Monday evening, Colorado State University assistant professor Leisl Carr Childers shared her research in public land use in the American west’s Great Basin. She focused her talk on multiple use, a land management concept.
“Multiple use is both a framework of thought and a policy that has codified all the different and often divergent activities that occur on public lands,” Carr Childers said.
The Great Basin, a desert area extending from southern Oregon and eastern California to central Utah, has historically been used for four primary purposes, Carr Childers said. These uses include ranching, nuclear testing, wild horse rangeland and outdoor recreation. She focused on the experience of Nevada citizens for her first book, “The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin.”
“I bring the first book (“The Size of the Risk”) up to the point where the landscape of the Great Basin becomes so congested with activity that management grinds to a halt and becomes very contested in the 1970s,” Carr Childers said. “My second book is on the Sagebrush Rebellion, which is a reflection of that problem going forward into 2014.”
Eimile Darney | Argonaut
Leisl Carr Childers is introduced by a UI professor during the Public Lands Talk on Monday, April 23.
Carr Childers said people should pay attention to public lands because they serve as an important part of America’s identity. She discussed how the current public lands narrative is an “us versus them” of ranchers versus wild horse advocates. She said she believes, however, that this narrative fails to consider other parts of the conversation.
“It’s more multidimensional than we make it appear,” Carr Childers said. “It’s not ranchers versus horses. It’s ranchers, horses, wildlife, outdoor recreationists in that configuration. Making sure that everybody not just has a seat at the table, but a viability in the process, is difficult when each position is trying to maximize the framework in which they’re operating.”
In her presentation, Carr Childers focused on the impact that ranching, nuclear testing, wild horse rangeland and outdoor recreation had on Gracian Uhalde, a rancher from Adaven, Nevada. She interviewed him in 2006. Uhalde’s story about reckless outdoor recreation in the area caught the attention of the audience.
“Two years ago (in 2004) a four-wheeler come through there going lickety split, a sixteen-year-old kid,” Uhalde said, according to Carr Childers’ presentation. “Then where that horse trailer is parked today, he lost control. There was a trailer parked there. He’s lucky he didn’t leave his brains splattered on the kingpin.”
Carr Childers said that emergency services were scarce in the region, so Uhalde tended to the teenager’s wounds himself.
Carr Childers said she pursues this research because, as a self-described military brat, she has no hometown of her own. Throughout her childhood, public lands such as those in the Great Basin provided her with an anchor. She said she believes people who live in places with few public land areas like the Palouse still need to participate in conversations about public land use.
“I think that if Americans gave greater priority and consideration to public lands management, beyond their own interests, that public lands would become a center point of American identity,” Carr Childers said. “Not just Western identity, but American identity. These lands, we take them for granted too much and we treat them as if they’re not our responsibility. My work asks readers to think about their responsibility relative to public lands.”
Carr Childers is currently writing her second book, which continues off the research she shared in “The Size of the Risk.”
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]