#1696 Assessing America's National Parks & Public Lands at 250

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

Clay's conversation with Char Miller, an endowed professor of environmental history at Pomona College and author of more than a dozen highly regarded books. How did America develop its public lands? Who were the key players in the formation of National Parks, Monuments, Forests, Wildlife Refuges, and Game Preserves? How fragile is the public domain at a time when the Trump administration seeks to scale back, privatize, and permit mining and other industrial activities? The conversation includes a segment on Native American sovereignty, the Land Back Movement, and the work of David Treuer, who has suggested that the National Parks and Monuments be returned to Native ownership or, at a minimum, Native co-management. The discussion also assessed the future of the Colorado River system, including the status of Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. This episode was recorded on January 27, 2026.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's introduction to our podcast, which is with my friend Char Miller of Pomona College.
0:09.0	Char Miller is an amazing man.
0:12.0	Written almost 20 books, he's the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California, one of the so-called Claremont group of extraordinary liberal arts colleges, including the Claremont Graduate School
0:27.5	and Pitzer and the famous Scripps, which is a women's college, one of the best in the
0:32.9	world, and Pomona, the flagship, and he's been there for a long time. He's getting close to
0:37.8	retirement, and this is part of my America 250 series, so I wanted to talk with him about where we
0:44.6	are in the public lands. As you probably know, there's a huge backlash in the Trump administration
0:51.0	against the public lands, attempts to privatize parts of it to allow mining
0:56.1	in certain of the national parks to pull back some of the national monuments,
1:01.5	especially in Utah, and especially fragile,
1:04.2	is the National Monuments and Antiquities Act,
1:06.2	which allows the president, by executive order alone,
1:08.6	to nominate a national monument.
1:11.7	Theodore Roosevelt was the person who made the first 18, beginning with his beloved
1:16.1	Devil's Tower.
1:17.8	And so I've known Char for a long time.
1:20.0	He's an extraordinary man, a great conversationalist.
1:24.0	His books include Ogalala, Water for a Dry Land.
1:26.8	That's about the Ogalala aquifer under the Great Plains.
1:30.3	Not So Golden States, Sustainability versus the California Dream. That was 2016.
1:34.3	America's Great National Forest, Wildernesses, and Grasslands, that was 2016.
1:39.3	The book that was sort of central to our conversation today, Public Lands, public debates, a century of controversy, 2012.
	...

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