Bibliocracy

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1. The ink is black, the page is white
2. Together we learn to read and write
3. A child is black, a child is white, the whole world looks upon the side, a beautiful side.
4. Welcome to Bibliocracy. I'm your host, Andrew Tonkovich, editor of the Santa Monica Review
5. and founding editor of Citric Acid, Orange County's online journal. I'm also a proud
6. member of the Community of Writers, which hosts an annual summer writers workshop in Olympic Valley,
7. California, where I'm happy to be recording this week. Check out the year-round programming,
8. as well as the conferences in poetry and prose at communityofwriters.org.
9. My guest this week on Bibliocracy is a scientist, writer, and environmental advocate who has spent
10. years as a trail builder, geologist, professional mountain biker, and writer on public land
11. management, wilderness, and the history and implementation of policies which directly
12. affect the natural world in so many ways. Dylan Oslager is out with a book from the legendary
13. non-profit publisher Hay Day titled Trail Work, Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's
14. public lands, a title and subtitle which argues simultaneously a thesis about policy and human
15. experience in the natural world. Don't take my word for it. Instead, note the blurbs from
16. Bill McKibben himself and recent Pulitzer winner Jason Roberts. In only 225 gorgeously composed
17. pages, Oslager delivers a naturalist's memoir, a science and policy report, a meditation,
18. and a cri de corps, reminding us how we have forgotten our paths into and out of our own
19. history on the land. Oslager holds both B.S. and M.S. degrees in earth science, as well as
20. minors in hydrology and astrophysics, and has taught courses on geomorphology, soil,
21. and science communication with writing in Outside, The LA Times, Patagonia's Cleanest Wine,
22. Republic, and Alta Journal. And of course, he is a hiker, trail runner, and mountain biker,
23. in addition to being a designer and trail builder. With all that, welcome to Bibliocracy,
24. Dylan Oslager. It's a pleasure to join you. It's nice to be here in your home turf of
25. Olympic Valley. You live in nearby Truckee, so that it's rare that I get to actually be in the
26. terrain or the ecosystem of somebody with whom I'm speaking. This book has an encyclopedic
27. character. It could be a thousand pages long, but you're such an elegant and poetic and economical
28. writer that it serves both as an introduction and a primer, as a policy exploration, as an advocacy
29. piece. This is at the same time both the gentlest and most militant book that I have read. And
30. all of it has to do with your embrace of metaphor So here you are early in the book and I quoting my guest on Bibliocracy Dylan Oslager My interest was not solely to question exactly what preceded me but rather to understand how a trail a line in the forest can act as a thread through which I might relate a landscape to myself society and nature
31. Metaphors galore.
32. It's a trail after all.
33. And then later on, here it is, everybody.
34. The greatest value trails and old maps provide is a pathway to the languages of connection that we have lost.
35. When you're cycling, do you just see metaphor?
36. Yeah, I overuse metaphor, admittedly.
37. And I think something I've registered over time, and I think in long kind of spider webbed contextualization of environment.
38. And so I tend to ramble or wax even in my own head. And so in writing, and through a lot of influence from my time at Community of Writers and with fantastic editors at Hay Day, I've kind of learned to try my best at embodying the Kurt Vonnegut adage of the truest ideas, the truest lights are those that come in short sentences and purity of thought.
39. And so my sentences in the book are my best attempt at shortening these extensive complex metaphorical thoughts that I have when I'm outdoors.
40. Not to burden you with even more metaphor, but as a sometime hiker and cyclist myself who's sitting with somebody who really is a hardcore mountain biker, trail runner, and hiker,
41. the trail is always this place of creativity, engagement, and fun, and sometimes hardship.
42. So why did I take this trail? Do I have to go back to the trailhead? Do I have to go
43. see where I came from? You make it very fun, and I do not tire of the metaphor.
44. I'm glad, and I'm glad that's the case. And I think, again, and throughout writing this book,
45. I'm not sure it's an original idea, especially coming from Indigenous perspective,
46. and people who belong to this continent and to this place that I live in and the places that I
47. write about, there is this long held ideal of our relationship and our challenge and our experience
48. in place is as much or more so relative to our experience of what is around us and our mental
49. state and connection with place, more so than just the difficulty or the resistance of landscape
50. against us. Oftentimes we caricaturize trails as being hard or difficult, but we don't think about
51. the factors like the external factors, the view sheds or human history or ecology that influence
52. that relationship we have, that experience we have. And so we've kind of tried to drill down
53. and derive trails into a few factors that kind of make up what we characterize them as or describe
54. them as. And we've eschewed a lot of really important facets of the environment, both spatial
55. and temporal, that really drive our experiences outdoors. Which is what your book is all about.
