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Title details for This Land by Christopher Ketcham - Available

This Land

How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West

by Christopher Ketcham
Christopher Ketcham
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West—and a plea for the protection of these last wild places
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. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.
Cover Photo courtesy of TWIG Media/Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 16, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984889553
      • File size: 450789 KB
      • Duration: 15:39:08

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Christopher Ketcham makes the wise choice to narrate his own audiobook, an exhaustive expos� of the Mormon ranchers who are keeping a murderous choke hold on the Bureau of Land Management. Ketcham speaks with an upbeat twang that doesn't reflect a specific region. His voice grows softer as he heads into Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument to research the rampant exploitation of public lands there. Ketcham expertly reenacts his audiobook's many interviews with passionate scientists, terrorized former BLM workers, and anti-federalist ranchers. His descriptive love of wild ecosystems provides the backdrop for his sledgehammer of scorn. No one but the author could express such informed disgust for the multilayered, bipartisan corruption that is destroying what is left of our public lands. J.T. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 13, 2019
      A vast endowment of public land is being ravaged with the help of the regulators who are supposed to protect it, argues this passionate, sometimes vitriolic environmentalist jeremiad. Journalist Ketcham roams western states surveying commercially driven environmental destruction on huge swaths of federally owned land: grasslands in Utah’s Grand Escalante National Monument ruined by cattle-grazing; wolves and grizzly bears hunted by sportsmen after being cavalierly kicked off the endangered species list; precious sagebrush grouse habitat obliterated by fracking; old-growth wilderness fragmented by roads, logged, and opened to off-road vehicles. His roster of villains is long, including the National Forest Service, portrayed as supine before business interests; the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose trappers slaughter economically inconvenient critters with cyanide bombs; the Bureau of Land Management, “a faithful servant” of lawless cattlemen and “a slavering prostitute” to oil and gas drillers; “collaborationist” environmental groups who greenwash corporate resource extraction; and humankind in general (“Homo sapiens is out of control, a bacteria boiling in a petri dish”). Ketcham balances vehemence with sharp-eyed reportage, fascinating explanations of ecological intricacies, and rapturous evocations of wild places (“the world glows with the new sage and ripples, and the glow races to the ends of the perceptible earth”). Ketcham’s indictment of national environmental policy isn’t evenhanded, but it is powerful. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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