Stephen Nash wraps up this hard-hitting overview of America’s public lands with the observation that “if we want that waning legacy to endure, we’re going to have to fight hard for it.”

As I pondered Nash’s troubling portrayal of public lands I happened to pick up the latest issue of The George Wright Forum, a journal focusing on parks and protected areas, and read a piece by Rolf Diamant in which he quotes historian Dwight Pitcaithley who has written that “the National Park System today is vastly different from the one envisioned and managed by Stephen T. Mather and Horace Albright….The complexity of issues confronted by park and program managers today could not have been envisioned by the first generation of Park Service administrators.” After reading Grand Canyon for Sale I thought, “Pitcaithley is so right!”

This book is not a celebration of public lands, the glories of the Grand Canyon, or of “America’s Best Idea.” Focusing on the Grand Canyon region, Nash effectively uses the metaphor of “selling” Grand Canyon to describe how much of America’s public land legacy has been sold or is for sale, especially in the current world of big money politics. He writes as an investigative reporter, effectively mixing deep dives into issues fully documented in extensive notes, with forays out onto the land and interviews with scientists, public land managers, and some of the “buyers.”

Nash writes of invasive species, which often threaten natural systems that made many places worthy of national park status. Climate change is a threat to all national parks, which he describes as “landscapes in motion.” As climate changes, organisms are forced to migrate, but how can they when the habitats they need have been eliminated outside park boundaries, dedicated to other uses like agriculture and development. “The inflexibility of current park boundaries is the Achilles heel for species preservation on public lands, as a Yale University study puts it – and it is the barrier to adapting to rapid climate change.” This is of course not the only threat to wildlife, and he describes the plight of the California Condor, once nearly extinct, brought back by captive breeding, and restored to the canyon. It’s not doing well now because of lead poisoning, a consequence of hunter’s use of lead ammunition.

Then there are real estate developers whose projects might change the plumbing of the canyon, and air tour operators who want more and more and produce a cacophony of noise pollution affecting wildlife and tourists alike. Cattlemen overgraze public lands and consider their grazing allotment a property right. Wealthy tycoons fund initiatives to cede public lands to states and private interests. Nash summarizes these threats, then analyzes why these threats persist and grow. His analysis always leads to money.

Influence of money on politics has always been with us, and Nash points out that the excesses of money in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century led to reforms, part of which was conservation resulting in national parks, forests, wildlife preserves, and agencies to manage them. Today money is back in politics to even a greater extent than in that earlier era and therein, argues Nash, lie many of the causes of public land issues and obstacles to doing anything about them.

Nash offers many examples of this: billionaires like the Koch brothers hold a third of the public land grazing land area, and damaging public land grazing persists because it offers them a generous subsidy. While we may not think of grazing as an issue in the National Park System, Nash describes the situation in the Grand Canyon/Parachant National Monument, where it is very much the case. The Koch brothers are also oil and gas tycoons, beneficiaries of ridiculously low lease and rental rates and royalty rates that amount to grand larceny.

At the Grand Canyon, air tour operators oppose regulation and lobby for ever more sightseeing flights to improve profits. Nash describes at some length how Arizona Senator John McCain led the charge in the late 1980s to pass legislation to curb noise pollution from aircraft. But then, a quarter century later, he joined Nevada Senator Harry Reid in pushing an amendment to a highway funding bill that, as Nash dryly observes, “accomplished quite a lot. It short-circuited the Environmental Impact Statement process entirely. (Which the Park Service had been working on for years.) It took the power to decide the noise issue out of the hands of the Park Service.” The current state of affairs regarding noise in the Canyon was just fine. “On the busiest days,” Nash notes, “more than a hundred helicopters may be over the Canyon at once.”

How did this happen? Why did McCain reverse himself? McCain, running for the presidency in 2008, “now had allies in the air-tour industry.” The McCain campaign – any presidential campaign- needs huge amounts of money.  Elling Halvorson, founder and owner of air tour companies at the Canyon and elsewhere, was a McCain fundraising bundler and big donor to McCain, and to Reid. Nash does not consider McCain a “senator of easy virtue.” Rather, “McCain has a long record of indignant support for campaign-finance reform. It is not that he is personally corrupt, certainly not under current law. Instead, his public service unfolds within a corrupt system, one that has made most of us skeptical, if not cynical.” So even someone like John McCain, inspired to legislate against noise pollution by a raft trip in the Grand Canyon, could not hold the line. It’s always about money.

This is a timely book as in 2017 we face a Trump administration that is bent on rolling back environmental progress across the board.  We who love public lands, national parks and the Grand Canyon have faced many conservation challenges before as Nash documents, but they have become much greater now. Nash concludes with this:

We can’t protect the nature and future of public lands if we continue selling them off to those influencers too. Almost too obvious to mention, though, is that science does not always translate into power. Research has already registered abundant and ominous warnings. That doesn’t by itself make natural systems the highest priority for public lands.

Instead, the hopes that remain are a prize won in 130 years of conservation battles, led by both Republicans and Democrats at times. Dispiriting, or perhaps inspiriting: if we want that waning legacy to endure, we’re going to have to fight hard for it. As Martha Hahn, former chief of science administration and resource management at Grand Canyon, says, “What is needed is for the public voice to rise to a level even deaf ears can hear.”