56. So beyond the poetry and the joy, there's also the utilitarian, the history, the revisionist
57. history, thank you very much, the discovery, which brings us to maps. Now, I don't know if you're a
58. trained cartographer, but at this point you might as well be.
59. I'll take the title.
60. And the searching around in the most unlikely places for maps in order to compare
61. what somebody once thought the landscape was versus what got grown over what got paved over what got lost what got ignored or unfortunately which got destroyed by mineral exploitation or whatever And your job I think you use the word
62. palimpsest at least once, is to see deeper and through the centuries and all that.
63. So now that I've waxed ecstatic over a beautiful book, which full disclosure, I read in two
64. sittings. It's so, so fun and beautiful. Maybe you could introduce yourself by way of the very
65. earliest portion of the book where we get a short bit of memoir about young Dylan and how he became
66. the person and activist and writer he is today. Yeah. And before I introduce myself through this
67. reading and not clarify when I'm beginning reading, but I'll introduce where we are and
68. give credit to not just who I am and how I became who I am, but the people who mentored me. Even
69. And just this morning, I was looking at 1800 general land office maps at my kitchen table,
70. which my wife just laughs at me as we drink coffee over those.
71. But I was comparing them to De Azevedo journals from UC Berkeley Library and looking at in
72. Washoe place names that he had recorded back in the late 1800s, early 1900s for his California
73. Indian handbook.
74. I don't know if you've ever seen that.
75. There's an early 1900s publication.
76. And I was comparing those notes against place names that I've been given from a young man in his mid-30s, Herman Fillmore, who is the son of one of the last Indigenous native Washoe speakers, Benny Fillmore.
77. And Herman's been working on place names and Indigenous language dictionary here for half of his adult life.
78. But the place that we sit here, Olympic Valley, the original name here is Memdui Modue.
79. And it describes deer coming over these trails for thousands of years and mountain goats.
80. Mountain goats are no longer here.
81. So I think people are important and introducing myself is important, but as is introducing place.
82. Because place is what raised me.
83. That said, spoilers abound.
84. I'll read from the beginning of chapter one here, destined for here.
85. Photos from my youth show a pencil-necked boy in loose denim overalls, diaper peeking out from the waistband, running barefoot and shirtless across one of the many cabin porches I have known.
86. In another photo, that same boy, now older and with buck teeth, stands amidst gently trickling streams as he proudly holds aloft fossilized mussel shells, fresh-caught trout, and small stones destined for an out-of-control and largely unrefined rock collection.
87. As the child of two geologists, I think perhaps my rock hoarding was an inherited condition.
88. I never quite fit in at school, instead finding solace and some childhood sense of purpose in the outdoors.
89. My infrastructure was largely that of wild places, which I had learned to see through the lens of geologic timescales.
90. While my classmates traded playing cards or learned to shoot jump shots, I rode my bike across town in search of new trails or fishing holes.
91. As a teen, I wandered trails across the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada of California, pursuing passions for rock climbing, mountain biking, and backcountry skiing, all the while letting my grades slip until both my pride and my summer plans needed rescuing in the form of a passing final multiple-choice chemistry exam.
92. It was an inauspicious academic start for someone who had not only been mentored but babysat since birth by Eldred Moores,
93. the famous geologist and main character in the geological history book Assembling California by the journalist and author John McPhee.
94. As a young adult, when I wasn't trying to find a new pocket of nature's mystery,
95. I was working at a climbing gym trying to scrape together enough money for my next trip.
96. I already missed my high school graduation ceremony and senior prom for backpacking and fly fishing excursions But looking back now I call it fate the natural consequences of having been born on the inaugural National Public Lands Day
97. which falls exactly on my birthday every few years.
98. I recall people, both peers and adults,
99. referring to me as obsessed with the outdoors,
100. which in hindsight was awfully charitable of them.
