Untrammeled: Americans and the Wilderness [rebroadcast]

BackStory

Education, History

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2016

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

BackStory is quitting the city and heading into the wild. In this episode, Brian, Ed, and Peter revisit America’s fascination with wild places and learn how humans have impacted even the most remote corners of our country. The Guys explore how the first European settlers encountered a landscape long shaped by human intervention, and later, how the city of San Francisco found a way to control the remote Hetch Hetchy valley, hundreds of miles away. They also consider how our ideas about wilderness have changed over time.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is backstory. I'm Peter Onough.
0:02.8	We have always prided ourselves on being not only America,
0:07.2	the strong, and America the free,
0:10.6	but America the beautiful.
0:12.6	That's President Lyndon B. Johnson describing his great society
0:17.1	more than half a century ago Johnson signed the Wilderness Act,
0:21.0	precisely to protect America the beautiful.
0:24.6	Today on the show we're exploring how Americans came to love the wilderness in the first place.
0:29.8	From the spiritual, imagine yourself in Hetchetchi on a sunny day in June,
0:35.2	standing waist deep in grass and flowers,
0:37.8	while the great pines sway dreamily with scarcely perceptible motion.
0:42.8	Do the endangered?
0:44.3	If you said it's not wilderness if humans have influenced it,
0:48.3	well then there's no wilderness.
0:50.3	A history of wilderness in America today on Backstories, stay with us.
1:00.3	Major funding for Backstories provided by the ShiaCon Foundation,
1:04.0	the National Endowment for the Humanities,
1:06.2	the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,
1:09.0	and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
1:12.8	From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities,
1:16.1	this is Backstory with the American History Guys.
1:23.3	Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Bellow, and I'm here with Ed Ayers.
	...

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