It is a wonderful fact of nature that some of the most magnificent scenery is where rivers begin: at the tops of mountain ranges. This is why our awe-inspiring national parks – Yosemite, Yellowstone – became the modern world’s first protected public lands. It’s always worth remembering the words of writer Wallace Stegner: national parks are America’s best idea.
But national parks proved far too small to protect all the water the dry west needs. At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt made the US the first modern nation to enshrine public lands conservation as a national priority. He created 150 national forests in the west to ensure a consistent supply of water and timber. Soon followed the first national wildlife refuges and the first national monuments.
Protecting only parks and forests proved tragically insufficient. Come the 1930s, farmers over-plowing dry prairies and deserts caused the Dust Bowl – the worst single-event environmental disaster yet in the nation’s history. To protect the soil-saving, deep-rooted native grasses, in the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt created the Grazing Service. The protection of grasslands, prairies, deserts and canyonlands heralded a completeness of conserved landscapes.
The counterattack to undo public lands conservation began at that point. By the 1940s, some western cattle kings and sheep barons, historically used to monopolizing western ranges, attacked the Grazing Service. Their tool was the Nevada senator Pat McCarran – a role model for senator McCarthy. McCarran toured the US west staging hearings about public lands in which he brazenly gave priority and preference to cattle kings and sheep barons.
A McCarran aide explained that a purpose of these hearings was to affect conservation workers “psychologically” – to hurt their morale. McCarran would order employees to attend his hearings and forbid them to speak, while encouraging his curated audiences to shout insults at them.
Mass layoffs followed – similar to the purge we saw this February. Disparaged and defunded, the service was amalgamated in 1946 into a new, enfeebled and industry-friendly agency called the Bureau of Land Management.
The political exploitation of fear, paranoia, conspiracy, false accusations, show trials, refusal of fair play and apocalypticism could be called McCarranism as accurately as McCarthyism.