going to suffer from online competition. >> we were able to go a little deeper into the publishers list. so if you are a small bookstore with a smaller amount of traffic and you are not selling as many books in an average week you need to buy the ones that are going to sell the best. we are able because we have a very loyal clientele. we sell those and then we are able to bring in one or two that was a little more obscure and we have to wait longer for its customer to come in for more information to the visit to st. paul minnesota and the other visits with local content vehicle go to c-span.org/mac local content.

>> booktv college series. this month we are at pepperdine university. wade grams have stomach booktv to talk about his book in which he looks at the nations gardens at the people who design them. this is about half an hour. >> now on the tv we want to introduce you to wade graham who is the author of american eden. >> guest: i do a series of things. i design gardens and imho the list. >> host: how did you get interested or acted. i got a chance early in life who taught me how to do it. she was quite a powerful

designer. so in the defining gardens and writing about the environmental history i realized i was quite ignorant about what i was doing. i knew how to do it and i could do english garden with a modern house that is strictly i didn't know why people needed these things and it came to me quite strongly that only by ignorance but it was an interesting question. my husband has commissioned and has lots of sharp things and they said about and what you please design me in english rose garden. i thought having my going to do this first of all and what does it for you about the marriage so i set out to change these things. >> of the attention between the two certainly are indicative of

who you thought they were. because we don't come from the commission we don't all think the same thing. we are bits of different things and try to reconcile them in those stories and mismatched are quite interesting. >> wade graham please give us an example of a public space that is a tenth place. it's a curious and frustrating public space. it simply says that we should go. it's this absolute stunning place that is quite whimsical and impressive. he really made an incredible sort of real estate demonstration and it's a place that first of all is the

founding american garden to understand thomas jefferson was and really cope or in an english man and an english world and was to fashion something which was an american character and what did it mean to be english institutions and turn them into something different. so he did this at monticello and you see it's made in english parts and fashions that he did something different and the first thing that one notices is nowhere is there a straight line in monticello. there are none because to him the garden that he grew up with were gardens about loyal power and oppression and absolutism. so he made monticello with these curving lines and flower beds and things that came up in views for the mountains of the river below. and what he did explicitly mean is that this was a free democratic garden, free and democratic people. so it is a demonstration in a sense of his ethics and his

ideology of his desperation in his belief for all of us and yet he would be completely unreconciled when the way that he made a living. >> wade graham have public space has always been important in american history? >> of course they have been enormously important. although america as a culture is far more turned inward. we don't spend enough time worrying about public spaces. we have the mall in washington that took a while to get fully together and we are still working on it actually. we don't have the equivalent of the square were direct square or tmm and -- tmm and square. it is a meaningful one when you look at gardens i make no distinction between a garden or

hidden courtyard and something that's out there on the fairground or public space. they still are expressions of who we are and what we believe. they are windows into the mind of the maker. i look at the garden that thinks of itself as a garden but also the way that jack nicholas carefully designed of the fairway to look like the distance of the place that he was. so the key is to learn how to read the language of the garden in the way that we read other things that are more obvious and that are explicitly expressive. so the landscape, the language of the gardens as water and grass and hedges and trees and flower beds and fountains and so forth but the syntax is similar to the way that we put other things together cut away that we express ourselves. so, we do it through our address

and speech and politics and if we are wealthy by spending money to. so we try to read these things and in the sense of the garden if i show it to you is me putting my mind on the ground, putting it out there as a diagram of who i think i should be and who i want to be and what i think utopia looks like. so that's how i approach it. >> who was frederick olmstead and his importance in america and americans public spaces? >> olmsted i would say created with the help of an english architect that we forget to mention i think the greatest piece of art of the american 19th century in central park and keep in mind he wasn't trained to do this. he was a gentleman farmer and he failed at it and then he was put in charge of the relief operations for the wounded soldiers in the civil war, the

