#1652 America's Public Lands: A Report Card

Clay Jenkinson interviews Jonathan Thompson, the author of books about the American West, including Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Thompson has written much about the pushback of western ranchers, irrigators, mining interests, and chambers of commerce against federal regulation (and even federal ownership) of the public lands in the West. How should we balance the varied interests in the West: agriculture, mining, motorized recreation, backpack recreation, Native American interests, and America's deep addiction to carbon extraction? Who should be at the table? Clay asked Thompson to look at the West from 38,000 feet and offer his predictions of its future in the second half of the 21st century. Will President Trump achieve his goal of privatizing whole swaths of the public domain?