Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands -- Part II with John Leshy

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As promised, John Leshy is back on the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast to discuss his recently published and definitive book, Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands.

Our Common Ground is the most comprehensive and incisive history, both legal and political, ever written about the American public lands. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who loves our national forests, parks, grasslands or BLM lands, especially right now, when the entire institution of the American public lands is being questioned by so many- most of whom have no idea what they are putting at risk.

John Leshy is a former General Counsel of the Department of Interior and the Harry D. Sunderland Distinguished Professor of Real Property at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. He has been deeply engaged in public lands policy and law for over fifty years.

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson.

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists.

www.backcountryhunters.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's one of my motivations for it is that, you know, these stories need to be known and appreciated.
0:10.2	And they're damn interesting, too. It's not just important and instructive, but they're really
0:18.7	interesting. So the answer is always overwhelmingly, yes, yes, yes, we should.
0:24.3	We like this.
0:25.3	This is a success story, you know.
0:27.3	This is a political process working like it's supposed to work.
0:31.0	And so we should honor that and respect that and learn from it.
0:34.2	That's really why I wrote the book.
0:37.0	And it was also driven largely at the grassroots.
0:41.3	It wasn't some top-down, you know, bunch of bureaucrats or pointy-headed politicians in Washington
0:47.5	making these decisions. These decisions were largely driven by campaigns at the grassroots level. And I think those two things are things
0:57.6	that are not fully appreciated well enough about how we got to where we are today.
1:03.0	Hey, everybody, Hal Herring. Thanks for being here. I came here today to talk about something,
1:09.3	a very serious challenge that's coming in.
1:11.6	If you haven't listened to episode 189 of the podcast yet, I hope you will.
1:17.5	But if you don't, I'll give you a nutshell of it.
1:20.3	The politicians in Utah are once again trying to conduct a huge land grab on the American public lands.
1:27.9	You may decide that you've heard this tune played too many times, but I'm here to tell you
1:33.2	that this is the slickest snake oil campaign that I have seen from the land grabbers, and I've
1:40.8	been following this a long time.
1:43.2	So, yes, it can make you angry.
1:46.4	No, they can't have 18.5 million acres of our public lands.
	...

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