american red cross. he was someone field in organizing thousands of resources and so on and so forth. and it created a central part as a kind of incredible demonstration of what was going on in america at that time. so, central park is indeed it looks like nature but it's a very creation of nature. they landscape scale replica of the nature that is being destroyed at the time they built it so manhattan island and new york city have this incredible dust real and financial power switch scared americans. they had been trained to think of ourselves as an angry and people. we live on farms and small towns. we have a sort of virtue in simplicity and we are told to think of ourselves yet in the 19th century we are confronted with a very different reality which was enormous industrial ovation coming in by the tens of

thousands, corruption and disease and the war around us. there is a wonderful moment that no one reads there is a young country girl at the the endless avenues in the tall buildings and she's anxious and she says the time will come when all the earth shall be be paid and indeed that's what it felt like two people. it felt like we were feeding the wilderness content which is in fact the thing that makes us different from the british and french the french and everyone who's been guaranteed virtue. for them in our act of destroying this nature we can anxious. what it represents is a kind of embarkation of the nature into the middle of the city. and it's the thing that keeps people saying it's not an aesthetic terms at all even though it is this gorgeous place with a sort of my old scheming

landscape and lakes and forests and tunnels. they made it all and blasted the tunnels out of iraq. they talked about it and medical language. they talked about it as a giant public health of the people in new york city were so frazzled and nervous with a loss of spirit and that by walking in this landscape they would be renewed with a certain form of national therapy is what it represents. so as you walk in central park, think about the tension between our view of nature as a repository of the virtue and based on the exploitation and the distraction of nature and these are difficult to reconcile. as jefferson's ideals. and the fact that he owned 666 people in his lifetime he was

unable to reconcile them. many of us are unable to reconcile our beliefs with what we really do during the day. so olmsted also we think of him as this landscape architect but he invented, if not inventive and really perfected the suburb. the suburb is a place where people with enough money can take a railroad out of the city and by themselves a piece of the romantic nature. often behind the guarded gated community. olmsted designed separate beautiful winding streets and lawns and an invocation of nature and it was the rejection of the city but you have to pay for it with city money. so, olmsted as he stated in his life he retired at his suburban massachusetts has a beautiful place. and he was so happy he said he just couldn't get enough of the suburban country, just a good

dose of his own medicine and that is where he died quite happily. but the model of the kind of creating a form of of as weak or that romantic nature as a citizen that allows us to live our actual urban lives we are in fact an urban industrial people is a way of reconciling things that cannot be reconciled. >> was their public policy fights about creating central park >> central park being in new york city really had more to do with finance than it did with policy. central park was not -- it was inhabited by several thousand black and irish people with their farms and the new york state legislature aj decision to commit some six or $7 million to buy and construct the park because they recognized that it would raise the land value. so the parks have always been billed as real estate amenities. they actually so -- the new york

legislature said we will fund this for the betterment of the finance of the city. that's what happened when he built this thing suddenly everyone had to live on upper fifth avenue up in the 50s and to be built mansions and that's how that worked. so real estate is typically at the heart of these things although you will find public policy not far from any garden that you look at. we can look at the show obama speech regarding at the white house which is in direct terms really just, you know, an assertion of them and agree in virtue at the times times remember she built it in 2009 )-right-paren the midst of the the meltdown that was caused by the lack of virtue is the market. it was actually pretty over leveraging of houses. and we have to remember that jefferson died an enormous debt because he kept rebuilding monticello and he was soon

mortgaged to the british bankers and it had to be sold when all the families were broken up so the mortgage debt. [inaudible] i think that it was built with $200 of the seeds and supplies &-and-sign donated labor and is about 1100 it was about 1100 square feet which paled in comparison to the details in a square feet of the vegetable garden in which he grew 350 kind of vegetables at a time, 50 kind of cabbages and 150 kinds of fruit trees. the garden at the white house is a little bit less ambitious, but no less forceful as a moral statement. but at the same time the interesting thing about the

garden is that it is an assertion of a program of a set of beliefs. she went on sesame street and said we grow our own food and we are using this to educate children about childhood obesity and the importance of putting these parts together to live in the virtuous sense. yet in the same year the farm bill came across her husband's desk that was just about $300 billion which fundamentally supports the overproduction of soybeans and corn which we used to make high fructose corn syrup which is makes over children obese to begin with. so the obama cannot really recognize the notion of public policy is either a end of this is what is interesting about what we do. >> in your work as a garden designer have you seen any impact from michelle obama's efforts at the white house? >> one of the things that is very hopeful about our own era

if i can back up one thing that one sees is a sort of pendulum swinging to the good times and the bad times. and we sort of do things bigger because it is more about the ostentation when we are in the other times, we sort of are closer to the inquiry in roots and we are in the middle now that one of the things that we are seeing constantly is people's desire to have a connection to how food is made and how food is produced and where it comes from and even in the middle of cities people are -- people are moving back into the center of the cities now and that is incredibly helpful.

