America’s public lands are often in need of a good lawyer, and they have one in John Leshy. He has served America’s public lands (and its owners) as an academic, author, and advocate. In his long career, he’s published legal textbooks, written briefs, argued cases, and taught law students, and he was the top lawyer in the U.S. Department of the Interior for almost as long as Bruce Babbitt was secretary of the interior.

Many politicians call for a return to the era of bipartisanship as a solution to any woe. This call has resonance because the bipartisan era occurred in the living memory of baby boomers. But in the long arc of history this era did not last long, and the evidence of today does not give much hope of a return to it.

Pinnacles is the nation’s fifty-ninth full-fledged national park. Twenty-five of our fifty-nine national parks, totaling 39.6 million acres, were first seeded by the establishment of a presidentially proclaimed national monument. Fourteen of these monumental twenty-five were established from more than one national monument proclamation, in that national monuments were expanded by later presidents.

The present president doesn’t seem to enjoy the outdoors, unless it is on a great big beautiful golf course. Though the presidential retreat in Maryland does have a modest driving range along with one hole and several tees, don’t bet on Trump spending any time at Camp David, tucked in western Maryland’s forests.

President Trump signed an executive order on April 26, 2017, that directs Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review sixty-two of the last three presidents’ national monument proclamations, dating back to 1996. Source: Wikipedia

The purposes and boundaries of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge can only be divined by examining at least a dozen acts of Congress, presidential actions, and administrative decisions.

Pelican Island in the Indian River Lagoon in Florida was the home to an extraordinary number of native birds, many of which were threatened by plume hunters meeting the hot market for feathers (and even whole birds) for women’s hats.

Until the latter third of the nineteenth century, forests in the United States were considered inexhaustible—not renewable, but inexhaustible. But by the 1880s, with watersheds on public and private lands were being decimated by unrestrained logging and grazing, an emerging conservation movement was beginning to convince the public—and would eventually convince Congress—that something needed to be done.