Public lands are Americans' birthright. It's our duty to defend them against new landgrabs

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/05/bernard-avis-devoto-public-lands-protect

Public lands are Americans’ birthright. It’s our duty to defend them against new landgrabs

How one couple helped save vast areas of wilderness in the 1940s – and provided a map for protecting them today

Nate Schweber
Tue 5 Jul 2022 04.00 EDT

“This is your land we are talking about,” the controversial, firebrand historian and conservationist Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1947, paraphrasing Woody Guthrie’s fresh folk classic.

Bernard and his stylish, sharp-witted wife, Avis DeVoto, had returned from an epic road trip across the Lewis and Clark trail, crossing the states of the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. On their way, they researched America’s wild, public lands and philosophized about the spiritual connection between the freedom of movement they allowed and the freedom of thought they inspired.

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As many as 230m acres constituting the natural patrimony that is the birthright of every American; the wilderness that made America the world’s first country to enshrine natural resource conservation as a national priority. Demagogic McCarran would have liquidated the landscapes of the American soul for quick cash to a politically connected few.

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Writing in Harper’s magazine, DeVoto called the devious plan a “landgrab”. He decoded McCarran’s anti-regulatory rhetoric as: “Get out and give us more money.”

The DeVotos’ courageous investigative journalism sparked the national outrage necessary to save the American wild from sale in the 1940s. But the movement to sell off public lands would rise again with the “sagebrush rebellion” in the 1970s, and again in 2014 when its totemic leader became the Nevadan Cliven Bundy. Patriarch of a family of anti-government agitators, Bundy is a scofflaw rancher who over two decades racked up more than a million dollars in unpaid fees for grazing thousands of his cattle on public lands, despite receiving huge federal agricultural subsidies. (“Get out and give us more money.”)

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By the 1950s, the landgrab movement had shape-shifted into plans to build dams that would flood wildlife-rich national parkland in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Wyoming’s Yellowstone, Montana’s Glacier, California’s King’s Canyon, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave and Tennessee’s Fort Donelson national battlefield.

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In the 1940s, as McCarran grew more paranoid and powerful, he demonized his opponents as disloyal to America – probably communists. In the 1950s, the flailing Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy donned McCarran’s persona. McCarthy saw McCarran as a role model, an American hero. Outrageous, headline-grabbing accusations by McCarthy were usually amplified versions of what McCarran already said.

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McCarthy attacked magazines that published Bernard DeVoto. The DeVotos were blacklisted from some of the largest ones in the US, a blow both to the hope for public lands, and to the DeVotos’ livelihoods. Creatively, they compensated by brainstorming ideas for a growing readership of American women.

At Avis’s suggestion, Bernard wrote about kitchen knives in Harper’s. It earned him a 1952 fan letter from Julia Child, then an aspiring cookbook author living in Paris. Avis vowed to make her a star, and a lifelong friendship blossomed. Child stayed an environmentalist for the rest of her life; she repeatedly asked the DeVotos how she could lend her support to public lands conservation (in her phrasing: “the public lands business”).

Come Donald Trump’s presidency, the similarities between what the DeVotos saw on western public lands at their nadir, and what had returned to the west, were nearly, and tragically, exact.

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A statement Bernard made for Dinosaur national monument in 1954 echoes just as resoundingly today. He was talking about wilderness, but he could be talking now about its heir, democracy.

“It can’t ever be replaced, and in a hundred years from now how will anyone know at first hand what wonders there were in this America of ours?”

Nate Schweber is the author of This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild, out now.