The public lands are the product of political decisions by Congress and the Executive Branch that stretch back more than a century. Over that time, the general trend has been to protect more and more of those 600 million acres from intensive development. The Trump administration’s nearly exclusive focus on exploiting these resources, particularly fossil fuels, was a sharp break with that trend. With a new administration in place alongside a closely divided Congress, it is a good—if dicey—time to take a quick look back, to see what history might suggest about what is to come. This presentation examines themes developed in the presenter’s comprehensive political history of America’s public lands, Our Common Ground (Yale University Press, forthcoming late 2021 or early 2022), as well as contemporary political and other conditions, and lays out possible futures.
Since there is no opportunity to ask questions of the panelists, this program counts towards self-study credit only.
Credit minutes for this program will be entered into your NHMCLE ART Account for you.
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