101. I was lucky enough that a small state college in Montana
102. took pity on my wandering mind and soul
103. and accepted my 2.9 GPA and mediocre SAT test results as worthy of further academic study.
104. In Montana, between jagged peaks and clear running streams, I finally connected academics to my love
105. of the outdoors. I was able to tie calculus to snowpack stability, rock climbing to geology,
106. and climactic characteristics to the relationship between pine bark beetles and pine trees.
107. This door unlocked, I began to excel in both school and the outdoor pursuits.
108. That shift marked my transition into a state of wonder that Wendell Berry describes as other worlds, and Berry Lopez calls interior landscapes, and that 19th century explorer Alexander von Humboldt celebrated when, after joyfully escaping from Europe, he found his own mind opened wide within the natural milieu of South America.
109. That's Dylan Oslager, my guest this week on Bibliocracy. Boy, you are a Californian.
110. Through and through. Yes.
111. The joyful solidarity I feel with somebody who appreciates this place is something so profound, made even more so by the authority that you bring to describing where we are.
112. Another word that's used a lot in this book is curiosity. And your curiosity, for the sake of affirming your own experience, then gets expanded into discovery and trying to figure out what is going on with the trails of indigenous people all the way to the forestry trails and to the Bureau of Land Management,
113. which gets you to be what they call a policy wonk, thank goodness, and somebody who becomes an advocate.
114. And remind me what comes first.
115. Do you start just building or repairing your own favorite local trails and then discover that you're kind of an expert at this?
116. So I started volunteering for trail work with the Sierra Club quite young.
117. And that was a gift, honestly, even though it felt like physical labor at 13 or 14.
118. doing trail maintenance and volunteering or taking it as a job as a young man with American
119. Conservation Corps. Those were kind of the what and the how, if not the where, the what and the how
120. of trail work. It was a job, but over time, it really was the why took time as to realizing
121. what I was an expert at, not just moving dirt, but understanding what I was moving dirt and what it
122. was that I was restoring. It was a natural growth, an organic growth, more so than a reversely
123. engineered. You know, I know everything about this so that I can go do. It was more I do and
124. realize I know nothing. And now I have a world of essentially academics to understand behind it.
125. I think a lot of people fall in love with the place or they read with alarm about some kind of
126. policy challenge, problem or threat. But you were immersed always in this natural world
127. so that to come back around to becoming an advocate makes even more sense, I suppose.
128. Listeners to this show and to KPFK will already be apprehending the politics of this book, of this circumstance, and won't be surprised at all.
129. My interest and my admiration for Dylan's advocacy, maybe you could synthesize it just a little bit.
130. In the local paper, you take a position on the op-ed page, which is related to the problem of neglecting the trail networks, which offer history, the record of policy mistakes and failures.
131. and in a weird way erase from people's memory and engagement their whole responsibility to our wild lands.
132. Yeah, no, politics is no small thing in this book or in my life.
133. It makes up a large part of my weekly work and just existence, whether I'm outdoors in nature or at home sitting at a desk.
134. It's one thing we never get to leave in the U.S. and especially nowadays.
135. if we care about the future of democracy.
136. You know, as well as I, how long it takes to write a book.
137. It was not my intention five years ago when I was writing about my love for public lands
138. that by the time this book was printed, that we would already be where we are
139. at the point of sell-off of public lands,
140. at the point of selling off American history and cultural archival nature of what we have,
141. not to mention the climate change impacts and the equity and access impacts, etc.
142. It is my greatest misfortune, honestly, that this book is as timely as it is. The book was largely written from Freedom of Information Act requests and investigative journalism. And then from my own experience, you know, this idea of the defunding of federal agencies and this loss of the history that we all share in public lands, these last vestiges of undeveloped, mostly undeveloped nature that we have in the U.S., these third spaces that many Americans don't get access to and often take for granted.
143. but that in my eyes sit in the same milieu of society as libraries or hospitals, anything like
144. that. These are things that inherently make us American and that inherently tie all of us together,
145. regardless of our upbringing or our background, and that reflect our own history. These are the
146. lands that are threatened now by our current political schema to be sold off, to be given to
147. the highest bidder for the enrichment of others and the degradation of quality of life for the
148. majority of us who get to call ourselves American. I think it's an important thing to write about
149. hard things with some hope. It is timely in that the book has lessons in advocacy and in how to
150. read public lands that I was hoping were just going to be educational for readers and less
151. kind of a guidebook on how to fight back against our current government.
