One of historian Douglas Brinkley’s “fortes,” as he puts it, is presidential history, and one project has been to focus on the conservation and environmental records of presidential players in 20th century America.

Bernard Devoto was an overlooked giant in the battle to save public lands in the West from development, according to a new book examining his conservation battles.

Everglades National Park is unique in America’s National Park System in many ways, not least because it is a wetland and did not, when it was proposed in the late 1920s, feature the typical scenic attractions of most units of the system.

Advice to writers is to write what you know, and few know more about America’s recent national park history than the brothers Jarvis.

McKenzie Long is a rock climber, graphic designer, and writer who, inspired by the “contest” over the Bears Ears National Monument where she loved to climb in the Indian Creek basin, decided to visit a select group of national monuments to gain a deeper understanding of why and how they are contested.” Her travels take her from Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument to Hawaii, just beyond which is the vast Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

While most of us memorialize our national park adventures with photographs, a great companion to those images are your thoughts, and Stefanie Payne has given us much room to record those thoughts in The National Parks Journal, Plan & Record Your Trips To The US National Parks.

For park travelers you prefer having a tactile national park guide in their hands, the 3rd edition of Your Guide To The National Parks has arrived with a number of updates, not the least of which is the inclusion of four "new" national parks.

When and why did the idea of national parks emerge in American history? Several creation myths, or “campfire tales” as Diamant and Carr call them, have been embraced by historians and government officials. Among them are the discussion around the campfire at Madison Junction on the Yellowstone Plateau during the 1870 Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition broaching the idea, which was then promoted by Langford on behalf of the Northern Pacific Railroad and resulted in the creation of Yellowstone as the world’s first national park.

I find the title interesting because a requiem is a dirge, an expression of sadness and mourning, often a lamentation for the dead. Yochim knew his time was short, was he in such a mood as he considered the future of the national parks? I think not, but he knew they were jeopardy.

There are many Doug Peacocks: Grizzly Man, the guy who could spend months living with grizzly bears in the wilderness of Montana and Wyoming and write great books about bears and his adventures with them; the Green Beret medic in Vietnam who sought solace in wild places and became a “warrior” in defense of those places; friend of Ed Abbey who made him into a fictional character named George Washington Heyduke in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang; award-winning filmmaker; and above all, fearless and tireless advocate for wilderness and wildlife.

The title of John D. Leshy’s political history of America’s public lands, Our Common Ground, introduces the central fact of the story he invites us to read. The American federal public land estate is our land, a shared heritage of more than 600 million acres owned collectively by the American people and managed by the federal government. Yet despite a vast literature on public lands, which he points out focuses mostly on categories such as national parks or forests, much of the American public does not have a comprehensive understanding of how they came to have such a public land legacy.

The origin story of America’s national parks goes like this: during the Lincoln administration, fearing that the recently “discovered” wonders of Yosemite Valley would be defiled as Niagara Falls had been, and the “Mariposa Big Tree Grove” logged, federal legislation created what would eventually become Yosemite National Park, though as author Dennis Drabelle notes, the word “park” never appeared in the law.

Rick Ridgeway started his life of adventure at 18, when he joined a group of friends to sail a small boat to Tahiti. Over the next half-century, he enjoyed (and survived) more adventures across the world than most of us can even conceive of.

The bear literature is rich, but with threats to bears proliferating today, writers and photographers are shining their lights on the plight of these charismatic megafauna. Several excellent books about bears have appeared that deserve our attention. Thankfully the news is not all bad, but as I’ve read through these recent publications, a sense of urgency grows – their prospects are not good.

There is a guidebook out there to help you navigate, and enjoy, the 20,000 square miles of landscape ranging from the top of the High Sierra east into Death Valley National Park.