America S Public Lands

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.

This updated edition traces the oft-forgotten ideas of nature that have shaped the evolution of America's public land system. The result is a fresh and compelling account of the most pressing challenges facing national parks, forests, rangelands, and wildlife refuges from their early beginnings through the first years of the Trump administration.

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.

The little-known story of how the U.S. government came to hold nearly one-third of the nation's land primarily for recreation and conservation.

“A big, bold book about public lands . . . The Desert Solitaire of our time.” —Outside A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West--and a plea for the protection of these last wild places The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

John Muir and Gifford Pinchot have often been seen as the embodiment of conflicting environmental philosophies. Muir, the preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service advocating sustainability in timber harvests, instituted conservation. The idealistic Muir saw nature as something special and separate; the pragmatic Pinchot accepted that people used the products of nature. The environmental movement’s original sin, and the root of many of it's difficulties, was its inability to reconcile these two viewpoints—and these two men.So how was it that Muir and Pinchot went camping together—and delighted in each other's company? Does this mean that the seemingly irreparable divide in environmental ethos is not as unbridgeable as it might seem? The perceived rivalry between these two men has obscured a fascinating and hopeful story. Muir and Pinchot actually spent years in an alliance that lead to the original movement for public lands. Their shared commitment to the glories of natural landscapes united their disparate talents and viewpoints to create a fledgling and uniquely American vision of land ownership and management.

The inside story of the drug cartels on our public lands—and the game wardens taking them on.

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.