Grand Canyon For Sale is a carefully researched investigation of the precarious future of America’s public lands: our national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, monuments, and wildernesses. Taking the Grand Canyon as his key example, and using on-the-ground reporting as well as scientific research, Stephen Nash shows how accelerating climate change will dislocate wildlife populations and vegetation across hundreds of thousands of square miles of the national landscape. In addition, a growing political movement, well financed and occasionally violent, is fighting to break up these federal lands and return them to state, local, and private control. That scheme would foreclose the future for many wild species, which are part of our irreplaceable natural heritage, and also would devastate our national parks, forests, and other public lands. To safeguard wildlife and their habitats, it is essential to consolidate protected areas and prioritize natural systems over mining, grazing, drilling, and logging. Grand Canyon For Sale provides an excellent overview of the physical and biological challenges facing public lands. The book also exposes and shows how to combat the political activity that threatens these places in the U.S. today.

Finalist for the 2020 WILLA Literary Award, Creative Nonfiction Inspired by her first breathtaking trip in the Grand Canyon, Harriet Hunt Burgess dedicated her life to saving land for future generations. Beginning in the 1970s, she persevered through four decades—overcoming daunting obstacles and taking extraordinary risks—to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the American West.Without Burgess, iconic and irreplaceable landscapes like the Lake Tahoe region and the California coast would be much different today. As Harriet Burgess once explained, “The land we save is our legacy. It’s what we give to our children.” The Grand Canyon was the catalyst for Harriet’s conservation mission and the spark for Grand Canyon to Hearst Ranch. Author Elizabeth Austin has interwoven her own exhilarating and life-changing dory trip through the depths of the Grand Canyon with the compelling story of Harriet’s early life and five of her most significant conservation achievements as founder-president of the American Land Conservancy.

How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America's identity. Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty. And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the Biblical flood carved landscapes less than 10,000 years ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; Western states argue that the federal government's land policies throttle free enterprise; Native Americans demand protection for sacred sites. In this book, David Nye looks at Americans' irreconcilably conflicting ideas about nature. A landscape is conflicted when different groups have different uses for the same location—for example, when some want to open mining sites that others want to preserve or when suburban development impinges on agriculture. Some landscapes are so degraded from careless use that they become toxic “anti-landscapes.” Nye traces these conflicts to clashing conceptions of nature—ranging from pastoral to Native American to military–industrial—that cannot be averaged into a compromise. Nye argues that today’s environmental crisis is rooted in these conflicting ideas about land. Depending on your politics, global warming is either an inconvenient truth or fake news. America’s contradictory conceptions of nature are at the heart of a broken national consensus.

Decisions of the Board of Land Appeals, Office of Hearings and Appeals, Dept. of the Interior.