pay in cash. if you're really concerned about it, you can kind of keep to a minimum your data transactions and so forth. you can take your money out of the bank and cash but you need. so when you stop paying cash, a site that if you're really concerned about it you can take a few steps on your own with or without the company. hope >> host: you are right. there is simple steps you can take or otherwise other effect is. we talked about the whole thing about don't let your cell phone talk to y five. are there things you uncovered in your research or other simple steps. some mashed -- ..

>> guest: the biggest take away you would want people to take away from their book. the core of a couple of things a really resonated with me that were scenes that carried over from when i had written my book on privacy. and it really struck me again. eat your tie back to the founding father, the constitution, to personal rights what would be one or two things you would want somebody listening today or when they read your book, what would you want them to take away from this conversation? >> guest: i want people to be

aware that when you read this book the zero case studies drawn from recent media events. these are not conspiracy types made up of events to where i am alleging that we are on this police state track and it is just a crazy ten foil hat argument. you know, these are things that you can flip on the evening news and look through the newspaper and see happening every day. federal, state, and local government encroaching all aspects of human activity. the biggest take away is that this nation was founded on the notion that our rights come from god, not government. if you think of that, look around you and read my book and see how far we have strayed from that. once that is gone where else can you go and live as free as we are supposed to be living? said the one that is a great take away. great book. i enjoyed it. it was hard to put down i lost a

little sleep over a couple of things in here. you did a fabulous job. i highly recommend this for everybody. anyone in the u.s. needs to read this book. thank you so much. >> guest: thank you. >> that was book tv signature program in which authors of the latest a nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators, and others familiar with their material. there's every weekend on book tv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday, and volume on monday. you can also watch online. go to booktv.org and click on afterwards and that book tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page.

up next, book tv college series. this month we are at pepperdine university. a break ramps that down to talk about his book american eden in which she looks at the americas gardens and the people who designed them. this is about half an hour. >> host: we want to introduce you to wade graham, the of certain of the author of this book, among other books, and "american eden." first of all, what do you do for a living? >> guest: i do the few things. a design gardens, a professor of public policy, and i am a journalist for. >> host: how did you get interested? >> guest: i fell sideways into it. i have always been interested in cultural history, designed of landscape. i got a chance early in life to train at the feet of a master who taught me how to do it. >> host: who was that?

>> guest: nancy gaudily power. quite a powerful designer. so when ended up happening to me , i realize that i was quite ignorant about what i was doing designing gardens. i knew how to do it. i could put an english garden with an english costs, but it struck me that i did not know why we did these things. and it came to me. >> the woman i need your help. my husband has commissioned a frankie kiri house that is quite a killer with lots of sure things sticking out. please design me in english rose garden. i thought, how, going to do this? what does it tell me about your marriage? i set out to figure these things out. >> guest: the tensions

between the two of them certainly were in dative of attention steeper, who they were and how they try to make things work. you see on reconcile attention everywhere. wheat bran bits of different things. we try to reconcile them. those stories and mismatches are quite interesting. >> host: give us an example of a public space that is a tense place. >> guest: i think to me the most magical and productive and condo curious and frustrating public space is probably monticello, thomas jefferson's house and garden. it is a place i think everyone should go. it is absolutely stunning, quite beautiful, whimsical, impressive. he really made an incredible

real-estate demonstration. it is a place that, first of all, it is the founding american garden. thomas jefferson was born in english men and an english world. it was up to him to fashion something new in the world phew, what it meant to turn them into something different. so he did this. you see instantly that it is made of english parts and english fashion, but he did something different. the first thing one notices is gone nowhere is there a straight line next. there are no clipped hedges. that coming to him, the gardens that he grew up with regard to some of royal power, oppression, absolutism, the king of france and so forth. he made monticello with these wonderful curving lines of a flower beds and woodlands that came up and use of into the distance. what he really did explicitly me was this was a

