ReThink History: The Uncosted West

About ReThink History: The Uncosted West

The United States owns roughly a third of its own landmass, and for a century and a half it has let private industry mine, graze, and log that land for almost nothing while keeping the bill for the damage. The Uncosted West is a history of that bargain. It takes apart the three legal frameworks that price public resources near zero — the General Mining Act of 1872, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and the federal below-cost timber program — and then visits the places where the costs landed: Kennecott's poisoned aquifer, the Berkeley Pit, 500,000 abandoned mines, Navajo uranium country and the 1979 Church Rock spill, bighorn herds lost to disease from domestic sheep, the old growth of the Pacific Northwest and the Tongass rainforest sold at a loss, Alaska's collapsing salmon rivers, and Puerto Rico's mountains of coal ash. History first, with the present-day fight — the 2025-26 public-lands sell-off, the Pebble Mine veto, and the battle over mining-law reform — as the climax. The organizing idea is one economist's word made physical: the externality, the cost a deal leaves out, and the machinery that has kept it out for 150 years. We work from federal statutes, agency and court records, and GAO reports, state the strongest case for extraction and for the ranchers, miners, and timber towns fairly, and are honest about what is verified and what is contested. The domestic companion to our series Backyard Empire. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research. © 2026 Selway Solutions LLC · Educational & Institutional Use License (https://history.selwaysolutions.io/index.html#license) · Contact (mailto:nick@selwaysolutions.io)

Publisher

ReThink History

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Jun 2026

Latest episode

27 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

15 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Jun 2026

   Selling Off the West: The 2025-26 Fight Over America's Public Lands

   A century and a half of pricing public minerals, grass, and timber near zero has left a bill, and in 2025 and 2026 the country is deciding whether to reform the system or finish selling it off. The finale of The Uncosted West weaves the live threads — the public-lands sell-off, the Pebble Mine veto fight, mining-law reform versus deregulation — gives the pro-development case its full weight, then lands the verdict and returns to where it began: a hand-built trail, and a flock of sheep.

2. 

   27 Jun 2026

   How a Billion-Dollar Copper Mine Became a National Park the Public Must Clean Up

   In 1938, with the richest ore gone, the company shut down Kennecott, Alaska on about a day's notice and walked away, leaving a 14-story mill and a whole town behind. Ninety years later the public owns both the beloved ghost town and the Superfund cleanup. Episode 14 of The Uncosted West — the reflective turn — tells the marvel, the abandonment, and the second life inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, where the Park Service now cleans the contamination. Same corporate name as Bingham Canyon; opposite fate.

3. 

   27 Jun 2026

   How Puerto Rico Beat a Copper Mine but Not the Coal Ash

   Two endings to one story: a community in Adjuntas that stopped an open-pit mine cold, and a town in Guayama buried under a coal plant's ash. Episode 13 of The Uncosted West tells Casa Pueblo's rare clean victory alongside the AES coal plant's ash dumped across the island's poor south, careful on the contested health science and fair to the plant's role in the power supply.

4. 

   26 Jun 2026

   Alaska's Zinc Boom and the Collapse of the Yukon Salmon

   The world's largest zinc mine tops the EPA's toxic-release list while a thousand miles of salmon rivers go empty for the twelfth year running. Told as documentary, Episode 12 of The Uncosted West covers the Red Dog mine on NANA land (with the caveat that most of its reported tonnage is managed waste rock), the Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon collapse, and the trawler-bycatch fight, weighing Red Dog's economic lifeline to the Inupiat and the genuine scientific dispute over causation.

5. 

   26 Jun 2026

   Why Taxpayers Pay Billions to Log the Tongass Rainforest

   The Tongass is the largest national forest in the country and the biggest intact temperate rainforest on Earth, and the government has lost on the order of $1.7 billion logging it since 1980. Episode 11 of The Uncosted West tells the story through Cold War pulp contracts, the Roadless Rule and the 2025 move to rescind it, and the stakes for salmon, carbon, and Alaska Native subsistence.

6. 

   26 Jun 2026

   The Spotted Owl, the Timber Wars, and the Real Value of Old Growth

   A clearcut turns a thousand-year forest into a one-time check and erases carbon, salmon, and biodiversity that never show up on the receipt. Episode 10 of The Uncosted West traces the liquidation of Pacific Northwest old growth, the spotted-owl listing and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, and the hard twist that the owl keeps declining largely because of the invasive barred owl.