152. How to read nature indeed. So of course, we're at activism, and I'm hoping that you'll read a
153. section, which really resonated for me because I admire the two activists who you profile here
154. in the context of what you just introduced, Dylan Osweger.
155. History tends to repeat itself. So I'll skip ahead here into the later pages of this book
156. into a chapter on largely activism. In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist
157. residing in Utah and working for the outdoor recreation industry, attended a BLM auction in
158. which 116 parcels of Utah's Red Rock Country were up for auction. Over the course of several hours,
159. Tim raised his bidding paddle, number 70, a non-digger by which he is now known,
160. enough times to win 14 distinct parcels, making up 22,500 acres of land.
161. By the time the auctioneer gavel had landed on that 14th parcel federal BLM agents had surmised that de Christopher had no intention of paying the 1 million he now owed the Bureau and subsequently arrested him In his honesty Tim admitted that he had bid to protect these places he loved
162. He felt forced to act on account of rushed and insufficient environmental and scientific review of the landscape prior to its sale.
163. Within a year, the U.S. Department of the Interior canceled many of the leases that had resulted from the BLM sale,
164. citing both historical preservation as well as violations of environmental laws protecting air quality.
165. Regardless of this vindication, Tim DeChristopher was found guilty on felony charges
166. for violation of the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act
167. and sentenced to two years in prison.
168. Five years later, on February 16, 2016, Terry Tempest Williams, the celebrated author and poet,
169. along with her husband, Brooke, a respected advocate for wilderness,
170. chose to follow the law closer to its written word. After protesting a BLM land auction in Utah,
171. they approached the clerk after bidding had ended and purchased two unsold parcels for a total of
172. 1,120 acres just north of Arches National Park. The price was $1,680, which they charged to their
173. joint credit card account, a legal and lawful transaction. Two weeks later, Terry Tempest
174. Williams lost her job at the University of Utah, a consequence that many speculated came out of
175. political pressure from the state government and donors, many with ties to the oil and gas industry.
176. By the fall, the BLM chose to annul the lease, which was held under the Tempest Exploration
177. Company, on the grounds that no clear plans to develop the parcel for energy had been established.
178. It was the first time that any individual, company, or corporation had ever been denied
179. a lease they had purchased under the Mineral Leasing Act. Today, about 23 million acres of
180. federal BLM land are under lease to developers. Of that, 12.4 million acres are actively producing
181. oil and gas through 89,000 wells across more than 23,500 leases. The remaining 10 million acres
182. are leased but unproductive. Lands held without development, only a fraction of these idle leases
183. have been formally suspended by the government, meaning the lessee no longer pays rent yet still
184. retains exclusive control. In effect, these developers block vast areas of public land
185. from being used for other purposes, including conservation, recreation, and restoration,
186. while being held to far looser standards than private citizens who openly defend the land for
187. its own sake. The difference lies in whose values align with the agency's directives.
188. Private industry that converts land into commodities fits neatly within a conservation model oriented around direct resource use, while preservationists like Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams, who see land as sacred and whole, are treated as outliers or even obstacles.
189. But this raises a fundamental question. If public lands exist to serve the common good, what does it say when their purpose is defined not by shared benefit or ecological care, but by extractive control and economic utility? When the government manages land not for people or place, but for profitability, the very meaning of public becomes hollow.
190. Yeah, that's a good question, Dylan Oslager. I wonder what happens. So my favorite singer, Billy Bragg, says that his audiences are in two categories of peanut butter, the crunchy and the smooth. So that was for the crunchies, very hardcore, direct action, which gets the goods, and a clear dialectic there about what's wrong.
191. Let move to something that right which is your work on an amazing project out in Ventura County called the Harmon Canyon Preserve It my not very elegant segue from activism to
192. stewardship. Although, I mean, in some ways they're the same thing, but I leave it to you
193. to define or introduce because the final section that I want you to please read for us is related
194. to your amazing work as a designer of trails in an area that was effectively reclaimed for the good,
195. for the public use, for the democratic use of those wild open spaces that we love.
196. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, this is towards the latter portion of the book and is based in Ventura,
197. California, so more to our south. Public lands, trails, and outdoor recreation have only one path
198. forward and that is not one of proliferating miles of new trails hacked across landscapes.
