economist in me wants to ask: What are the trade-offs of making such changes in our parks? And how are such changes valued?

Let’s start by acknowledging there is always a trade-off between economic activity and the environment. Everything we do—from sheltering and feeding ourselves, to going to movies and ballgames—changes the natural environment around us. And this is not new. Pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers altered the environment as they burned Great Plains grasses in their quest for buffalo burgers.

What are the costs of such alteration? For a long time, planners have sought to ascertain the value of urban open space. A recent study by Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes and Colorado State University professor John Loomis tried to estimate the value of the National Park Service system. It is a big number, $92 billion. But even then, they admit that many aspects of the park system are undervalued because putting any price on them would be speculative at best.

Among these difficult-to-price aspects are the health and psychological benefits to those who use the parks—and to those who don’t use the parks, but who benefit from changed behavior by those who do. Their analysis also does not consider the opportunity cost of the parks—in other words the money that might be made were they not parks, but privatized for housing, mining, logging, or commercialized recreation.

The Trump administration’s current evaluation is focused on those parks that are designated as National Monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. While there are huge challenges in conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the National Monuments, it is still a worthwhile exercise to think about the values that can be pinned down.

Let’s begin with an easy example. The Statue of Liberty is a National Monument. It sits in New York Harbor on Liberty Island, prime real estate. In 2016 there were over 4.5 million visitors. They paid about $27 each to visit, which includes the boat ride to and from, and admission tickets to all or part of the monument. If we compare this to Manhattan skyscrapers that have an average age of over 60 years, then over the same amount of time visitors will have spent more than $7 billion at the monument.

Again, we don’t count those who benefit because others have been inspired by their visit to the Statue of Liberty, nor the value of connecting us to our heritage. It is undeniable that these are significant.

On the road to Bears Ears. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An alternative to the statue would be a skyscraper. The island would be prime real estate for building exclusive condos with views of the city and the harbor. The value would be diminished by the fact that domestic and maintenance workers would have to be paid more to get over to the island, and that access to the city would require a boat ride. So perhaps the comparable development is the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue office tower, another prime property.

The Kushners paid $1.8 billion for it, and The New York Times reports that they expect to spend $3.3 billion to renovate it. When you add this up—$5.1 billion—it is clear that the Statue of Liberty Monument (with a value of $7 billion-plus) is worth more than the alternative condo skyscraper occupying the same land.

And this is just the pure economic cost-benefit analysis. It leaves out the non-pecuniary value of being inspired by Lady Liberty, of connecting us to our heritage, and of reminding Americans that we were all once immigrants yearning to breathe free.

So it’s clear why no one, as far as I know, is contemplating selling or leasing parts or all of Liberty Island. But what about Bears Ears National Monument, the first target of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s effort to shrink national monuments and open them up for development?

I’m betting that, at least until recently, you never had heard of it. Bears Ears is in a remote part of southern Utah.

But as an example, Bears Ears is instructive—and the economics are a bit more complicated. First of all, Bears Ears, like many monuments, is free to visit. So we don’t have admissions revenue to look at. Plus, the remoteness of the park means it will not have the same level of visitor traffic as the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Of course, luxury condos are not an alternative in such a remote place. But you can make the case that mining is an alternative use.

Now let’s consider the full value of Bears Ears. It spans an area with a fossil record from the age of the dinosaurs, one of the most complete records we have. The value in studying this record is that we may obtain a better understanding of the fossils from this time spanning the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Also, Bears Ears is home to more than 1,000 archeological sites dating from when early Native Americans lived in the area. This civilization vanished and new knowledge on how climactic changes seemed to have decimated their civilization is going to be useful for our grandchildren (or maybe even ourselves). The monument also has other values—to the visitors who make the trek there, and to Native Americans who still live in the area and have a spiritual and heritage connection to many parts of it.

What are we giving up by protecting this potentially useful historical, cultural, and scientific research site? Uranium. The Daneros Mine in Red Canyon is an existing uranium mining operation in the Bears Ears area that was purposely left out of the monument. But the monument effectively prevents further exploration and mining inside its boundary.

Here is the context. Uranium prices have been falling since they peaked in 2007, and economics teaches us that this happens when demand falls or supply increases. So if other parts of Bears Ears were not great places to mine before the monument was declared, they certainly are not now.

