24 The New York Review
My Land, Your Land
Bill McKibben
Grinnell :
America’s Environmental
Pioneer and His Restless
Drive to Save the West
by John Taliaferro.
Liveright, 606 pp., $35.00
Natural Rivals :
John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the
Creation of America’s Public Lands
by John Clayton.
Pegasus, 276 pp., $27.95
The right-wing effort to privatize or
obliterate many of the institutions of
our public life—from public education
to public broadcasting to public librar-
ies to public health care—includes, not
surprisingly, an unrelenting attack on
a particularly distinctive tradition: the
vast complex of public lands that date
back more than a century and consti-
tute an essential part of our national
character. Donald Trump dramatically
shrank the size of two newly created
national monuments (Bears Ears and
Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah) to
allow more oil and gas drilling; his ad-
ministration has also opened the Arc-
tic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil
industry in a particularly spectacular
act of vandalism now being challenged
in court. The GOP platform in recent
years has called for either privatizing
public lands or handing them over to
state governments, which are, espe-
cially in the West, typically dominated
by the resource extraction industries.
John Taliaferro’s Grinnell and John
Clayton’s Natural Rivals tell the story
of the birth of this remarkable experi-
ment. It’s a story Americans need to
know and appreciate. Urban and subur-
ban dwellers often know only about the
national parks, which are a fairly small
subset of the public lands archipelago.
The much larger lands of the United
States Forest Service and the Bureau
of Land Management are sometimes
less charismatic, but they are at least as
ecologically important and often just
as beautiful. I’ve spent much of my life
sharing a property boundary with the
Forest Service, but I knew little of the
complex behind-the-scenes machina-
tions and the public appeals that pro-
duced this unlikely wonder. I’m struck,
reading these accounts, how useful the
history is for the present moment. They
prompt the important recollection that
Americans have at times demanded
that our prosperity protect the public
good, not just private interests.
George Bird Grinnell, one of the
most prominent early American con-
servationists, is one of those figures
who remind us that nineteenth-century
America was a fairly small place, espe-
cially at its upper reaches. A descen-
dant of settlers who came over on the
Mayflower, Grinnell grew up on an es-
tate in what is now upper Manhattan,
tutored by the widow of John James
Audubon. After a sojourn at Yale, he
traveled west to help a professor with
geological research and immediately
ran into Buffalo Bill Cody, the most fa-
mous plainsman of his day. Stopping in
Salt Lake City, he met Brigham Young
and “flirted with twenty-two [of his]
daughters in a box at the theatre.” He
became, among other things, a maga-
zine writer and editor, and when young
Teddy Roosevelt didn’t like a review
of one of his books that Grinnell had
written, the future president stormed
red-faced into his office at Forest and
Stream in New York—but Grinnell
won him over, and soon he and TR
were friends and co-conspirators.Grinnell made it West just in time
to watch one era fade into another. In
1872, at the age of twenty-two, he and
a fellow Scroll and Key man from Yale
took the train to Nebraska (the golden
spike finishing the Transcontinental
Railroad had been driven three years
earlier). They traveled in “the most lux-
urious fashion”—Horace Clark, presi-
dent of the Union Pacific railroad (and
not coincidentally son-in-law of Cor-
nelius Vanderbilt), had provided them
with free sleeping car passes. Alight-
ing in Plum Creek, they joined what
might be best described as an early
experiment in cultural tourism, pay-
ing a guide to take them on a buffalo
hunt with the bow-wielding Pawnee.
Though the tribe had been confined to
a reservation for more than a decade,
they were let out twice a year to hunt,
and in this case nearly the entire four-
thousand-person band was ranged with
their horses along the Platte. Grinnell
described the scene many times over
the years, always evocatively:Among the numberless bluffs that
rise one after another like the
waves of a tossing sea, the buf-
faloes can be seen by thousands;
some peacefully reposing on the
rich bottoms, others feeding on theshort nutritious grass that clothes
the hillsides.... Here were eight
hundred warriors, stark naked,
and mounted on naked animals....