199. Rather, the path lies in the constant learning and appreciation of the landscape itself.
200. It is having reverence for places sacred to others. It is reflecting on history and asking
201. questions of people and place that might not pertain to our own needs. It is leaving places
202. alone that do not need us. This is what stewardship is. Stewardship is appreciating exactly what we
203. have and wanting to preserve the same sense of joy for everyone else. It is allowing others to
204. forge an appreciation for nature for themselves, built from informed histories to which they can
205. relate. Stewardship in outdoor recreation requires reverence to place, where our experiences are
206. woven as thread into story of land. Threads and patches of past, present, and future come together
207. as quilted fabric, sewn thick with layers of familiarity and countless colors of significance.
208. Across the panels of each place lies a story of complex truths,
209. those of the beauties and flaws we hold as being part of nature ourselves.
210. All of this encompasses what sustains us and what challenges us.
211. All that has changed, that has stayed the same, and that has been lost along the way.
212. Stewardship is not just volunteer trail work days,
213. trash cleanups, group hikes, or charitable donations.
214. It has a deeper meaning, one rooted in reciprocity.
215. reciprocity. Stewardship includes the recognition of how much we take from nature and how mindfully
216. we must approach what we return. Stewardship means rethinking success in the outdoors,
217. not as reaching the summit first or going the farthest, but in remembering, especially during
218. lean times, to notice and appreciate the details. It is the act of meaningful catch and willing
219. release. There's the poet, Dylan Oslager. That's beautiful. Catch and willing release. So here's my
220. recommendations, listeners. Immediately go out and get this book, Trailwork, Restoring the Paths and
221. Stories of America's Public Lands. But you can also do some online activity. And I'll let Dylan
222. help me out here because I went to YouTube and I took the virtual hike through, I believe, some of
223. the trails that you designed at Harmon Canyon, where I mean to go myself and ride my mountain
224. bike. But tell us where else your writing appears, maybe your website and anything else you'd like
225. to shout out to the listeners. Yeah, by all means. The book is only a month and a half old, so I am
226. on book tour largely throughout the summer and it's shaping up to be into the fall, especially
227. in the Western U.S., but I have some stops in New York City and on the East Coast as well.
228. Those are all listed on my website as well as on Hay Day's website.
229. Likewise I stay very active in political advocacy around public lands People can always see my work at Protect Our Winters and Outdoor Alliance with opportunities to write letters to your senators and congressional members to tell them how much public lands or nature matters to you and that selling it off is a terrible idea for both contemporary America and for our future residents
230. And then likewise, some new writing. Alta Journal, I always feel honored to write within High Country News, Outside Magazine are really where my most recent pieces have landed. Republic is a fabulous new journal by Chris Kyes, who is the ex 20 year editor in chief of Outside Magazine and now runs his own nonprofit newsroom.
231. And then finally, Hay Day has always a wonderful milieu of books coming out every quarter.
232. It's a fantastic nonprofit publisher promoting books from voices that are underheard and
233. underrepresented.
234. I would greatly recommend their newest releases and anything in their back catalog.
235. Thanks for that.
236. Also, the Omnium Gathering Quarterly, which is the in-house journal of the community of
237. which we are both members, the community of writers, which meets every year up here in the
238. high Sierra, where it's been my pleasure to talk to this terrific writer and activist. Thanks so
239. much for being my guest, Dylan Oslager, this week on Bibliocracy. Thank you.
240. Thanks for listening. And thanks to KPFK board op, Osman Flamenco, and engineer Mark Maxwell,
241. Tune in next Thursday at 2.30 p.m. for another celebration of the literary arts on Bibliocracy.
242. Oh, the ink is black, the page is white. Together we learn to read and write, to read and write.
243. And now a child can understand, this is the law of all the land, all the land.
244. Oh, the ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write, to read and write.
245. Their robes were black, their heads were white, the schoolroom doors were closed so tight, were closed up tight.
246. Nine judges all set down their names
247. To end the years and years of shame
248. Years of shame
249. Their robes were black
250. Their heads were white
251. The People's Game returns to KPFK.
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258. The People's Game, where sports meets the real world.
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260. Valle.
261. Bárbara y por el mundo, WWW.