The counter to that point is: Uranium prices may change someday. How and when is hard to predict. But uranium ore is important, and could be critically important to our national security. Still, this is unlikely. The U.S. demand for uranium is not likely to increase anytime soon, as reactors like San Onofre in California close and other reactors—such as two to be built in Jenkinsville, South Carolina—are abandoned in mid-construction. Indeed, there is so little demand that most of the uranium now mined from southwest Utah is exported.

In such a case, where we are dealing with “might-be’s” instead of quantifiable benefits, we can turn to optimal decision theory to help us make wiser choices.

The optimal decision is the one that provides at least as good an outcome as all other available decision options. So if the costs of the “might-be’s” are not immediate, they receive little weight. In the case of Bears Ears, the optimal decision now is to leave well enough alone and to keep an eye on the “might-be’s” just in case.

In other words, if we don’t need to make a decision, the optimal action is to make contingency plans for the time when a decision must be made.

A secondary argument for opening Bears Ears to mining is that it takes time to open a mine and begin ore production. So if we need uranium for national security, we could be behind the production power curve. The answer to this is quite easy. If quick access to uranium is valuable, then instead of exporting it from the Daneros Mine to South Korea, the federal government should purchase and stockpile it. The reason why this is superior is that uranium seams play out, and if they are opened today they still might not be available when a national crisis requires them. Thus the uncertainty of the need for the strategic ore drives the decision to preserve Bears Ears.

There is also the issue of jobs. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this amounts to less than 40 jobs. In an economy of 147 million jobs in the United States and 1.5 million in Utah, this is no more than spit in the ocean. So the strategic metal arguments are the ones to consider seriously, and they point to no economic alternatives superior to doing nothing with Bears Ears at the moment.

My guess is that other National Monuments would end up with a similar cost/benefit calculus. There may be legitimate arguments about future needs, either by those who will benefit from maintaining the park in perpetuity, or by those who see a national interest in exploiting resources from the park at some point in time. But the absolute wrong economic decision would be to change a “might-be” to a “must,” thereby creating a cost in the loss of the park.

That brings me back to my personal interests in parks and monuments. Of course, I don’t want to see even one-tenth of one acre given over to mining or development. But the point that should drive decision-making is not personal preference, but analysis of costs and benefits to society as a whole. And it’s clear that careful study and a willingness to admit what we don’t know can lead to a better solution for such places than short-term changes in policy to satisfy exploitation interests.

And if we don’t take care to respect the analysis, you might find yourself booking a tour of the unique architecture of Liberty Island Condos in the middle of Upper New York Bay some day.

The post The Trump Administration Wants Uranium Mining in Utah—but What About the Dinosaur Fossils? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Brower, once head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, is a towering figure in the late 20th century environmental movement—and in my own life. One crucial moment in our relationship came at my parents’ annual holiday party in December 1964. I was 22 and about to graduate from Berkeley and join the Peace Corps for a stint in a Turkish village. We knew the Browers because my mother, Beth, had been friends with David’s wife since the 1930s. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but Dave interrupted to say, “You have a nice speaking voice. Would you be willing to narrate a film for the Sierra Club?” I gulped and said, “Sure.”

Brower was the first executive director the Sierra Club ever hired, beginning in 1952. He led successful campaigns to block two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, helped spark the creation of Point Reyes and Cape Cod National Seashores and Kings Canyon National Park, and launched the Sierra Club into a successful book-publishing program with oversized word-and-photograph volumes celebrating special places the club was working to save. He increased the membership of the Sierra Club nearly ten-fold and was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, a skilled lobbyist and publicist for nature.

By the time of that holiday party, Dave was approaching the midpoint of his career and was embroiled in a new fight to the death over two proposed hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a venture spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Brower was giving no ground on these dams, especially after he and his conservation allies had acquiesced to the government’s plan to dam Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The move had been a tradeoff to save Dinosaur National Monument, and it was a decision Brower would regret for the rest of his life. Glen was nearly 200 miles long with only the gentlest of rapids, dozens of side canyons of soaring Navajo sandstone, more beautiful than the Dinosaur canyons it was sacrificed to save. The film he asked me to narrate celebrated Glen Canyon, and mourned its loss.

