The Threat to California Public Lands

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You’ve probably been to a national or state park in California. But have you ever hiked in BLM land? 15% of California – 15 million acres – is public land operated by the federal Bureau of Land Management. This is land that no one wanted: not beautiful enough to be deemed a national park and too remote to be developed. As such, they are under threat of being exploited for their resources or sold off, which Republicans have threatened to do. In his new book, “The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands,” Josh Jackson shines a light on the beauty of these “common grounds” that belong to all of us and the perils that they face. Guests: Josh Jackson, author, "The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California's Public Lands" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQED Podcasts comes from the Exploratorium.
0:04.6	Leap into the wild new world of artificial intelligence this summer
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0:20.1	Hey, forum listeners, it's Mina.
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0:45.3	From KQED.
0:46.7	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:01.7	This year, Republicans in Congress proposed but eventually backed off a massive public land sale
1:06.9	that could have seen an unprecedented number of acres move into private hands.
1:12.6	Perhaps you don't think of California as a landscape of public lands in the way that Utah or Alaska are,
1:18.8	but 43% of our state is different types of public land.
1:23.7	Today we'll hear from Josh Jackson, whose new book The Enduring Wild, takes us to some of California's least visited public lands and helps us see their specific histories and ecologies.
1:35.4	It's all coming up next right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:52.2	Josh Jackson's new book, The Enduring Wild, A Journey into California's Public Lands,
1:57.3	opens with the kind of big map that I have loved since childhood.
2:02.6	It shows our state in four colors. The whitish part is privately owned land and it takes up almost all the coastline and the Central Valley.
	...

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