Picture the United States without the National Park System we know today.
Forests logged, rivers dammed, hillsides mined in places like Yellowtone, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks: That could be the reality if not for Avis and Bernard DeVoto, largely unsung heroes of U.S. conservation.
The story of the DeVotos’ remarkably successful activism, and resulting McCarthy-era blacklisting, is at the heart of this year’s Everybody Reads selection, “This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild,” by journalist Nate Schweber.
The program, launched in 2000, promotes a book to readers in north central Idaho and southeastern Washington each year for reflection, discussion and author interaction. Schweber will speak about “This America of Ours” at area libraries and schools next week. (A schedule of his appearances is below.)
Schweber, who was born and grew up in Missoula but has lived most of his adult life in New York City, discussed his affinity for Bernard DeVoto’s perspective during a recent phone interview. DeVoto, a Utah native, was another New York City transplant.
Bernard DeVoto was a writer and Avis an editor — his editor. When they discovered a plot by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to sell off millions of acres of public lands in the West, “including national parks, monuments, forests and grasslands,” he wrote a “blockbuster exposé,” published in 1947 in Harper’s Magazine, titled “The West Against Itself.”
Schweber recounts the DeVotos’ efforts and the drama that surrounded them as the couple revealed continued threats to public lands, perhaps most alarmingly the proposed damming of the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument along the Utah-Colorado border.
The plan by the Bureau of Reclamation threatened to open beloved parks to exploitation and development, undoing the DeVotos’ legacy of saving millions of acres of public lands.
Lewiston City Library Director Lynn Johnson read Schweber’s book and was struck by the parallels to issues today.
“We didn’t learn from history,” Johnson said. “We never learn from history, I’m afraid to say.”
There was a local connection that made an impression on her as well: The DeVotos’ ashes were spread at the DeVoto Memorial Cedar Grove in Idaho near Lolo Pass, not far from the Montana border — a place where Johnson’s family had stopped when she was growing up.
Intrigued by the history detailed in the book and the connection to this landmark so close to home, Johnson emailed Schweber.
“And then he surprised us by walking in the door here,” she said.
Schweber, a freelance journalist for publications including The New York Times, was in the area covering the November 2022 murders at the University of Idaho.
He agreed to participate in the Everybody Reads program, and now, he said, he looks forward to returning to Idaho to discuss his book.
“One of the ironies of this book, or of Bernard DeVoto, is he’s the first person born in Utah to ever win a Pulitzer Prize, and nowhere in Utah is there anything memorializing this guy,” Schweber said. “It’s the state of Idaho who has the West’s tribute to Bernard DeVoto — it’s enormously to Idaho’s credit that that’s there.”
Stone (she/her) can be contacted at mstone@inland360.com or (208) 848-2244.
Everybody Reads
Nate Schweber, author of this year’s Everybody Reads selection, “This America of Ours,” will speak at venues across the region next week. Copies of his book are available at area libraries. More information is at everybody-reads.org.
- Noon Tuesday, Colfax Library, 102 S. Main St.
- 7 p.m. Tuesday, Neill Public Library, 210 N. Grand Ave., Pullman.
- 11 a.m. Wednesday, Moscow Public Library, 110 S. Jefferson St.
- 4 p.m. Wednesday, Terrell Library, 140 Glenn Terrell Mall, Washington State University, Pullman.
- 10 a.m. next Thursday, Winchester Community Library, 314 Nezperce Ave.
- 1:30 p.m. next Thursday, Lewiston High School, 3201 Cecil Andrus Way.
- Noon Nov. 15, Lewiston City Library, Event Space, 411 D St.
- 7 p.m. Nov. 15, Asotin County Library, 417 Sycamore St., Clarkston.
