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About This Land
A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate
of the public lands in the American West–and a plea for the protection
of these last wild places
The public lands of the western
United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land,
canyons, forests, and mountains. It’s an American commons, and it is
under assault as never before.
Journalist Christopher Ketcham has
been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and
governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory
book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to
see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah,
revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public
lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal
land management agencies, who have been compromised by the
profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to
regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics
on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior’s failure to implement
and enforce the Endangered Species Act–including its stark betrayal of
protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse–and investigates
the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking
mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along
the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former
government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and
other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future
generations.
This Land is a colorful muckraking
journey–part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair–exposing the rot in
American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our
national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham’s vision of ecological
restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded
ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in
place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to
recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and
establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no
development at all, not even for recreation.