National Park Week is August 22 to 30, and this year’s theme is “Celebrate America’s Story,” honoring the country’s 250th anniversary and marking the National Park Service’s 110th birthday.
Our public lands have been the stage for much of the United States’ history, and we’ve invited Dillon Osleger, scientist, environmental advocate, and author of Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America’s Public Lands, to share five books that contextualize how America laid claim to these natural areas, who owned them first, the threats facing public lands now, and how to get involved in environmental advocacy.
In late July, President Donald Trump signed proclamations reducing Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments by 90 percent to make way for oil drilling and uranium mining. Meanwhile, the Colorado River is at a record low level, and questions of how its water is distributed proliferate. Osleger notes that these developments are among the most critical threats to public lands and warns that future generations’ access to the outdoors is at risk. Educating the public about their lands’ history and uncertain fate is more important than ever.
“I’ve found it to be the easiest process when you encourage people to read, and to discuss public lands with their families or friends in a way that makes these public lands personal to them, tied to where they’ve been outside,” says Osleger. “You start to create these ripple effects: If people understand a place close to them the way they’d understand family—clear as gin—they start to understand why places far away, that they might never visit, are important.”
Here are five books Osleger recommends.•
GRINNELL: AMERICA’S ENVIRONMENTAL PIONEER AND HIS RESTLESS DRIVE TO SAVE THE WEST, BY JOHN TALIAFERRO
“George Grinnell was born in the mid-1800s, 1849, and he is someone who is truly responsible for a lot of the public lands and national park preservation that gets attributed to Roosevelt, to the Audubon Society, and to John Muir. There are a lot of issues with John Muir, a lot of issues with Roosevelt around hunting and around Indigenous people—this is the biography that I wish people read. He is one of the few environmentalists from the 1800s who would have fans, in his time, his contemporaries, who would be both Indigenous people and environmentalists.”
THIS CONTESTED LAND: THE STORIED PAST AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL MONUMENTS, BY MCKENZIE LONG
“McKenzie Long does an incredible job at looking at national monuments in the West—the beauty within all of them and the landscapes, but also looking at their threats, and how national monuments are created, but how they are also the least permanent form of public lands. She just does a wonderful job of connecting people to place, while also showing what’s at loss beyond just acres of land in each of these places: what species are threatened when you remove protections, how development can happen.”
DISPOSSESSING THE WILDERNESS: INDIAN REMOVAL AND THE MAKING OF THE NATIONAL PARKS, BY MARK DAVID SPENCE
“This is kind of my definitive go-to, the one I reread to understand Native American removal alongside the creation of national parks. It’s a difficult read for a lot of people. Sometimes this history makes people uncomfortable, but I find no easier way to truly learn anything than to be uncomfortable. It puts you in a place of understanding, of asking why. They were the homes of, and relatives of, people for time immemorial, for thousands of years before they were gated off for the more voyeuristic pleasure of people to take photographs, or to make money as companies. It’s one of those necessary reads for anyone who really wants to get into public lands or understand where they come from.”
OUR COMMON GROUND: A HISTORY OF AMERICA'S PUBLIC LANDS, BY JOHN D. LESHY
“This is the definitive work. I don’t want to call it dry, but it’s not exactly a run-through read; it’s not going to keep you. This is one you get through piece by piece, in the sections it has. But it is the definitive history of public lands. I think it’s really critical to understand what laws actually define public lands, because national parks sound so obvious and easy; national forests sound so obvious and easy. However, there’s this crazy, almost Byzantine set of laws that have been established all the way back from 1850 to the 1980s, and all of those laws have an incredible impact on public lands. This is the book if you want to get into public lands as your job, or you want to play a really critical role in public lands advocacy. This is your book.”
THE HIGH SIERRA OF CALIFORNIA, BY GARY SNYDER AND ILLUSTRATED BY TOM KILLION
“I love their work. They’ve done a couple of books in this style, on Mount Tamalpais as well as about the Bay Area. They both hike in a kind of circumambulation—which is less focused on peaks and more focused on traversing around a mountain, even at the base—which is seen repeated across a whole bunch of cultures. There aren’t a lot of books that go into that, and this is such an approachable, really beautiful book for people to get taken in with some of Gary Snyder’s poetry and essays about that process—hiking in place, with less of a focus on people.”
Elizabeth Casillas is an associate editor at Alta Journal. A graduate of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, she has previously written for the Poly Post and Enspire Magazine.
