Around the Campfire Archives

Category Archives for Around the Campfire

Around the Campfire #77, Deconstructing Today’s Great Land Grab

This Campfire is lighting the way for a theme issue of “Defending Our Public Lands” that will appear in our new digital magazine Rewilding Earth, and which will grow steadily in the coming weeks and months as we revitalize and expand our website Rewilding.org

#75 Around the Campfire; What Condition My Condition Is In

What Condition My Condition Is In Well, I guess it’s time to explain my withdrawal of late and why The Rewilding Institute seems to have been moved to the back burner. In a nutshell, I’ve had two kinds of breakdowns this year—technological and spine. Coming together, they’ve been a perfect storm. (As you’ll see soon, […]

#73 Around the Campfire: Comparing Applies and…Parsnips?

Around the Campfire #73, July 24, 2017 State Trust Lands are often misunderstood in terms of both their character and their management. THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC LANDS, but are instead the subject of a public trust created to support the education of New Mexico’s children. (Emphasis in original.) –New Mexico State Land Office Website, Aubrey […]

#72 Around the Campfire; Trumping the Wild?

One night last November, Nancy and I tuned into CNN to celebrate the election of the first woman as President of the United States—and for the Democrats to retake the US Senate. But as the evening wore on, I suddenly felt a cosmic shudder, which made me spill much of my second martini. It was […]

#66 Around the Campfire; A Brief History of the National Wilderness Preservation System

There are any number of books, booklets, and articles about Wilderness Areas in the United States, but little has been written about the history of how designated Wilderness Areas have grown in number of areas and in total acreage from 1924 to today. To wit, many conservationists know that New Mexico’s Gila was the first […]

#65 Around the Campfire; Faraway and Nearby

A tired old broadside against Wilderness Areas goes something like this: “By working to shield and set aside far-off lands as Wilderness Areas, conservationists shun the land where people live and work.” I heard this back in the 1970s from urban environmentalists. Wilderness deconstructionists picked it up twenty years later. Whether they knew it was […]

#64 Around the Campfire; Closing Keynote Talk at the 50th Anniversary of The Wilderness Act Conference

Editor’s note: Given without notes or outline, this Campfire is Dave’s closing plenary talk (October 19, 2014) from the conference to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act in Albuquerque. Thanks to Vicky Hoover for helping clean up the transcript. The copy here is nearly verbatim. _____________________________________________________________ Well, thank you for being here on a […]

#63 Around the Campfire; The Anthropocene and Ozymandias

Much has been made lately of the so-called Anthropocene—the idea that Homo sapiens has so taken over and modified Earth that we need a new name for our geological age instead of the outmoded Holocene. One remorseless Anthropoceniac writes, “Nature is gone… You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over […]

#62 Around the Campfire; Wilderness for the Drylands Bureau of Land Management Wilderness

(Note: This edition of Around the Campfire is adapted from my new book, The Great Conservation Divide, which is now in print. An announcement and order form will soon go out to this list.) Bureau of Land Management in the Wilderness Act Howard Zahniser and other wilderfolks wanted to have all four federal land managing […]

#61 Around the Campfire; The Forest Service Against the Wilderness After World War Two

Right before World War Two, conservation and resourcism were friendlier than they had been since the 1890s. With Harold Ickes as Secretary of the Interior, Ferdinand Silcox as Chief of the Forest Service, Bob Marshall as Head of Recreation for the Forest Service, and Ding Darling as Director of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and […]

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