Protected Lands Episodes

Chris sounds the alarm over a Senate proposal to sell millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land, explaining what privatization could cost Western communities and urging immediate action.

Parker Lloyd tours the Nature Center at Pia Okwai, where Tracy Aviary and West Valley communities are restoring former industrial land as wildlife habitat and an environmental-justice gathering place.

Diné leader Davina Smith explains Bears Ears as a living cultural landscape, the legacy of her grandmothers' resistance and the necessity of Indigenous leadership in protecting sacred lands.

Journalist David Helvarg revisits his 1994 investigation The War Against the Greens and explains how the Wise Use movement's tactics evolved into today's attacks on environmentalists, public lands and democracy.

Writer and photographer Josh Jackson discusses The Enduring Wild, his travels across California's BLM lands, the tension between exposure and protection, and threats from mining and agency cuts.

Season Four opens with the Los Angeles fires, the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, and the emerging Moab-to-Mojave network of protected lands across the Southwest.

Some landscapes become part of who we are. Chris Clarke reflects on his relationship with Avi Kwa Ame, the southern Nevada landscape protected as a national monument in 2023 after years of Indigenous-led advocacy. Personal stories of desert exploration mingle with excerpts from the monument's designation celebration and voices from the campaign to protect it. The result is both a portrait of an extraordinary place and a meditation on how loving a landscape can change the course of a life.

The Chihuahuan Desert stretches across northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, encompassing extraordinary biological and cultural diversity. Chris Clarke talks with Janae Reneaud Field, Kathia Gonzalez, and Rocio Ronquillo of El Paso's Frontera Land Alliance about protecting this often-overlooked desert. They discuss community conservation, environmental education, and the campaign to protect Castner Range, while exploring what it means to build a conservation movement rooted in the communities that call the Chihuahuan Desert home.