Status Updates From WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO...

This crash course of history and Western public lands and public domain helps put into perspective why Trump wanted to tamper with BLM land and put it in the hands of private owners — it costs the fed gov a pretty penny to manage it. So much knowledge to be scooped up here.

"A revolutionary. [John Wesley Powell] might have spared the West the dust bowls of the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s, as well as the worst consequences of river floods."

Learning that there were more "dust bowls" then just the 1930s. Searching for more information online yields little (it's tricky finding anything w/ Google anymore) but he's likely referring to haboobs in connection with overworked agricultural land.

“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.”

Going west through Minnesota, through the plains of South Dakota, to Wyoming, to that great, vast space… that Western world is a different kind of beauty, great open expanse, and this book is its memory, bringing it all to life again for me again. True wild beauty.

“Mom, listen. In three months I will be eighty years old, thirty years older than you were when you died, twenty years older than my father was when he died, fifty-seven years older than my brother was when he died.”

Such a good way to start a chapter and I’m absolutely into it. Really liking his writing style.