free, democratic card for free and democratic people. it is a demonstration in a sense of his ethics, ideology, aspiration, believe for all of us. yet it is completely on reconciled with the way in which he made a living. mainly the garden was built by slaves. >> host: public spaces always been important in american history? >> guest: of course they have been enormously important. america as a culture is far more turned inward, far more interested in our private spaces. we don't often spend enough time worrying about public spaces. we have your meaningful public spaces that other countries. we have the mall in washington, but it took a long time to get that fully together. we don't have the equivalent of trafalgar square or red square art @booktv square. i think the distinction is

not necessarily a meaningful one. i make no distinction between a private garden or hidden card there still expressions , windows into the mind of a maker and the collective mind. i look at gardens as to my it thinks of itself as a garden to but the golf course, the way jack nicklaus carefully designed the fairways to look like the distance of the place where he was. the key is to try to read the language. so the landscape -- the language of gardens, water and grass and hedges and trees and woodlands and lorenz and fountains and so forth. the syntax is similar to the

where we put other things together, the way we express ourselves. we do it through our dress, speech, politics. we are wealthy we do it by spending money on things to show people as a form of demonstration. so i try to read these things and get a window into the mind that made them. in a sense a garden if i show it to use me putting my mind on the ground, putting it out there as a diagram of who i think i should be, what i want to be, what i think he to appeal looks like. >> host: frederick olmsted and his importance in america's public spaces. >> guest: i would say he created with the help of an english architect who would forget to mention, i think the greatest piece of art of the american 19th century in central park. he was not trained to do this. he was trained as a gentleman farmer. then he was put in charge of

the relief operations for wounded soldiers in the civil war, american sanitary commission which became the red cross. skilled in organizing thousands of people and resources and so forth. they created at central park to a kind of incredible demonstration of what was going on in america at that time. central park looks like nature, but it is the recreation, landscape scale replica of a nature that was being destroyed. men and island and new york city are this incredible raging conflagration of industrial and financial power which quite scared americans. americans have been trained to think of ourselves as an agrarian people live on farms and small towns. a virtue and simplicity. yet in the 19th century we are confronted with a different reality, places

like new york city which was enormous cities, industrialization, emigrants coming in by the tens of thousands. corruption and disease and war are around the spirit is a war. they're is a kind of a wonderful moment in a novel from 1952 which no one reads called pierre. a young country girl who gazes at the endless avenues and the tall buildings. she is anxious and says the time will come when all the earth still be paved. in the combat that is what it felt like to people. we were paving the world in this country and. that is the thing that makes us different from the british, french, everyone. it guarantees or virtue. so in our active destroying this nature we became anxious. central park represents an implementation and it is the thing that keeps people.

they talk about central park not in aesthetic terms even though it is this gorgeous place with the sort of wild landscapes and lakes and forests and tumbles. then made it all. the blasted the tunnels of the rock. they talked about it in medical language, as a kind of giant public health measure that people in new york city were frazzled, nervous irritation and loss of spirit. about walking in this landscape they would be renewed, literally a form of national therapy is what that represents. if you walk in central park think about the tension between our view of nature as a repository of virtue and the fact that our economy is based on the exportation if not destruction of nature. those things are difficult to reconcile as jefferson's ideals. he wrote the declaration of independence, all men are created equal.

the fact it the hon 686 people, many of those are unable to reconcile the id so we think of him as this landscape architect. but he also invented or if not invented then really perfected the suburb. the suburb is a place where people with enough money can take a railroad out of that horrible city and by themselves a piece of romantic nature often behind gates, guarded and gated communities. retired to one of the suburbs, massachusetts, a very beautiful place.

and he was 75 so happy. he just could not get enough of the suburban country. a good dose of his own medicine. but the moral new was kind of creating a form of romantic nature as the medicine that allows some to live his urban life in urban and industrial pivoted is a way, and a sense, of reconciling things that cannot be reconciled. >> host: where the public policy fights but crating central park? >> guest: central part being in numerous city had more to do with plants than it did with policy. central park was not a call of nature. it was an avid with several thousand black and irish people. the new york state legislature made its decision to commit some six or $7 million to buying and constructing a part because they recognize that it would raise land value.