7. 

   26 Jun 2026

   Why the U.S. Forest Service Loses Money Selling Public Timber

   The Forest Service often spends more preparing a timber sale and building the logging roads than it gets back for the trees. Episode 9 of The Uncosted West explains the mechanics of below-cost sales and the vast forest road system, and gives the agency's multiple-use mandate, rural jobs, and fire-management case a fair hearing.

8. 

   26 Jun 2026

   What Cattle and Sheep Do to Public Rivers and Wild Bighorn

   Riparian zones are a sliver of the arid West but support most of its wildlife — and they are exactly where livestock congregate. Episode 8 of The Uncosted West, anchored by the 1970 Tahoe trail, walks through trampled banks and warmed trout streams and the pneumonia domestic sheep pass to wild bighorns, while making clear that well-managed grazing can be range-compatible.

9. 

   26 Jun 2026

   Why Taxpayers Fund the Killing of Millions of Wild Animals for Private Ranchers

   A little-known federal program killed nearly two million animals in a single year, much of it to protect private livestock on public land. Episode 7 of The Uncosted West sets the below-market grazing fee beside USDA Wildlife Services' predator control, and gives the rancher's real losses and the program's non-lethal work their due before the ledger lands.

10. 

    26 Jun 2026

    Uranium, Coal, and the Poisoning of Navajo and Hopi Land

    On July 16, 1979 a tailings dam failed near Church Rock, New Mexico, releasing more radioactivity than Three Mile Island into a river Navajo families relied on — the largest accidental radioactive release in U.S. history, and one most Americans have never heard of. Told carefully, Episode 6 of The Uncosted West covers the 523 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land and the Black Mesa coal and aquifer, and the structural reason these costs landed here. Extraction also brought jobs and revenue; the harm is one of unequal bargaining power.

11. 

    26 Jun 2026

    How Mining Companies Walk Away From Toxic Cleanups (Bankruptcy and Orphan Mines)

    Superfund law is meant to make the polluter pay, so how do so many poisoned mines end up orphaned onto the public? Episode 5 of The Uncosted West follows the mechanism through the Berkeley Pit (Anaconda to ARCO to BP), the EPA's 2018 decision not to require hardrock miners to prove they can pay for cleanup, the roughly half-million abandoned mines, and the partial fix of the 2024 Good Samaritan Act.

12. 

    26 Jun 2026

    How Kennecott Avoided the Superfund List (Bingham Canyon's 72-Mile Plume)

    One of the largest human-made excavations on Earth sits above a 72-square-mile plume of contaminated groundwater — and its owner avoided being listed as a Superfund site. Episode 4 of The Uncosted West tells how Kennecott Utah Copper and regulators used the 1995 Superfund Alternative Approach to keep Bingham Canyon off the National Priorities List, crediting the company's funded cleanup and weighing what it actually meant.

13. 

    26 Jun 2026

    Why Grazing on Public Land Costs Just $1.35 a Cow (The Taylor Grazing Act)

    A New Deal law ended the free-for-all on the overgrazed public range, then calcified into a permanent below-market subsidy. Episode 3 of The Uncosted West traces the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 through the birth of the BLM to a grazing fee a fraction of the private rate, and states the permittee's case fairly.

14. 

    26 Jun 2026

    Why Mining Companies Still Pay $0 in Royalties for Public Minerals (The 1872 Mining Law)

    Coal, oil, and gas pay the public a royalty to leave federal land; gold, copper, and lithium pay nothing, under a law signed in 1872 and still on the books. Episode 2 of The Uncosted West explains how the General Mining Act works — cheap claims, zero federal royalty, historic patenting — and why 150 years of reform have failed, while giving the critical-minerals case its due.

15. 

    26 Jun 2026

    How America Gave Away Its Public Land and Kept the Bill

    In the summer of 1970 a Forest Service crew hand-built a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail across Tahoe land closed to protect it, then watched a rancher's leased sheep trample it back to dust. Episode 1 of The Uncosted West uses that scene to define the externality and introduces the three frameworks that let private industry mine, graze, and log a third of the country for almost nothing: the General Mining Act of 1872, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and the federal below-cost timber program.

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