The American West

A road trip with Steven Rinella across the High Plains to the Blackwater Draw Unesco Site on the border of Texas and New Mexico leads to an assessment of 13,000 years of change in one western environment, where people have practiced every kind of life way from hunting elephants to turning the plains into cotton fields and oil country.
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In the 20th century peculiar landforms dismissed earlier in western history with the denigrating term “badlands” became compelling locations for scientists and artists in the West. First passed over as economically worthless, these barren, colorful landscapes were translated by painters like Georgia O’Keeffe into iconic imagery. Now many are national parks and wilderness areas.
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For the first 50 years of the 20th century a new federal agency did everything in its power to disappear all wolves from the West and America. What saved the wolf was its own intelligence in the face of eradication, and the emergence of the new science of ecology, whose practitioners revealed the real animal within the legend.
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The Frontier and the freedom it afforded was the shaping influence of the 19th century American West, but life in the Modern West has been formed just as powerfully by the presence of a public lands system American visionaries established a century ago. This is why they did it.
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Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a lifestyle and political career that made him the most important president in history for the creation of a West and a country centered on conservation. In the process his obsession with nature finally took the U.S. in a different policy direction than the countries of western Europe we had tried for three centuries to emulate.
Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.
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