and as they do it, they are bringing the same agrarian aspirations into the center of the cities. many of my clients say i want agriculture. i wanted to grow the troubles for itself and my kids. i want fruit trees and lots of people have chickens, i want chickens in the shadows of the skyscrapers of downtown los los angeles for three blocks from the dodgers stadium. my kids about in the morning and get the eggs. it is quite wonderful. so in a sense, we are making a renewed effort to reconcile and two brings these opposites together and it can be done just like the rose garden it can be done but it is a balancing act. >> host: in your own personal x.. what kind of permits from the city do you need to raise chickens? >> guest: luckily for me the city of los angeles decided to allow backyard chickens up to three and no roosters.

but many places are a little bit behind in many cities including the cities of los angeles will cite you do have a vegetable garden in the front chart. so, we are still wrestling with that idea. >> of american voters and environmentalists? stanek americans have always been environmentalists. we have a rather perverse veneration of nature. we've always venerated nature insofar as it is what makes us different. we have lost our wilderness continent is what gives us an opportunity to make the world from the corruption of europe. remember we all came from corrupt and sort of the story countries. but at the same time, we brought with us a cultural attitude towards why old nature that it was somehow terrifying. somehow dangerous and needed to be subdued. so we both think that the american wilderness is something that confers an enormous difference in beauty and sublimity to us but we will tell the world as fast as we can and we will cut down the forest as

fast as we can and turn again nature itself into agriculture. so, i think environmentalism as it appeared was another aspect of this anxiety about the changes that we are destroying it so fast. in the sense that it was nostalgia for the nature if you look at the mid century cometh a great american writers all wrote about nature. that's what they were on about. all these other books and americans became concerned that we ourselves were the story in nature too quickly. you know, we could hear cut, mine it, burn it, plow and kill it. think about the extinction crisis in the 19th century and the carolina. heat and the american indian. in a sense it was an awakening to the fact that our veneration of nature wasn't enough to save it and we needed to actually put in place policy and intention.

so this is probably why americans have a slightly uneasy relationship with what he called environmentalism because it goes to the core of who we think we are. >> we are here at pepperdine university in malibu california. what has been the role of california in the gardens and the american environmentalists? >> good question. california has always had an outside influence on and off just california but on the rest of the country and the rest of the world because in a sense it is so visual everything is bigger here in seminole valley and s-sierra and the thought of the desert. it's a landscape that is just powerfully iconic and it's also a climate that is release active. so you draw people here to live in the kind of splendor of nature. too many people come here and we get back into the same public that we already had. you can only run so far

individually for you is a kind of, is our national trauma and obama quite large. it's also the case that environmental politics and environmental formation and rhetoric really matured into a form you from david brower in the sierra club and based in northern california. but modern environmentalism tickets shape probably here. then the second part of your questions about gardens, and i think the modern garden did emanate from california. it came out of postwar suburbia and it is a kind of wonderful form of gardening that makes the modernist ideas of simplicity and quite a bit of the paradise on the hill with no other people around in the veneration of nature and also palm trees and exotic things that people brought back from the war in the pacific and having fun after all

that sort of difficult times of depression in the war and if so forth. it's the 40s and 50s and 60s. i think that notion that there could be pleasure in the private landscapes that the nuclear family was deserted in paradise that we constructed the garden of eden, but spread all over the world world is to you could go anywhere in the world and see california style gardens, you could see them in nigeria and new zealand. in china they are building subdivisions for tens of millions of people that are modeled on orange county and santa barbara spanish colonial architecture and the pleasure principle at large. so that is the only american style that is really probably indigenous to america and it's certainly the only american style of writing has become globally influential. >> in the suburbs the lawns have

