January 16, 2020 25
carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds,
spores, with streams of music and
fragrance.”
But that exploitation did not disap-
pear simply because of Muir’s ecsta-
sies, and in the traditional telling its
chief spokesman was Pinchot. A less
romantic figure than Muir, he was by
background much more like Grinnell:
the child of wealthy Manhattanites, he
attended Exeter and Yale (though he
was Skull and Bones, not Scroll and
Key) before taking up forestry in a sys-
tematic way. He studied silviculture in
Europe, and then was hired by Freder-
ick Law Olmsted (as I said, nineteenth-
century America was a small town) to
take charge of the forests surround-
ing George Vanderbilt’s vast Biltmore
estate in the hills near Asheville. But
Pinchot always had his eye on bigger
forests—at first he hoped to be hired
to manage New York State’s new Ad-
irondack Park, but since the state leg-
islature banned all logging on public
lands, it turned out there was little to
manage. Instead, it would be the new
federal lands that came his way, and
his destiny was to create the US Forest
Service and to try to turn forestry into
a profession like law or medicine.
So in the traditional picture, Muir
stood for the wild and Pinchot the man-
aged, and their fight came to a head at
Hetch Hetchy, the smaller Yosemite
valley that the federal government
eventually allowed San Francisco to
turn into a reservoir. The picture is not
inaccurate, but it’s definitely incom-
plete, and thus the second half of Clay-
ton’s book sheds valuable new light.
As he points out, before there could
be a dispute over how best to use pub-
lic lands, there had to be public lands,
and during the 1890s Muir and Pinchot
worked together to do something quite
remarkable.
Until that point, the federal govern-
ment had basically been in the business
of giving land away (after, of course,
taking it from its first owners). Home-
steading drove America’s western ex-
pansion as pioneers were granted land
lot by lot across the continent. And
much larger giveaways to the railroad
barons and other industrial interests
helped spur the pell-mell development
of the American interior.
But by the latter part of the nine-
teenth century, that pattern began
bumping up against some stubborn
realities. One was sublime: as settlers
pushed into more remote areas, they
kept encountering places that seemed
almost too magnificent simply to sub-
due. Yosemite and Yellowstone were
early examples, but there were more:
the redwood groves in northern Cali-
fornia, Crater Lake in Oregon, the
Grand Canyon. Another reality was
utilitarian: there were real fears that
unmanaged logging would cause the
country to run out of wood, which was
a crucial resource not only for energy
but also for railroad ties, telegraph
poles, and the beams that kept the ceil-
ings of coal mines from caving in.
There was an emerging ecological
understanding, too: ever since George
Perkins Marsh had published Man
and Nature in 1864, it had been slowly
dawning on people that unrestricted
tree-cutting was leaving no forest to
hold back water, leading to spring
floods and summer droughts. (The Ad-
irondacks were protected in no small
part because important downstate in-
terests feared that clear-cutting near its
headwaters would eventually silt up the
Hudson and the Erie Canal.)
All of this argued for beginning to
“reserve” land that would otherwise
have been given away, and so in the
course of a very few years something
profound happened. “Somehow,” Clay-
ton writes, “the notion of public lands
became an American hallmark.” And
he attributes much of the “somehow”
to the “cooperative competition” of
Muir and Pinchot.
TR would eventually set aside some
of the most transcendent landscapes in
America, but it was under his predeces-
sors—Cleveland and McKinley—that
many of the crucial precedents were
set. And both Muir and Pinchot un-
derstood that if they were to win con-
gressional support for withholding land
from private ownership (something the
various railroad, logging, and mining
interests, not to mention poor settlers
still streaming west, mostly opposed),
it would require making sure that pub-
lic lands were wisely administered in
ways that would clearly contribute to
American economic growth.
The commission trying to shep-
herd the necessary legislation through
Washington needed Pinchot’s plan-
ning but also Muir’s pen. As Clayton
notes, “Muir’s essays from 1897 sound
as if they have an unstated dual by-
line: Muir’s rhetorical gifts are applied
to Pinchot’s ideas.” For instance, in
an issue of the San Francisco–based
Mining and Scientific Press, Muir ar-
gued that “Uncle Sam is trying to have
his forests—what is left of them—at the
same time trying to find out how best
they can be put to use forever for the
benefit of miners, farmers, lumbermen,
and people in general.” He told an Or-
egon newspaper that “the forests must
be made to yield a perennial supply of
timber, without being destroyed or in-juriously affecting the rainfall, thus se-
curing all the benefits of a forest, and at
the same time a good supply of timber.”Congress acted, the public lands
began to accumulate, and over time
the differences in emphasis between
Muir and Pinchot came to the fore. In
practical terms, the division was often
solved by protecting the most scenic
and beloved places as parks and, later,
wildernesses (Muir founded the Sierra
Club, which did much to defend those
spots). Meanwhile, the great bulk of
the land was turned over to the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Man-
agement, which tended to be captured
to one extent or another by the indus-
tries (mining, grazing, logging) they
served. Still, the BLM lands and the
National Forests remained public, and
that kept them in the arena of argu-
ment and adjustment, with an ongoing
balance between use and preservation.