so parks have always been built as real-estate amenities, to sell the real estate around the. this has been the financial model. the new york legislature said be will funds this for the betterment of the finances of the city. and that is what happened. suddenly everyone had to live on upper fifth avenue p remove from the 30's to the 50's and rebuilt their mansion. that is how that worked. so real estate is typically at the heart of these things come all the you will find public policy. we can look at michele obama's garden at the white house which is really just an assertion of agrarian virtue and a difficult time to reach adults in 2009 where in the midst of a financial meltdown which was caused by the over leveraging of houses. jefferson died in the

enormous debt because he kept rebuilding monticello to try to make it more perfect. he was so mortgage to british bankers that the whole place had to be sold when he died and all the slaves and their families broken up. mortgage debt is an old thing. realistic overreaches an old american habit michele obama, response to that crisis which was a moral crisis was to go back and reassert agrarian roots. i think it was built with $200 of seed and supplies and some school children's donated labor. about 1100 sq. ft. which pales in comparison to mr. jefferson which was 80,000 square feet at in which she drew 350 tons of vegetables at the time. 150 kinds of fruit trees with a garden at the white house is a little bit less ambitious, but no less

forceful a moral statement. at the same time, the interesting thing about that garden is that it is an assertion of a program, a set of beliefs. she went on sesame street and said we grow our own food in their use is to educate children and did the same year a farm bill came across her husband's desk that was just about $300 million which fundamentally supports the overproduction of soybeans and corn which we use to make africa's corn syrup which is what makes our children of peace to begin with. the obama's cannot really reconcile their version of what a garden is to put the notion of public policy is. i think these intersections are what is interesting. >> host: in your work as a garden designer have you seen any impact?

>> guest: i absolutely have. one of the things a very hopeful, a sort of a pendulum swinging back and forth. when it is good times we splashdown. we do things bigger. it's more about ostentation. when we are in leaner times we sort of cute closer to agrarian roots. we are in the middle now, one of the things i see constantly is people's desire to have a connection to health food is made and produced. even in the middle of city's people are moving back into cities for the first time in generations. we have been a people who have been running away from our cities and then turning real pesters in the thick once didn't people are moving back into the center of cities now. that is an. they're bringing the same agrarian aspirations into

the center cities of want to grow vegetables. of what fruit trees. lets the people have chickens. about three blocks from dodger stadium. my kids go out and the morning and get the eggs. in a sense we're making a renewed effort to reconcile and sue bring these opposites together. it can be done to us like rose garden. it can be done, but it is the balancing act. >> host: in your own personal experience what kind of permits from the city do you need to raise chickens three blocks -- >> it depends on the city you live in. lucky for me the city of los angeles, they decided to allow backyard chickens many places are a little bit behind many cities will come

and fight if you have a vegetable garden in your front yard. is still wrestling with that idea. >> host: of america's always been environmentalist ? >> guest: we have not. we have a rather perverse federation of nature it makes us different. we have thought that our wilderness, and that is what gives us an opportunity to remake the world. for rubber, we all came from corrupt and destroyed countries. at the same time we brought with us a cultural attitudes toward wild nature, it was somehow terrifying, somehow dangerous and needed to be subject. we buffeted that the american wilderness is something that confers enormous difference and non and eugene, we will co levels as fast as we can and cut down the forest as fast as we can in turn nature itself and to agriculture.