After narrating the film I did my stretch in the Peace Corps, ending in the summer of 1967 with a $5-a-day tour around Europe. From London, I wrote Brower a letter offering my services to the Sierra Club, but claiming no relevant education or experience. Just enthusiasm.

Brower seldom answered his mail. He was, however, known for his long memory, and kept nearly everything on paper for future reference. One of his tenets was that a phone call is nearly always better than a letter, because letters take too long to reach their destinations and get put into piles to be acted on later.

Upon my return from the Peace Corps, I got a job at Head Start. I met a talented young photographer who, when he learned I knew Brower, asked if I’d see if Brower would be willing to look at his work. I phoned, and Dave asked me to drop by his house up the hill in Berkeley later that evening.

The house had been built in 1947 after Brower returned from the war in Italy. River-polished rocks covered most of the horizontal surfaces, and photos and maps adorned the walls. A macaque monkey named Isabelle, rescued from the psychology department at UC Berkeley, roamed the house along with two or three black lab mixes.

Around the dinner table that evening, with plenty of scotch under our belts, Brower asked me to craft a book manuscript from journals and magazine articles written by Norman Clyde, a legendary octogenarian Sierra mountaineer, who also happened to be visiting the Browers. I gulped again, and said, “Yes.”

I went to work for the Sierra Club in May 1968. This turned out to be Brower’s final year at the club, as he had gotten into trouble with his board of directors for various faults, some real, most political. After a vote by the members of the Sierra Club, Dave resigned the following spring and I was fired along with several other partisans.

Dave immediately put the unpleasantness behind him. The rest of us refugees could complain for hours about the injustice we’d just lived through, but Dave had more important things to spend his energy on. He would bravely say that what had just happened was a mitosis, as when a cell doubles itself by dividing in two.

Midway through 1969, Dave, along with a handful of former Sierra Club staffers and volunteers, started Friends of the Earth. It was meant to complement the Sierra Club and other existing organizations, to do the work the club didn’t want Brower to do in its name. This would include a vigorous international program, expansion into campaigns involving energy policy, the protection of public health, pollution abatement, and other concerns beyond forests, parks, and wildlife.

The organization was small and scrappy, and made noise by defeating federal subsidies for a Boeing-built supersonic transport aircraft, delaying construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline for several years (resulting in a far safer pipeline), and leading the crusade against nuclear power, aiming its fire first at the Diablo Canyon reactors on the central California coast.

The Sierra Club board had agreed not to oppose the Diablo proposal in order to save the Nipomo Dunes nearby. A minority on the board thought this a dreadful decision, given Diablo Canyon’s remoteness and beauty. A fierce internal battle erupted within the club. Brower’s opposition to Diablo, in fact, had been one big reason he was chased out of the Sierra Club, the old guard arguing that the club had given its word; others arguing that the club was duty-bound to oppose despoliation of precious stretches of pristine coastline.

At the time, the Sierra Club’s opposition to Diablo was simply because of where it would be built. Later, Brower and many others came to oppose nuclear power altogether because of the plants’ vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters.

Things went well for a long spell, but in 1986 Friends of the Earth, with finances in bad shape and a deeply divided board, closed up shop in San Francisco, forcing Brower off the board and laying off the staff, leaving only a small operation in Washington, D.C. He must have been discouraged, but again he refused to dwell on the past.

Instead, Dave and several others went to work building Earth Island Institute, which Dave had started a few years prior in case Friends of the Earth decided to dispense with his services. Earth Island is an umbrella that shelters and nurtures dozens of small organizations working on a wide variety of projects in every corner of the world.

I, for my part, took a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and stayed in touch with Brower, who by then was approaching 80 years of age. We’d meet occasionally for lunch or drinks; he was always full of ideas and suggestions for new projects.

As I neared retirement in 2008 I was casting about for a big project and Brower influenced my life again. Dave had written two ramshackle autobiographical memoirs as well as a borderline manifesto titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. However, at the time of his death in November 2000, no one had written a proper biography about him. More distressingly, he was being forgotten. When I talked with young environmental lawyers they only vaguely recalled his name. “I really must do this book,” I thought, “And I hope that it helps keep his story alive.”

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