Over recent decades, in fact, the pen-
dulum seemed to be swinging a little
more in Muir’s direction. I remember
talking with Mike Dombeck, the chief
of the Forest Service under President
Clinton, who said that the most impor-
tant economic use of much of the land
under his jurisdiction was as a buffer to
filter and clean water.
Now, obviously, we are moving very
fast and very hard in the opposite di-
rection, and we are doing it at precisely
the wrong time. The Grinnell Glacier
in Glacier National Park has melted
to a slushy shadow of its former gran-
deur (indeed it is almost certain that
the park will need a new name in a few
decades’ time). But despite that reality,
the Obama administration and now,
much more dramatically, the current
regime have given the fossil fuel indus-
try carte blanche on our public lands.
A great deal of the land where bison
once roamed is now given over to drill-ing rigs and pipelines; were America’s
public lands a country of their own,
they would be the fifth-biggest carbon
producer on earth, trailing only the US
as a whole, China, Russia, and Saudi
Arabia. It’s bad enough that Exxon
et al. are using their own real estate to
destabilize the planet—that they are
drilling the property of the American
people is particular lunacy.
And it’s a lunacy that’s spreading.
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro,
has insisted, like the opponents of Muir
and Pinchot in the 1890s, that the vast
reserves of public land in the Amazon
are an obstacle to economic growth
and must be opened to commercial
exploitation. As rates of deforestation
have begun to soar, he has cheered the
process on, arguing with Trumpian
logic that if Brazil doesn’t destroy its
rainforests, someone else will. “Brazil
is like a virgin that every pervert from
the outside lusts for,” he explained.
Bolsonaro’s rhetorical attacks on set-
ting aside land for indigenous people
let landowners know they had little to
fear if they broke the country’s forestry
laws—and the rainforest fires that have
fouled the air of Brazil’s big cities were
an entirely predictable result.
Against the Republican desire to
privatize America’s public land, a new
and strong Democratic emphasis on
protecting it has emerged. Most of the
presidential candidates have signed on
to the idea first put forward by Bernie
Sanders and Senator Jeff Merkley of
Oregon to bar oil and gas drilling on
public lands; among the major con-
tenders, Elizabeth Warren has pro-
duced the most comprehensive plan for
public lands. It deems the 25 percent
of America in public hands an “irre-
placeable resource,” and pledges to
generate much of the country’s renew-
able energy from these lands—not, one
assumes, by tapping the hot water be-
neath Old Faithful; care will still need
to be taken to protect these landscapes
from the lesser damage renewables
can inflict. She also promises to restart
some version of the Depression-era Ci-
vilian Conservation Corps, employing
10,000 young people and veterans to
get to work on the backlog of deferred
maintenance on trails and campsites.
And, interestingly, Warren would com-
mit to “meaningfully incorporat[ing]...
tribal stakeholders in the management
of public lands.” This recognition that
America’s public lands once belonged
to the original Americans is welcome;
in other parts of the world, there have
been some moves to restore indigenous
people to their traditional roles as care-
takers of these landscapes. The journal-
ist and activist Julian Brave NoiseCat,
for instance, has written powerfully
about the increased role of First Na-
tions people in guarding the British
Columbia landscape. “As a much older
nation,” one leader explains, “we have
to show Canada how to manage these
resources.”
That a quarter of our nation remains,
at least nominally, in public hands is a
great potential asset at a time of eco-
logical crisis and economic inequality.
Men like Muir and Pinchot were far
from perfect—among other things,
they had at best a romantic and at worst
a starkly racist view of Native Ameri-
cans. But their combination of idealism
and realism delivered us a great gift.
May we make the best use of it, even
(or especially) when that best use is to
leave it alone. QMOON, JANUARY
The moon was Chanel,
show-offy in purity, an also-
ran or might-have-been.
The air chewed twigsfrom the bare trees,
gorging on unkempt gardens.
The healthy cold proved Prussian,
stringent about lavatoriesand honor. I saw the afternoon
darkly, the gloaming soon
after dawn, each day spent
before its hand leftits pants pocket. Those long
afternoons of summer, the sun
barely ducking under the horizon
before bobbing up, well,that was being young.
So much to look forward to,
the body waiting to angle its desires.
Winter, that was another thing.—William Logan