gotten bigger and then the smaller again haven't they? >> simple forces. one is escalation of real estate values and is now quite expensive to have the big long -- in this part of the country is through the roof so people are reassessing that notion. property values drive these sort of decisions and property values are quite high. what do you do at pepperdine? >> i teach at the school of public policy. and i teach quite a bit about resource politics and about water for a table which is a big issue for us and it is an urban issue in agricultural one where there are no real distinction. so, what's happening in the state is fascinating on many levels not just because of the stresses like the drought that's putting us into a crisis and making us think about our underlining institutions so never let a good crisis go to waste. it's also the case that

california by virtue of the size of its economy it is the largest by far the largest in the public local parts and 38th with brazilian friends. california has always been able to lead in terms of its regulatory decisions committee can on air pollution and cleaning up tailpipes and its water. the state had a clearwater act before the federal one, it had a coastal act with any other states and it's been able to drive through those kind of decisions and it's been almost able to train the rest of the country because they look to california because it is the most popular state. california makes the decision for example to take the lead out of gasoline. the automakers eventually the ticket out of cross country if they make the decision to require catalytic converters that whole country even surely will turn of california makes a decision as the state did under arnold schwarzenegger passing the laws to cap and trade the

gas emissions than that market is going to become powerfully influential. we have seen other states and even québec and the canadian province seeking to join the cast and trade system. studying what happens in real-time is a good way to see the larger trend and another aspect is that california's economy is very much oriented towards the rest of the world's. so the connection to china and korea and japan and australia and latin america are always at the forefront of the way in which we think about our relationship in the environment the way that we regulate it. we have a problem now we have successfully cleaned up a lot of the smaller emissions and we have evicted most of the heavy industry and cleaned up the cars and vehicles so it is much cleaner now but now we have smog coming from china not only blowing across the pacific but we have a look of diesel engines

coming through that come to the port of long beach and los angeles and the trains and trucks that hold them off to chicago and kansas city and freely we exported a small but we are bringing it back in the form of the goods that are manufactured offshore. as with changes the way we have to regulate and think how do we cope with a globalized economy because we are not separate from it. >> you talked about the tension often involved in these issues. one of those is the fact that california has done these things and has led in several lived in several environmental areas. but in la is known as the land of excess. big houses, consuming energy, cars everywhere, highways and cars. >> everything you mentioned is true. we have to remember that there are 18 million people in southern california in the place that arguably should support that many. and in the place that there shouldn't be a big city at all. it doesn't have a harbor is

surrounded by mountains cut off by the deserts and it has no coal or iron ore and the great industrial city continues to pull people here. southern california and los angeles in particular did this through design or engineering engineering in the institutions and we went out out into the water and found the energy and publicized itself quite well and it continues to do that. southern california has been unable not only to succeed in economic and cultural terms but then to kind of room in its success with too much success and it has those far been able to work its way through the stresses and continue to function. and i think that we are well equipped to continue to do that in terms of cleaning up the air. there is an enormous amount of innovation going on. there's an enormous amount of innovation in terms of

efficiency and an electric economy cleaning up the energy sources and streams and then for a example then four x. single in the area of water supply, southern california is utterly vulnerable because it built itself based on polling water in from all over the rest of the united united states and those supplies are frankly vulnerable and quite questionable. the region as a whole gets it and is trying to think it's way towards solving the problems in one of the interesting things is simply by ceasing to say we are a desert that there's no there is no water here we have to go to wyoming and auburn california to get the water is actually not a desert. there's a lot of water that we waste to the ocean that we could reuse and recycle and cleanup groundwater basins and become more self-sufficient in this region. so it's both true that there's an enormous amount of innovation

and an assessment of the vulnerabilities here so i would have a mixed verdict but it's an interesting thing to watch. >> powder that english garden turnout next >> is -- i snuck in a love of gardens. >> we've been talking with way to graham about the gardens tell us about who we are. this is booktv on location at pepperdine university. >> ..

>> >> "the copernicus complex" is the phrase that tries to