A Complicated History

Alumni, Arches

In his newest book, historian Adam Sowards ’95 examines the long-running tensions between environmentalists and industry over public lands in the West.

While growing up near Seattle, Adam Sowards ’95 wasn’t exactly a lover of the outdoors. In fact, when he enrolled in an environmental history course during his junior year at Puget Sound, he was driven more by the insistence of his advisor, Bill Breitenbach, that he diversify his coursework as a history major than by the prospect of actually learning about the subject. And then, in about week three, inspiration struck. “All of a sudden,” Sowards says, “all the history I thought I knew looked different when I looked at it from this different angle.”

That course, taught by former Puget Sound professor Andrew Isenberg (now at the University of Kansas), combined with another course Isenberg taught about the history of the American West—as well as classes taught by Nancy Bristow—didn’t just wake Sowards up to new possibilities. They inspired his entire career.

With his focus on the intersection of the history of the American West and the history of the environment, Sowards, now 49, went on to Arizona State for graduate school. Until recently, when his wife took a new job in Western Washington, Sowards was a history professor at University of Idaho. And in April 2022 alone, he saw the publication of both a brand-new book—Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands—and the publication in paperback of his previous book, An Open Pit Visible From the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight To Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest, which won the Hal K. Rothman prize from the Western History Association.

OUTDOOR LESSONS "Public lands are a great experiment in democracy," Adam Sowards ’95 says. Shown here: Zion National Park in Utah.

Before taking those courses at Puget Sound (where he also competed on the track team), Sowards says, “I don’t think that I had thought a whole lot about being a westerner, or a northwesterner. I started to really recognize the uniqueness of the West and its historical experience and its landscapes, which are the things that I’ve been interested in for close to 30 years now.”

An Open Pit Visible From the Moon tells the story of the push and pull during the 1960s between extractive industry and environmental activists over the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area of Washington’s North Cascades. Making Public Lands, Sowards’ fifth book, expands his work by tracing the larger history of conservation on public lands. It explores the history of those lands and how the agencies that govern them, like the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, were shaped by activism and political concerns.

As for the future of those lands in the midst of the effects of climate change and the ever-present tension between industry and environmentalism?

“My pessimist side says we might be doomed given the political polarization in the United States and with climate change,” Sowards says. “It can feel impossible that these lands can be managed either for the greatest democratic or the greatest ecological good. But my optimist side says that public lands are a place where a more equitable relationship with lands and people could exist.”

Sowards points to a section in his book about Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, where a group of indigenous tribes pushed the government to have it recognized as a national monument. “The public land system hasn’t always treated indigenous people well,” Sowards says. “So you have this intertribal coalition come together and come to the federal government and say, ‘We think it would be a good option to manage this as a national monument.’” After the Obama administration protected that land, the Trump administration scaled back those protections before the Biden administration restored them “with important managerial input from the tribal people of that region,” Sowards says.

Historian

Adam Sowards ’95

"I started to really recognize the uniqueness of the West."

Sowards is also hopeful because the current heads of the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service are both Native American. “There are ways to learn from the past and make improvements and try to rectify some of those wrongs,” Sowards says.

“Public lands are a great experiment in democracy. It’s often an experiment that fails, but it has the potential to really see great elements of our nation’s civic life at work.”

Since announcing his departure from University of Idaho, Sowards has been teaching classes online while he figures out what comes next. And all those years after taking those courses at Puget Sound, Sowards found himself coming full circle when his old professor, Nancy Bristow, used An Open Pit Visible From the Moon in a class she taught about 1960s history—and asked her former pupil to Zoom in for the class discussion. “I’ve always said she was the best classroom teacher I’ve ever seen,” Sowards says.

Attending Puget Sound, Sowards says, remains one of the best decisions he ever made, as it literally shaped his career—and made him appreciate the outdoors in a way he never had before. At Idaho, he taught a program called Semester in the Wild, which involved spending time at the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 states.

“I think college is good that way, because it hits you at a time in your life where you’re open to having those sorts of discoveries,” Sowards says. “And it certainly worked that way for me.”

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