This Land is Our Land

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, near the Hogback [Bureau of Land Management]

When the sun come shining, then I was strolling

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling

The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting

This land was made for you and me

- Woody Guthrie

The storms came in 1931. Not snow or ice, or the markets, but dust. Dust rolled in great billowing clouds. From D.C. to Boston it settled on cars like snow, came in through windows, darkened the sky for days at a time. They cleared it with shovels. On the plains where it originated, dust formed drifts and dunes that covered roads and automobiles, piled in the corners of drafty handbuilt homes, blotted out the sun.

"Black blizzards", as they became known, awoke the nation to the crisis of the Dust Bowl. The land of the Great Plains, thought fertile and inexhaustible, was disappearing.

In declaring the Homestead Act of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln said that "the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition." The act drew a wave of new and inexperienced settlers to the plains, offering them land and opportunity. It had few requirements: a filing fee, five years continuous residence, and the making of improvements, such as a home and a farm. After that, settlers would be granted title to the land.

Settlers believed the adage "rain follows the plow", that they could bring about a climate conducive to agriculture through sheer hard work on the land. They tore up deep-rooted prairie grasses, replacing them with monocultures of shallow-rooted corn and wheat. Cows and sheep grazed the uncultivated areas beyond their capacity, churning and loosening the soil.

These unsustainable practices were the main cause of the Dust Bowl. The western plains are too dry and its soil too fragile to support the kind of intense plowing, planting, and pasturing imported from the east and Europe. Add to that a severe drought that struck in 1931 and the disaster was all but assured. By 1934, 125 million acres across Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado was either useless for farming or rapidly losing topsoil. Over 500,000 families became homeless, many heading west to California in search of jobs. Musician Woody Guthrie was himself an Okie, or Dust Bowl refugee. Traveling with other displaced farmers, he learned their traditional songs and wrote his own, including his famous "This Land is Your Land".

The crisis triggered a swift and far-reaching federal response, the first wave of what could be called environmentalism. Congress established the Soil Conservation Service (now the National Resources Conservation Service, 1933), the Resettlement Administration (1935), and Farm Security Administration (1937), together tasked with buying out small farms that were not economically viable, relocating settlers to planned communities, and promoting more sustainable farming practices.

I was thinking about Guthrie in October of last year, when I decided to take a two week vacation to Utah.

**

Scenic Highway 12 connects the Moab and Green River area of southeast Utah to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks to the southwest. It is the only major paved road that traverses southern Utah, passing spectacular vistas of rocky escarpments, shapely hoodoos, and seemingly endless expanses of sagebrush wilderness. After crossing nearly a hundred miles of open desert roads--straight as an arrow for dozens of them--the highway ascends the shoulder of Boulder Mountain, where the air cools and Ponderosa pines stare eastward across the Escalante River basin to the Henry Mountains. This was the last part of the continental United States to be mapped, and remains some of its most rugged and inaccessible country. Down the other side the road opens along white sandstone cliffs, rising to a feature called the Hogback, a thin, winding ridge not even wide enough for a guardrail. I slowed, trying not to drive off the road as my head swiveled at the vista. A sign: GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT - Bureau of Land Management. I stopped the car and got out. The sun was close overhead boring into me as if perched on my shoulder. In every direction bands of pink, peach, gold, and cream stretching to the horizon, the rock blending with the purplish blue of the thin sky. On either side, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the tributary canyons, their cool waters out of sight, slowly carving. Gnarled junipers with their shredded bark and clumpy evergreen boughs clung to the sandy cliffs as shadows danced across domes and ledges in the warm breeze.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was set aside in 1996 as the flagship in the BLM portfolio. In his proclamation, President Clinton cited the area's "spectacular array of scientific and historic resources", including a unique geology of fossil beds exposed in a series of terraces that preserve hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history; an ecology that spans five life zones and supports a diverse array of plants and animals; and world-class archaeological sites that tell the story of early people on the American continent.

"Nothing in this proclamation", it continued, "shall be deemed to affect existing permits or leases for, or levels of, livestock grazing on Federal lands within the monument".

The Homestead Act was finally repealed in 1976 with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which stated that "public lands be retained in Federal ownership" permanently. It sought to put an end to squabbles with the states, which sought the land for their own uses. Though they have different mandates, the four main federal land management agencies (Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service) together manage a total of approximately 606 million acres, about one quarter of the nation's land surface. This is land that belongs to YOU, the American taxpayer. You can hike it, boat it, camp on it, explore and photograph and lose yourself in it. It's your right to be here, so long as your use doesn't infringe on anyone else's.

