This Land Is Our Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance
These new books cover challenges to our shared land, ranging from Indigenous appropriation to current corporate grabs.
The post This Land Is <i>Our</i> Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance appeared first on The Revelator.
In a perfect world, a book-review column focused on public lands would provide readers with exciting tips and insights about visiting national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, and other breathtaking sites across the United States.
But it’s not a perfect world: Today America’s public lands face their greatest threats as the Trump administration expands the extractive economy, slashes agency workforces, seeks to shrink national monuments, and makes plans to sell off many of our natural assets — even as attendance at our national parks continues to soar to record levels.
That’s why several new and forthcoming books about public lands are essential reading: They put this new threat into historical context, reveal the complexities and contradictions in our public-lands policies, offer insight into their current and future protections, and remind us of their beauty and ecological importance.
Some of them also teach us how to get maximum enjoyment out of a visit to a national park.
Here are a dozen-plus new books about public lands, published in 2024 and 2025, along with their official descriptions. The links go to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to request these books through your local booksellers or public libraries.
We’ve also provided a list of several must-have, critical, and fundamental books about public lands for your environmental library and book collections — a list especially for new and young environmentalists and those new to environmentalism who seek core information as a foundation for their advocacy and understanding in today’s world.
Before we get to the traditionally published books, we thought it was important to mention one of the primary texts being used right now to attack public lands:
Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership
We include this one on the list to reveal the strategies of those trying to monetize and minimize America’s public lands. There’s a lot to digest and understand in this roadmap for unworking the federal government; for the primary section affecting national parks, monuments, and forests, skip to Chapter 16 on the Department of the Interior by self-styled “Sagebrush Rebel” William Perry Pendley.
Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands by Adam M. Sowards
Environmental historian Adam Sowards synthesizes public-lands history from the beginning of the republic to recent controversies. The U.S. federal government owns more than a quarter of the nation’s landscape, managed by four federal agencies. It intersects history with nature, politics, and economics and explores how the concept of “public” has been controversial from the start, from homesteader visions to free-enterprise ranchers to activists. Americans have a stake in these lands: They are, after all, ours.
Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Julie Brugger
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah has figured prominently in the long and ongoing struggle over the meaning and value of America’s public lands. In 1996 President Bill Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the monument, with the goal of protecting scientific and historical resources. This book focuses on the perspectives of diverse groups affected by conflict over the monument. Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism.
The Other Public Lands: Preservation, Extraction, and Politics on the Fifty States’ Natural Resource Lands by Steven Davis
A comprehensive primer on state public lands and the political dynamics that underlie their management. For most Americans state lands are the most accessible type of public land; however, despite their ubiquity, they remain largely terra incognita. Offering a wide-angle overview, Davis focuses on how states prioritize competing claims related to conservation, resource development, tourism, recreation, and finances. Exploring differences and common patterns in state land management, he examines the privatization and commercialization of state parks and the tensions between recreation, revenue, and the preservation of biodiversity and natural landscapes. He also raises issues about equity, access, appropriate development, and ecological health. With current demands to transfer federal lands to the states, Davis concludes with an appraisal of whether states could handle this transfer and suggests ways to ensure adequate access in an era of increased need.
The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands by Josh Jackson
A galvanizing road trip across California’s immense public wilderness from a beloved adventurer. It all began with a camping trip. Outdoor enthusiast Josh Jackson had never heard of “BLM land” before a casual recommendation from a friend led him to a free campsite in the desert — and the revelation that over 15 million acres of land in California are owned collectively by the people. In The Enduring Wild, he takes us on a road trip spanning thousands of miles, crisscrossing the Golden State to seek out every parcel of public wilderness, from the Pacific shores of the King Range down to the Mojave Desert. Over mountains, across prairies, and through sagebrush, Jackson unravels the stories of these lands: The Indigenous peoples who have called them home to the extractives’ threats that imperil them today, and of the grassroots organizers and political champions who have rallied to their common defense to uphold the radical mandate to protect these natural treasures for generations to come.
Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem by Robert B. Keiter
For more than 150 years, the 23-million-acre Yellowstone region — now widely known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone. Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region. Extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands, Yellowstone is a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. The quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task. (Available July 2025)
Land Back: Relational Landscapes of Indigenous Resistance across the Americas edited by Heather Dorries and Michelle Daigle
Relationships with land are fundamental components of Indigenous worldviews, politics, and identity. The disruption of land relations is a defining feature of colonialism; colonial governments and capitalist industries have violently dispossessed Indigenous lands, undermining Indigenous political authority through the production of racialized and gendered hierarchies of difference. The collection of voices in Land Back highlight the ways Indigenous peoples and anticolonial co-resistors understand land relations for political resurgence and freedom across the Americas, examining the relationships of language, Indigenous ontologies, and land reclamation; Indigenous ecology and restoration; the interconnectivity of environmental exploitation and racial, class, and gender exploitation; Indigenous diasporic movement; community urban planning; transnational organizing and relational anti-racist place-making; and the role of storytelling and children in movements for liberation.
Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands by Joseph Whitson
While outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of “the wilderness” as an unpeopled haven, this book is an analysis of the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, U.S. public lands, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism. Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation.
National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration edited by Christina Gish Hill, Matthew J. Hill, and Brooke Neely
The history of national parks in the United States mirrors the fraught relations between the Department of the Interior and the nation’s Indigenous peoples. But amidst the challenges are examples of success. This collection of essays proposes a reorientation of relationships between tribal nations and national parks, placing Indigenous peoples as co-stewards through strategic collaboration. More than simple consultation, strategic collaboration, as the authors define it, involves the complex process by which participants come together to find ways to engage with one another across sometimes-conflicting interests. In case studies and interviews, the authors and editors of this volume — scholars as well as National Park Service staff and Tribal historic preservation officers — explore pathways for collaboration, emphasizing emotional commitment, mutual respect, and patience, rather than focusing on “land-back” solutions, in the cocreation of a socially sensible public-lands policy.
Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus
For millennia land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment. With an overview of modern global land reallocation history, Albertus shows how the shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis — and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.
Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers by Frances Backhouse
Some 170,000 wood bison, North America’s largest land animals, once roamed northern regions, while at least 30 million plains bison trekked across the rest of the continent. Almost driven to extinction in the 1800s by decades of slaughter and hunting, this ecological and cultural keystone species supports biodiversity and strengthens the ecosystems around it. Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers celebrates the traditions and teachings of Indigenous Peoples and looks at how bison lovers of all backgrounds came together to save these iconic animals. Learn about the places where bison are regaining a hoof-hold and meet some of the young people who are welcoming bison back home.
Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty
A vivid portrait of the American prairie, which rivals the rainforest in its biological diversity and, with little notice, is disappearing even faster. The North American prairie is an ecological marvel, a lush carpet of grass that stretches to the horizon, and home to some of the nation’s most iconic creatures — bison, elk, wolves, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and bald eagles. Plants, microbes, and animals together made the grasslands one of the richest ecosystems on Earth and a massive carbon sink, but the constant expansion of agriculture threatens what remains. Exploring humanity’s relationship with this incredible land, this book offers a deep, compassionate analysis of the difficult decisions and opportunities facing agricultural and Indigenous communities. A vivid portrait of the heartland ecosystem that argues why the future of this region is essential far beyond the heartland.
2025 Rand McNally Road Atlas & National Park Guide
Showcasing our country’s astonishing beauty, the Rand McNally Road Atlas & National Park Guide is packed with hundreds of photos, essential visitor information, and insightful travel tips for all 63 of America’s national parks. Includes a complete 2025 Rand McNally Road Atlas to make navigating a breeze, plus tourism websites and phone numbers for every U.S. state and Canadian province on map pages.
More Must-Read, Fundamental Public Lands Books for Every Environmentalist’s Collection
Literally hundreds of books about public land have crossed our desks since The Revelator started publishing eight years ago. Here’s a compendium of several must-have, critical, and fundamental books about public lands for your environmental library and book collections — a list especially relevant for new and young environmentalists who seek essential information to create a foundation for their advocacy and understanding in today’s often “anti-climate-change” world.
In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer by Steven Davis
Briefly lays out the history and characteristics of public lands at the local, state, and federal levels while examining the numerous policy prescriptions for their privatization or, in the case of federal lands, transfer.
American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West by Betsy Gaines Quammen
Quammen, historian and conservationist, documents the ongoing feud between the Bundy ranching family, the federal government, and the American public, examining the roots of the Bundys’ cowboy confrontations, and how history has shaped an often-dangerous mindset which today feeds the militia movement and threatens public lands, wild species, and American heritage.
George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks by Jerry Emory
The first biography of a visionary biologist whose groundbreaking ideas regarding wildlife and science revolutionized national parks.
This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments by McKenzie Long
One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii.
Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands by John D. Leshy
A leading expert in public-lands policy, Leshy discusses the key political decisions that led to this, beginning at the very founding of the nation. He traces the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus in favor of the national government holding these vast land areas primarily for recreation, education, and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources.
History Comics: The National Parks by Falynn Koch
Turn back the clock to 1872, when Congress established Yellowstone National Park as an area of unspoiled beauty for the “benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Meet the visionaries, artists, and lovers of the American wilderness who fought against corruption and self-interest to carve out and protect these spaces for future generations. See for yourself how the idea of national parks began, how they’ve changed, and how they continue to define America.
Head to your public library or local bookstore for all these great books about public lands. For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several more on these and related issues — visit the Revelator Reads archives.
Previously in The Revelator:
Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction
Trump’s Approach to Public Lands? Expanding the Extractive Economy and Declaring a War on Nature
The post This Land Is <i>Our</i> Land: New Books About Public Lands, the Threats They Face, and Their Ecological Importance appeared first on The Revelator.