so i think environmentalism as it appeared in the 19th century was another aspect of as a anxiety about the changes. since it was a soldier you look at the mid century, the great american writers of wrote about nature. americans became concerned that we ourselves were destroying nature to quickly we clear cut it, minot, burned, drain it complies with and kill it. buffalo. so in essence it was an awakening to the fact that our veneration of nature was not enough to save it and we need to put in place policy and intention. this is probably what

americans have a slightly uneasy relationship. it goes to the court the of who we think we are. >> host: here at pepperdine university in malibu, california speech and a good question. california has always had an outside influence on the rest of the country. in that sense it is so visual. everything is bigger here is a landscape that is just powerfully iconic. it is also a climate which is really, really seductive. it is trying people here. when you draw people here eroded. too many people, and we get back into the same problem we have always had. you can only run so far. you keep looking up

paradise. california is an and our national whom. it is also the case that environmental politics and formation and rhetoric really matured in california . modern environmentalism ticket shape. the second part of your question was about gardens. the modern garden did emanate from california. came out of postwar suburbia kind of a wonderful form of a garden that mixes modern ideas of simplicity, quite a bit of jefferson's paradise on the hill where no other people are around. and also lot of wednesday, a lot of teaching style and palm trees and exotic and, things that people brought back from the war in the pacific and having fun after all of that difficult time.

mount. the '40's, 50's, 60's, the good times. california. i think that that notion that there can be pleasure, private landscapes, the nuclear family was this sort of new paradise. that spread all over the world. you can go anywhere in the world and see california style gardens, nigeria, new zealand. in china they are building subdivisions were tens of millions of people that are modeled on orange county, santa barbara, spanish architecture, swimming pools the pleasure principle at large. the only american style that is really probably indigenous to america and is certainly the only american style that i think has become globally influential. >> host: in suburbs lost up in l.a. have got smaller again. >> guest: simple forces.

one is an escalation of real-estate values in this part of the country the price of water is going through the roof. people are reassessing that notion. property values drive these sorts of decisions. property values are quite high and must places. >> host: what do you do? >> guest: i teach urban environmental policy. i teach quite a bit about resource politics and water which is a big issue for us. it is an urban issue as well as an agricultural one, there are no real distinctions. so what is happening in this state is fascinating on many levels, not just because of the stress is like the drought that is putting us into a crisis and making people actually think about underlying institutions, which is useful. never let a good crisis go to waste. it is also the case that california by virtue of the size of its economy, the

largest economy in the united states come up there with brazil and france. california has always been able to lead in terms of its regulatory decisions, taking on air pollution, tailpipes, water. the state had the clean water act and clean air act. had a coastal act before any other states. it has been able to drive through those kinds of decisions and it has been able to train the rest of the countries because markets look to the california because it is so large. california makes a decision for example to take the lead out of gasoline. automakers will eventually take it out across the country and make a decision to require catalytic converters. the whole country will eventually turn of california makes a decision as the stick to it under our laws written in your to captain terry green has gas emissions. that market is going to

become quite powerful and influential. we have already seen other states seeking to join california's captain trade system. saying what happens here in real time is a good way to see a larger trend. another aspect is that california's economy is very much oriented toward the rest of the world. this of the connections to china, korea, japan, australia, latin america are always at the forefront of the way in which we think about our relationship to the environment, the way in which we regulated. we have a problem. we successfully cleaned up a lot of our smog emissions, evicted most of the heavy industry, cleaned up cars and vehicles. the air is much cleaner, but now we have smog from china not only blowing across the pacific but we have a lot of diesel engines coming through, ships that come to the port of long beach and

then trains and trucks that haul goods off we imported are smart. such changes the way in which we have to regulate we are not separate from. >> host: he talked about the tension often involved in these issues. one of those tensions is the fact of california has done these things, lead in several environmental areas, but a los angeles is known as the land of access to a big house is consuming energy, cars everywhere, highways and cars. >> guest: everything you mentioned is true. we have to remember that there are 18 million people in southern california, a place of arguably should not support that many. a place where there should not be a great city at all, no natural advantages, no harbor, surrounded by mountains and cut off from the rest of the world by

desert and has no coal, iron ore. yet no great industrial city that continues to pull people. southern california and los angeles did this through desire and engineering in institutions. it went out and found the water, the energy to much-publicized itself quite well and continues to do that the southern california has unable to succeed too much success and has thus far been able to work its way through the stresses and continue to function. and i think we are well eclipse to continue to do that. in terms of cleaning up the air, an enormous amount of renovation and terms of efficiency, an electric economy, cleaning up the energy