Presentations & Media - Adam M. Sowards

I participated in an online contributors’ reading with Wild Roof Journal. You can listen in on YouTube.

I joined Stephen Hausmann on the New Books Network to discuss Making America’s Public Lands in May 2022. You can listen in to our conversation here.
I was one of those interviewed on this fascinating story about crosscut saws, “The Wilderness Tool,” for 99% Invisible.
I delivered the 2022 William Howard and Hazel Butler Peters Lecture at Brigham Young University in November 2022. The lecture, “The Integrity of the Public’s Land: Turning Points on the Path toward a Democratic Landscape,” drew from my latest book.

I joined Wyoming Public Radio for a short conversation about the convergence of two pieces of 1872 legislation: Yellowstone National Park Act and General Mining Act. You can read the transcript or listen in here.
For Shepherd.com, I made two lists of book recommendation thematically associated with my most recent books. One focused on wilderness and the other on public lands. The short lists also contain a bit about my own books.
For the Idaho Humanities Council’s Connected Conversations initiative, I offered a lecture called, “The American Landscape: An Introduction through Four Laws, Two Places, and Two People.”

I joined Erik Loomis for the Lawyers, Guns & Money podcast to discuss Making America’s Public Lands in May 2022. You can listen in to our conversation here.
The National Archives Museum hosted Michelle Nijhuis and me in conversation about my book, Making America’s Public Lands in April 2022. The conversation is available on YouTube.

I was interviewed multiple times to help inform Zach Hagadone’s series on timber in the twentieth century–“Conservation: From the Timber Wars to Collaboration”–for the Sandpoint Reader.
- Part 1
- Part 2
In the early days of the new Biden Administration, I joined Erik Loomis on the Lawyer, Guns, and Money podcast to discuss The Present and Future of Public Lands. You can listen into the conversation here.

After one of my Reckoning with History columns about the relationship between mining law and recreation, I spoke on Idaho Matters with Boise Public Radio. The June 4, 2019 conversation is here.

On Jefferson Public Radio’s segment, The Jefferson Exchange, I spoke with host Geoffrey Riley and guest Ben Greuel of The Wilderness Society about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. You can listen to this July 10, 2018, conversation here.
On June 27, 2018, I participated in a short segment on Boise State Public Radio about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. You can find the program and listen here.

The Moscow, Idaho, chapter of the League of Women Voters invited me to discuss public lands history and they recorded my rather informal, rambling remarks. Below is part one of three. Part two and part three are also available.

I presented this poster at the American Society for Environmental History meeting in April 2016. It is based on on-going research examining Kennecott Copper Corporation’s threat to construct an open-pit mine in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area.

John Concillo, an Oregon producer, has been working on a film project called Liberty & Wilderness that focuses on William O. Douglas’s contributions to American environmentalism. In 2012, he interviewed me in his Portland home. This excerpt includes me discussing public lands and Justice Douglas.

https://vimeo.com/153180891

This is a poster created from work Rebecca Stunz and I completed with funding from the University of Idaho’s College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences Key Fund Collaborative Research Grant. Ultimately, it appeared as an article in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly.

In July 2015 at Summer Fishtrap, I convened a panel discussing “How Historians Unearth Hidden History.” The year’s theme was “Hidden from History: Stories We Haven’t Heard, Stories We Haven’t Told” and honored Alvin Josephy, Jr., a Fishtrap co-founder who would have been 100 in 2015. These remarks framed the panel’s task and explain partially what I think historians can do.

In Summer 2014, an Environmental Science graduate student (Brynn M. Lacabanne) and I wrote a history of IWRRI, a project still being revised for publication. This is a summary of that work, given at the University of Idaho’s Malcolm Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium.

At Summer Fishtrap 2014, at the invitation of Al Josephy, I presented this breezy historical account of Pacific Northwest rivers to set up a panel about rivers from various perspectives–tribal, legal, and recreational. This .pdf includes two links within the document that should provide the edited clips of the video I showed. The entire film, “The Columbia: America’s Greatest Power Stream” (1949) is embedded below and well worth watching.