About thirty miles down the road from Boulder lies the small rural community of Escalante, an island in a sea of public land that includes Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Dixie National Forest, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and Capitol Reef National Park. At the end of April I arrived here again, this time to start a new job with a nonprofit that works to protect and preserve the Monument.

At a social function not long after arriving I ran into a BLM backcountry ranger. Wearing sandals and a cap over shoulder-length brown hair, she carried the practical and reform-minded air of someone given a longer leash in the agency, as her frequent patrols require. We got to talking about Escalante, the BLM, and the West.

"Everyone who goes onto public land is a steward," she said. "Some are good stewards--they pack out their trash, fix trails, leave it better than they found it. Some are bad. Some don't even know they are one."

Take one example. Cryptobiotic soil is a living microscape of lichens, mosses, and cyanobacteria that forms a crust on the surface of the sandy soils of the Colorado Plateau. It acts as a seed bed for grasses and saplings and binds the soil together, increasing water absorption and decreasing erosion. Mature crypto takes decades to form and can be thousands of years old. But it is easily crushed underfoot and when disturbed can take additional centuries to recover. Grazing, ATVs, 4x4 vehicles, and off-trail hiking and mountain biking have caused widespread damage to this valuable resource across Utah. The state has responded with a public education campaign aimed at recreationists: "Don't Bust the Crust!"

BLM has developed "land-health standards" that are used to inventory the state of land under its administration. They include measures of biological conditions such as soil health, water quality, plant species diversity and the quality of habitat for threatened and endangered species, and define the minimum benchmarks to maintain functional and sustainable use of the landscape. A recent report that synthesized the conditions of BLM-administered rangelands, however, found that 50% (54 million acres) are failing those standards. In 72% of failing allotments, livestock grazing is listed as the primary cause.

**

Spring is wind season in Escalante. One day in May it blew so hard the windows of my apartment rattled and the walls creaked against the gusts. Outside it battered the trees, which swayed violently. To the south, dust rose in great sheets from the canyon flats and was drawn high into the air, obscuring the cliffs usually visible from town. I was walking on Main Street when a yellow haze descended and the cloud rolled over. Grit blew into my eyes and teeth, and I turned to shield my face. So this is the desert, I thought.

A couple weeks later I took a drive to visit our office in Kanab, about two hours from Escalante. Our office administrator is usually the only one there, the other Kanab-based staff having either moved on or retired. She pulled a plastic bin off the shelf. "Do you want a hat?" She reached inside and handed one to me. It was a blue trucker, with a red and yellow stripe and our logo across the front. On the back, above the snaps, was embroidered THIS LAND IS OUR LAND. "We're not supposed to sell these anymore," she said, "but you can have one."

Not supposed to sell them because people got upset at those five words. I understand, it's a little insensitive. The history of the West is that of forced resettlement and genocide, harassment and assimilation of Native peoples, subjugation of land and way of life. Whose land is it really? Then there's ranchers, who see in environmentalists nothing but elites peddling their impish coastal values in communities that don't want them, who would rather see all this land handed over to do as they wish.

Both are a misunderstanding.

**

In his book This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, author Christopher Ketcham writes about the politics and broken promises of the Grand Staircase. His first experience with public lands was as a boy with his father, on a trip to Washington's Olympic peninsula:

I had never seen a rainforest. I remember that my father and I walked trails in a drizzle through enormous luminous trees, towering moss-covered trees, and everywhere was mist. The treetops disappeared in fog that blew in delightful streaming banners, the soil was rich and dark and steamy, the mushrooms glowed, the big fleshy ferns trembled, and the air, flowing with humidity, was a kind of vibrating cream-green. Occasionally the drizzle ceased and the clouds opened and the sun smiled down and the wet forest sparkled as if decked with jewels. It was a forest that seemed to me a breathing friendly-monster immensity, impossible to comprehend and easy to disappear into, a place where I could be swallowed forever.

"I've never been back to Olympic," Ketcham continues. "But to know it's still there matters to me; it matters that one day I might take my children there and that they might go with their grandchildren, and that generations of my family a hundred years hence might see it too."

That's what it means to be a steward of public lands. It's how I feel about the Adirondacks, the Appalachian Trail, and a tiny state park in central New York called Gilbert Lake where with my own father I first learned to see nature. It's how we all should feel when confronted with things larger and infinitely more complicated than ourselves. Looking up from the Grand Staircase in wonder at a cosmic riot of stars and galaxies, for example, and having them embrace you right back. There are places worth preserving for their own sake.

Today another wind advisory. Outside the dust swirls. It blows in through the cracks under my windows and scatters across the hardwood floor. It blows across the road and hangs in the air. We don't have to get used to this. We don't have to put up with it.

I look at the hat hanging by the door, ready to be worn.