America S Public Lands Politics Economics And Administration

Sewage seeping into creeks, crumbling cabins and disintegrating roads, dilapidated visitor centers, catastrophic wildfires: these are some of the sights awaiting visitors to federal lands today. Federal agencies in charge of the public domain call for more support in the form of taxpayer dollars while constantly seeking to add to their holdings; environmental groups call for increased restrictions on land use and resource development; private citizens call for a return to the good old days of crisply tended, crime-free, and unspoiled national parks. All, it seems, overlook the sad fact that the existing federal estate is in terrible shape, badly maintained and managed, and with no immediate hope for improvement. Will more money, more restrictions, more regulations address the problems that plague America's public domain? No: Rather, real improvement requires reform of the managing institutions. Who Is Minding the Federal Estate? is a book intended for any reader with an interest in improving the condition of our public lands. It begins by examining the origins of the federal estate, which, though originally intended to be a temporary clearinghouse, now comprises a third of the U.S. landmass. The book describes the evolution of laws governing that estate and of the public conception of wilderness_once thought to be abundant and in need of taming, now considered to be inviolable and even sacrosanct. In non-technical prose that draws on economic theory and empirical analysis, it systematically investigates patterns of federal land management_and, more to the point, mismanagement. The book closes by offering a set of alternatives that will improve stewardship of the federal estate both by incorporating more private initiatives and by freeing those lands from the grasp of politicians who come and go in favor of a sustainable, long-term management ethic. These alternatives come unshackled by policies that lead to disasters such as the recent and ongoing epidemic of massive fires sweeping the forests of the West.

Throughout American history, “public lands” have been the subject of controversy, from homesteaders settling the American west to ranchers who use the open range to promote free enterprise, to wilderness activists who see these lands as wild places. This book shows how these controversies intersect with critical issues of American history.

Issues like clearcutting, wilderness preservation, and economic development have dominated debates over public lands for years, yet we seem no closer to resolving these matters than we ever were. Martin Nie now looks at why there continues to be so much conflict about public lands and resource management-and how we can break through these impasses. Showing that such conflicts have been driven by interrelated factors ranging from scarcity to mistrust and politics, he charts the present status and future prospects of public lands management in America. Nie looks closely at two of today's most intractable conflicts: the designation of U.S. Forest Service roadless areas and management of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. He uses these cases to investigate more inclusive issues about governing federal lands in the West, such as the contested use of science and litigation, lengthy planning processes, and controversial practices of Congress and the president in managing environmental disputes. Along the way, he addresses such other conflict areas as snowmobiles in Yellowstone, bear and wolf protection, fire and forest health, drilling in Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, and federal grazing policy. Nie emphasizes the complicated and often contentious interaction between the branches of the federal government as a major factor in misunderstandings. He particularly cites the problem of vague statutory language, which tells our public land agencies little about what they should be doing but lots about how they should be doing it. Nie reexamines this confusing body of law and policy, in which the rulemaking process wags the dog and agencies are caught in political quagmires, to show how the pieces fit-but more often don't. Throughout the book, Nie considers the factors that make some public land conflicts so controversial, revisits how they have been dealt with in the past, and proposes ways they might be better managed in the future. Eschewing the single-policy approach to public lands management-such as encouraging free markets-he instead surveys a diverse array of other available options. His big-picture outlook for the twenty-first century is a bold call for reshaping ongoing conflicts-and for reinvesting in our public lands.

First Published in 2011. During the 1970s, land managers in the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) often must have felt they lived in interesting times. The decade began with the first Earth Day, an event that revealed the increasing strength and militancy of the environmental movement; as it ended, western commercial users of the public lands, disaffected by environmentalist policymaking victories, had launched the "sagebrush rebellion." Those managers were expected to reconcile often sharply polarized interest group pressures with professional values, as well as with diverse federal statutes and regulations that reflected uneasy compromises among group and professional influences. Although the technical specifics of public lands management differ from those in other fields of natural resources management, the political tensions in public lands policymaking are similar to those in other natural resources fields. Thus, this description of the Forest Service's xiii xiv PREFACE and BLM's handling of those tensions should be of interest to many in the natural resources management community as a whole. This study should also be useful to students of public administrative politics generally.

How it is that the United States—the country that cherishes the ideal of private property more than any other in the world—has chosen to set aside nearly one-third of its land area as public lands? Now in a fully revised and updated edition covering the first years of the Trump administration, Randall Wilson considers this intriguing question, tracing the often-forgotten ideas of nature that have shaped the evolution of America’s public land system. The result is a fresh and probing account of the most pressing policy and management challenges facing national parks, forests, rangelands, and wildlife refuges today. The author explores the dramatic story of the origins of the public domain, including the century-long effort to sell off land and the subsequent emergence of a national conservation ideal. Arguing that we cannot fully understand one type of public land without understanding its relation to the rest of the system, he provides in-depth accounts of the different types of public lands. With chapters on national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management lands, and wilderness areas, Wilson examines key turning points and major policy debates for each land type, including recent Trump Administration efforts to roll back environmental protections. He considers debates ranging from national monument designations and bison management to gas and oil drilling, wildfire policy, the bark beetle epidemic, and the future of roadless and wilderness conservation areas. His comprehensive overview offers a chance to rethink our relationship with America’s public lands, including what it says about the way we relate to, and value, nature in the United States.

The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands. Drawing upon neglected sources from organized ranchers, this is the first book to provide a historically based explanation for why the relationship between ranchers and the federal government became so embattled long before modern environmentalists became involved in the issue. Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, Public Lands and Political Meaning traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies, giving us a new look at the relations of power that made the modern West. Although a majority of organized ranchers supported government control of the range at the turn of the century, by midcentury these same organizations often used a virulently antifederal discourse that fueled many a political fight in Washington and that still runs deep in American politics today. In analyzing this shift, Merrill shows how profoundly people's ideas about property wove their way into the political language of the debates surrounding public range policy. As she unravels the meaning of this language, Merrill demonstrates that different ideas about property played a crucial role in perpetuating antagonism on both sides of the fence. In addition to illuminating the origins of the "sagebrush rebellions" in the American West, this book also persuasively argues that political historians must pay more attention to public land management issues as a way of understanding tensions in American state-building.