This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West [B1065]
Ketcham, Christopher
2019 HCDJ ex-library copy in nice condition with a mylar-protected dust jacket. 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.
From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Christopher Ketcham is my new hero & I am eternally grateful for the investigative journalism he did for this work!"; "Strong, well-researched, accurate and clear, but most of all passionate, bursting with the righteous anger we should all feel at the plunder of our natural heritage. The cowboy hats distract the public from welfare ranchers' (and their lackeys in public agencies) pillage of the lands and waters every American owns-- pillage underwritten by huge taxpayer subsidies. Ketcham's book places him in the company of outspoken, outraged-- and sadly, departed-- conservation prophets such as DeVoto, Brower, Foreman, and Abbey. This generation desperately needs such voices, now like never before, as the end times for Earth's biodiversity unfold. Here's hoping for much more from Christopher Ketcham."; "I've spent the last year and a half trying to read this, even a few pages at a time, but for an environmentalist and a lover of the American West it's just so effing sad that I made it halfway and just can't read any more. I'm giving it five stars because it's a critical book and one that so many others should read, hopefully stronger than I am."