John Clayton

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Access to public lands is just as hotly debated today as it was when the U.S. initially started setting aside large tracts of land, saving them from development. That the philosophical idea of publicly owned lands all started with a fishing trip to Montana and a campfire on the rim of the Grand Canyon by the founders of the philosophy seems fitting. But who were these men and what have they wrought?

Think Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, said author John Clayton during a speech in front of an inquisitive crowd in the Coe Auditorium; the November edition of the Draper Natural History Museum’s Lunchtime Lectures.

Clayton is a Montana-based nonfiction writer who produces the free weekly newsletter Natural Stories. His books include “The Cowboy Girl” (about Cody's Caroline Lockhart), “Wonderlandscape” (a history of Yellowstone researched in part on a Buffalo Bill Center fellowship), and “Natural Rivals” (a dual biography of naturalist John Muir and U.S. Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot.

In the same way that the rivalry between Bird and Johnson brought the NBA to new heights of popularity in their era, so did Muir, often referred to as the father of National Parks, and Pinchot, the first chief of the Bureau of Forestry and the Forest Service, according to Clayton.

“Magic was sort of the fast breaking point guard and Bird was the outside shooting rebounder — complete different philosophies about basketball,” Clayton explained. “The Lakers and the Celtics played very different styles, but they united in a common purpose of promoting the sport of basketball.”

Likewise, Muir and Pinchot had different philosophies, talents and views of how to save our natural beauty. Yet together, in conversations about the natural world while traveling through some of America’s most beautiful landscapes, they came together to promote public lands.

“Thanks in part to the writings of John Muir as well as organization of Gifford Pinchot, this idea of public lands — as sort of a superset of national parks and what were then called forest reserves — that idea of public lands had really lodged firmly in the American mind and was able to grow through the next decade with Teddy Roosevelt and then through the subsequent decades,” Clayton said.

Their efforts, and those who prescribed to their message of conservation, eventually led to the robust collection of American public lands, including national parks, monuments, historical sites, national forests, Bureau of Land Management and Reclamation properties, state and local parks, and even places like city green spaces and libraries, which are all publicly owned.

Muir was like an evangelist for wilderness, famously writing in his 1901 book, “Our National Parks,” “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.”

He preached preservation and, after seeing what people were doing in an unregulated Yosemite, leaned towards the hands-off prescription.

Pinchot, however, was an early forester, conservationist, and politician known for reforming the management and development of forests and for advocating the conservation of the nation’s reserves by “planned use and renewal.”

He once said, “Conservation is the application of common sense to the common problems for the common good.”

The two, along with Roosevelt, essentially slam-dunked the idea of public lands at a time when conservation often gave way to development. Clayton said Muir, who was from California, must have been the Magic of preservation in his analogy and Pinchot, who was from the east coast, was the Larry Bird of conservation.

The lessons studied and reported by Clayton in his writings reveals a lot of the same debates they had at inception that are still quarrelsome today.

Interestingly, Congress was just as dysfunctional in the 1890s as they are considered to be now, Clayton intimated.

“Big surprise; Congress was really dysfunctional,” he said of the early days of conservation.

Debates about preservation and conservation raged then, resulting with “no trespassing” signs posted on public lands at first and zero funding appropriated to actually implement the new regulations.

It was difficult to designate and protect new national parks like the nation’s first, Yellowstone National Park, in 1872. Clayton said while Yellowstone was the first to receive the designation, Yosemite was the first public land to be set aside, saving it from development before eventually being designated as a national park in 1890.

He likened the hot debates of the early 1900s to the current debate raging around Bears Ears National Monument. The 1.35 million-acre monument was proclaimed a national monument by former president Barrack Obama in 2016, reduced in size by 85% to 201,876 acres by former president Donald Trump, and then reinstated back to its original size by President Joe Biden on Oct. 8, 2021.

“Maybe [monuments] will evolve to be noncontroversial national parks. Or maybe we will decide that that was too much of a stretch of the interpretation of the Antiquities Act,” he said, adding, “I don't want to be up here preaching my particular views; I think there can be multiple potential outcomes.”

His book, “Natural Rivals,” fully explores the impact of Muir and Pinchot — as well as a little basketball theory.

“What I found as I dug into the lives of Muir and Pinchot, and thought about this question of public lands, was that public lands really were the result of the combination of preservation and conservation — the Park Service and the Forest Service being successful philosophies for managing public lands. Muir was sort of a prophet. Pinchot was sort of a statesman. It took both types of talent to give us the legacy of public land we have today,” he said.

It’s impossible to know, but in the new age of GPS apps like OnX, at a time when interest in outdoor recreation and public lands is skyrocketing and as Americans begin to realize they, despite where they live, have as much right to federal public lands in the West as the residents, Muir and Pinchot might have together continued to call for further conservation if they were here today. It’s at least doubtful either would have approved of selling off 640-acre parcels of public lands to the highest bidder to build private estates for the very few able to afford them, not unlike the 640-acre parcel of state-owned land northeast of Kelly currently open for public comment on the state’s analysis of a potential sale.

But that’s yet another contentious debate.

“The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests, is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it,” Muir said in 1895. “So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for.”

For more on John Clayton: naturalstories.substack.com/.

Up next at the Coe: Northwest College Associate Professor of Biology Eric C. Atkinson will discuss his studies in a multi-pathogen assemblage infecting the avian community of the northeastern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem on Dec. 7 at noon.