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 · <a href="https://history.selwaysolutions.io/index.html#license">Educational & Institutional Use License</a> · <a href="mailto:nick@selwaysolutions.io">Contact</a>
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or paste the RSS link into any podcast app.
Episodes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.