This Land

How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West

By: Christopher Ketcham

Narrated by: Christopher Ketcham

A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West - and a plea for the protection of these last wild places

The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the listener on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act - including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse - and investigates the destructive behavior of US Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists, and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

This Land is a colorful muckraking journey - part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair - exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

Cover Photo courtesy of TWIG Media/Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

©2019 Christopher Ketcham (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"As Christopher Ketcham says so eloquently in these pages, the vast public lands are perhaps America's greatest legacy, a landscape of the scale necessary to help preserve the diversity of life on a hot planet in a tough century. That's why we need to pay such attention to the stories he tells of the threats they face." (Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)

"Christopher Ketcham is a marvelously fresh and forceful voice, one unaffected by the squishy language and languid resistance of our grotesquely compromised (and well-funded) environmental organizations. Instructive and swiftly, smartly written, this book about the pillage and poisoning of our public lands reinvigorates writing as a force for outrage and change at the same time as it returns us to the clear-headed, big-hearted zeal of classic environmental works." (Joy Williams, author of The Florida Keys)

"As potent in its way as Silent Spring. This book will open your eyes to the greed and abuse destroying our public lands. Better yet, it will make you angry." (T. C. Boyle, author of Outside Looking In)

History and more

If you have, or will spend any time in the west you need to listen to this book. Incredible, lyrical and in many ways depressing.

Probably the best book I have listened to

This book is excellent, both in its content and its narration. I highly recommend it for anyone who cares about our public lands. It is well organized and gives the reader a good understanding of the dysfunctional dynamics brought about by our exploitative economic system. Anyone who cares deeply about the plight of wild animals would benefit from listening. Especially meaningful for those of us who live in the western United States but relevant to all. Very well narrated by the author.

Read or listen to this and care

Start giving a damn about our public lands and start doing something about preserving and increasing them.

Informative but very political

I appreciate Ketchum’s research into the public land use debate, but even for someone who tends to agree with his overall stance, this book spends a lot of time and energy on Ketchum’s personal political beliefs that don’t really serve the book as a whole. Even with a political topic like this I felt he went overboard and felt like I was sitting in on an undergrad environmental science lab discussion at times.

Eye opening facts and beautiful prose

This is a story that desperately needs to be told. With so many people claiming to love the environment very few of us, even those who live in the storied West and spend lots of time outdoors, have a clue about the administration of and probable fate of our precious public lands.

The facts are overwhelmingly grim and depressing; the author is unsparing and clear-eyed in impressing the urgency and dire nature of the threats.

I do wish the author had spent more time researching practical ways to effect change, but this book provides ample inspiration for readers to find innovative ways to participate in a more hopeful future.

Insight into public land use

As a native to CO, I've been fortunate enough to be immersed in the public lands available in the West. However, it seems most people have limited knowledge on their rights to our public lands and how they're managed (or mismanaged). I recommend this book to anyone interested in the details about past and current issues surrounding federal lands, conservation, and expoitation of our natural resources.

A must listen/read if you care about public lands

I wish it didn’t take me so long to hear about this book. Ketcham provides an unapologetic look at the subsidized destruction of our public lands, interspersed with some beautiful prose about his explorations.

Very well read. Thoroughly researched.

Our public lands are on death row, and now we can explore some of  the details of a corrupt and greed-driven prosecution, moved by hypocrites and zealots who subvert our legal system and pervert the language of scripture to justify their personal gain, at the expense of our sacred public trust, and hopefully all just in a nick of time. These gloomy machinations are rolling away as we read on.


And I hope this is just the opening volley from this author, the Helen Prejean of our public lands and the endangered fauna that are facing down a certain death sentence. More needs to be dragged into the light by this dedicated author, who has doggedly investigated and so eloquently written on our behalf many heretofore unheralded facts and facets thus far. So please give him 5 stars everone, it's the best way to ensure another volume will be forthcoming.

Suddenly we have dropped Nature Conservancy from our donations

A tough read but necessary for every remnant 60’s environmentalist that wants to understand a new generation of activism & how we lost the war.

Very Very Powerful

I had to stop listening and just breathe several times with this book. I am aware of a great deal of the environmental damage and corruption in the United States and especially the West but to listen to the history laid out word by careful word, leaving no prisoners , is devastating, powerful, and enlightening. I feel a little wrung out, depressed and above all determined to do more than just donate to Sierra Club and pick up trash.