Among all these men there was not
a gun nor a pistol, nor any indica-
tion that they had ever met with the
white men.... Like an arrow each
horse darted forward. Now all re-
straint was removed.... What had
been only a wild gallop became a
mad race.Grinnell joined in the action, kill-
ing a buffalo himself (with a gun). “I
marvel at his monstrous size and vast
strength,” he wrote, “and admire his
massive horns and hoofs, which shine
like polished ebony, and his shaggy
head with its impenetrable shield of
hair, hide and bone.” The hunt, writes
John Taliaferro,proved to be the most momen-
tous, the most defining experience
of Grinnell’s eighty-eight years
on earth. It was mythic; it was
ecstatic. He was not the same af-
terward, and in the midst of it, he
surely sensed that it might not re-
peat itself.Indeed, in his first account of the hunt,
he wrote of the buffalo, “their days are
numbered, and unless some action on
this subject is speedily taken... these
shaggy brown beasts, these cattle upon
a thousand hills, will ere long be among
the things of the past.”
Grinnell may have called the Indi-
ans he accompanied “barbarians,” but
he was clear who was at fault for the
vast herd’s demise. The Pawnee, hereported, would eat “every ounce” of
the kill, and “what is not eaten while
fresh will be jerked and thus preserved
for consumption during the winter,” a
drain on the herd easily replenished by
reproduction. By contrast, “a party of
white hunters had they the same oppor-
tunity” would have “left all but enough
for one day’s use to be devoured by the
wolves or to rot upon the prairie.”
Grinnell would spend much of his
life defending both wildlife and Native
Americans (though as was perhaps to
be expected in that paternalistic and
racist age, his advocacy on behalf of
the continent’s original inhabitants
was a mixed blessing). He founded
the Audubon Society, and saw it grow
to three hundred chapters within a
year; and with Roosevelt he started
the Boone and Crockett Club, which
attempted with some success to turn
hunting from a market-driven plunder
into a more sporting pursuit. Perhaps
his greatest legacy is Glacier National
Park in Montana, which he did more
than anyone else to help protect, and
where Mt. Grinnell now looks down on
Grinnell Glacier. By the time of his last
trips, in the 1920s, it was no longer the
wild place he’d first encountered. As he
wrote to the soon-to-be-famous young
conservationist Aldo Leopold, “While
I have never regretted what I did in this
matter because of the pleasure those
parks give to a vast multitude of peo-
ple, still the territory that I used to love
and travel through is now ruined for my
purposes.”The clash between use and preserva-
tion defined the relationship between
two even more important figures of this
period, John Muir and Gifford Pin-
chot. Or at least that’s the traditional
reading, challenged to some degree by
John Clayton in Natural Rivals.
The first half of this somewhat awk-
wardly arranged volume more or less
tells the standard story, one that envi-
ronmentalists have repeated around
campfires for generations until it’s be-
come gospel truth. It features Muir as
the prophetic man of nature; fleeing a
Wisconsin frontier household stifled
by a particularly cruel Presbyterian-
ism, he heads out into the healing
wilderness. His trek from Louisville
to Cedar Key in Florida—which he
would later chronicle in the magical
book A Thousand- Mile Walk to the
Gulf—helped strip away the last ves-
tiges of his anthropocentrism (by the
end he’s cheering on alligators who get
the occasional bite of man “by way of
dainty”), and from there he voyaged to
California, ending up in the Sierra Ne-
vada. There, in his “Range of Light,”
he established a euphoric grammar
and vocabulary of wilderness for all
the generations to follow; we see the
world in no small part through Muir’s
eyes, and it is a great change from ear-
lier times, when most of what counted
was utilitarian exploitation of the land-
scape. “Everything is flowing—going
somewhere, animals and so-called life-
less rocks as well as water,” he wrote.
“Thus the snow flows fast or slow in
grand beauty-making glaciers and
avalanches; the air in majestic floodsTheodore Roosevelt and John Muir, Glacier Point,
Yosemite National Park, California, 1903Underwood^&Underwood