Who owns the American West? Christopher Ketchum will be here to talk about his new book, This Land.

Is the Internet ruining the English language? Gretchen McCulloch will join us to discuss her new book, Because Internet.

Plus, we'll talk about what we and the Waterworld are reading.

This is the Book Review Podcast for the New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Christopher Ketchum joins us now, phoning in from the Catskills, his new book, This Land, How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are ruining the American West is featured on our cover this week of the Book Review. Chris, thanks for being here.

Here you are in the Catskills. How did you get interested in writing about Out West?

Because I went West as a child many times with my dad, my parents, and experienced the National Parks.

And then later went West as an adult and realized that the public land system of the West did not simply consist of the National Parks.

That in fact there was this enormous domain out there, managed by mostly the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service.

And that this was Land Held in common by all American citizens. And as I put it in the book, it's this fantastic socialist experiment and the world's most hypercapitalistic nation.

And so I thought to myself, man, this is incredible. I own this land. So do my daughters. So do all my friends. So does every newly naturalized immigrant in this country.

We are all co-owners of this incredible vast terrain of wild lands. So I figured, hey, I should write a book that celebrates and defends it.

Well, it defends as an interesting word because as you point out in many ways, even though this is public land, there are other influences there.

So give us a sense of what the Bureau of Land Management is supposed to do with these non-park lands and what's actually being done with them.

Okay, so the managing agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service operate under what's called a multiple use mandate and multiple use stipulates that the public lands shall be used, exploited for everything from logging to oil and grazing to mineral extraction.

But at the same time, those lands should be protected for ecological protection, for soil and air and water quality for archaeological funds, paleological funds, et cetera, et cetera.

So in practice, the problem here is that multiple use is really multiple abuse and you have widespread degradation of the environment and in many places it has a catastrophic assault on ecological health across the public land.

Is part of the problem the way in which that's set up? I mean, it sounds like a kind of oxymoronic mission to begin with to both exploit and protect the same piece of land.

Exactly. I mean, that is the problem. The whole idea of multiple uses is it's not operable. For example, when you have livestock grazing all across the air at lands of the west, you know, there's a fragile, fragile ecosystems that are terribly affected by cattle, which is not an issue.

It's an invasive species. So when you have all these cattle, just to take one example, spread across the public lands, they destroy the native flora.

You have cattlemen and government agencies killing off native sauna, considered pests by the livestock industry.

You have the pollution of water sources, streams, rivers. You have a kind of vast biotic simplification that occurs. Similarly with oil and gas drilling, I'll just give you one example, you know, in the pine-dale complex of the upper green river valley of Wyoming.

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