44. Season III, Episode VI: Environmental Protection

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

This week, we are going to be exploring the relationship between presidents, the bully pulpit, and environmental protection. When did presidents start thinking about federal use of land? When did that consideration change from an economic one based on maximizing profit and agricultural production for white settlers to something else? How do national parks fit into the equation? What are the implications for Native sovereignty? And finally, how did the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency change the president’s relationship to land in America?

We are going to tackle these questions and more on today's episode. First, we spoke with Dr. Mark David Spence, the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks, about the early history of presidents and land as a national resource. We talked about the role of national parks in the late 19th century and the complicated relationship between national parks and native peoples.

Next, we spoke with Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, the author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. Nelson gave us a history of the first national park in the world, told us about the outsized impact of Theodore Roosevelt in the national park system, and discussed executive action on national parks today.

Finally, we spoke with Dr. Brooks Flippen, author of Nixon and the Environment, about Richard Nixon, environmental protection, and the creation of Earth Day. Brooks shares with us the really interesting political motivations behind Nixon's climate actions. You might be surprised to learn that climate change was once a bipartisan issue!

Let’s dive in.

Guests:

Dr. Mark David Spence is a public historian specializing in environmental history, the American west, and the history of national parks. He is the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks.

Dr. Mark David Spence is a public historian, a consultant, and a visiting professor in the Oregon University System. Dr. Spence specializes in environmental history, American Indian history, the history of the American West, and the history of national parks. For the past several years, he has been the sole proprietor of HistoryCraft, where his work is largely focused on historical studies for the National Park Service. Before moving to Oregon, Spence was an Associate Professor of History and Chair of American Studies at Knox College in Illinois.

Dr. Spence is also the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks. National parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier preserve some of this country's most cherished wilderness landscapes. While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, Spence’s book examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.

Follow Mark David Spence on Twitter @markdavidspence.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Massachusetts and the author of four books, including Saving Yellowstone.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Massachusetts. Her brand new book Saving Yellowstone tells the story of the creation of the first national park in the world, Yellowstone National Park. A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.

Nelson is also the author of three previous books: The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War, and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp. She writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Times. Her column on Civil War popular culture, "Stereoscope," appears regularly in the Civil War Monitor.

Dr. Nelson earned her BA from Harvard University in History and Literature and her PhD from Iowa in American Studies. She taught at Texas Tech, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, MIT, and Brown before leaving academia to become a full-time writer in 2014. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

You can follow her on Twitter @megankatenelson.

Dr. Brooks Flippen is a political and environmental historian, and a professor of history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

Dr. Brooks Flippen is a professor of history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He is an expert on American political, religious, and environmental history. Flippen is the author of four books. Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006), Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), and Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

Dr. Flippen attended Washington and Lee University, where he graduated with a BA in 1982. He then taught secondary school history in New York and Virginia before getting his MA in American History at the University of Richmond in 1988. He went on to get his PhD in twentieth-century American political history at the University of Maryland in 1994. He came to Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 1995. Over the 2017-2018 academic year, he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer teaching at South China Normal University in Guangzhou, China. In addition to writing four books, Flippen has spoken at a number of organizations, including NPR and the Nixon Presidential Library.