Integrated Public Lands Management is the only book that deals with the management procedures of all the primary public land management agencies—National Forests, Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and the Bureau of Land Management—in one volume. This book fills the need for a unified treatment of the analytical procedures used by federal land management agencies in planning and managing their diverse lands. The second edition charts the progress these agencies have made toward the management of their lands as ecosystems. It includes new U.S. Forest Service regulations, expanded coverage of Geographic Information Systems, and new legislation on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Wildlife Refuges.
Integrated Public Lands Management is the only book that deals with the management procedures of all the primary public land management agencies--National Forests, Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and the Bureau of Land Management--in one volume. This book fills the need for a unified treatment of the analytical procedures used by federal land management agencies in planning and managing their diverse lands. The second edition charts the progress these agencies have made toward the management of their lands as ecosystems. It includes new U.S. Forest Service regulations, expanded coverage of Geographic Information Systems, and new legislation on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Wildlife Refuges.
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 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"--
Questions about land use, conservation, and preservation—already so perplexing and contentious—take on a new complexity and greater urgency when the land in question is understood as sacred. This is a view increasingly held, as adherents of mainstream religions come to recognize what indigenous peoples knew centuries ago—that the sacred inheres in nature itself. What such a trend means and how it involves the forces of culture, religion, and constitutional law (especially First Amendment clauses concerning the free exercise of religion) are considered with a remarkable breadth and depth of understanding in this important new work. Drawing on case studies of national parks and monuments, national forests, and other public lands and resources, Lloyd Burton gives a clear and comprehensive account of how the intertwining influences of culture, religion, and law have affected the management of public lands and resources in the recent past and how they may do so in the future. In a unique and unprecedented way, his book weaves together teachings on nature and the sacred among indigenous and immigrant culture groups in the United States; the relevant constitutional history of religion and government action; and analysis of contemporary conflicts over culture, religion, and public lands management. As such, Worship and Wilderness is essential reading not only for public land managers and environmental policy makers but also for anyone interested in the growing significance of religious interests in the use of resources that constitute our national commons and our common natural heritage.
The United States Forest Service, perhaps more than any other federal agency, has made great strides during the past two decades revolution izing its public involvement efforts and reshaping its profile through the hiring of professionals in many disciplinary areas long absent in the agency. In fact, to a large extent, the agency has been doing precisely what everyone has been clamoring for it to do: involving the public more in its decisions; hiring more wildlife biologists, recreation specialists, sociologists, planners, and individuals with "people skills"; and, fur thermore, taking a more comprehensive and long-term view in planning the future of the national forests. The result has been significant-in some ways, monumental-changes in the agency and its land manage ment practices. There are provisions for public input in almost all as pects of national forest management today. The profeSSional disciplines represented throughout the agency's ranks are markedly more diverse than they have ever been. Moreover, no stone is left untumed in the agency's current forest-planning effort, undoubtedly the most compre hensive, interdisciplinary planning effort ever undertaken by a resource agency in the United States. Regardless of the dramatic change that has occurred in the U. S. Forest Service since the early 1970s, the agency is still plagued by con flicts arising from dissatisfaction ~th how it is doing business.
Forest Management and Planning, Second Edition, addresses contemporary forest management planning issues, providing a concise, focused resource for those in forest management. The book is intermixed with chapters that concentrate on quantitative subjects, such as economics and linear programming, and qualitative chapters that provide discussions of important aspects of natural resource management, such as sustainability. Expanded coverage includes a case study of a closed canopy, uneven-aged forest, new forest plans from South America and Oceania, and a new chapter on scenario planning and climate change adaptation. - Helps students and early career forest managers understand the problems facing professionals in the field today - Designed to support land managers as they make complex decisions on the ecological, economic, and social impacts of forest and natural resources - Presents updated, real-life examples that are illustrated both mathematically and graphically - Includes a new chapter on scenario planning and climate change adaptation - Incorporates the newest research and forest certification standards - Offers access to a companion website with updated solutions, geographic databases, and illustrations
As the twenty-first century dawns, public land policy is entering a new era. This timely book examines the historical, scientific, political, legal, and institutional developments that are changing management priorities and policies—developments that compel us to view the public lands as an integrated ecological entity and a key biodiversity stronghold. Once the background is set, each chapter opens with a specific natural resource controversy, ranging from the Pacific Northwest’s spotted owl imbroglio to the struggle over southern Utah’s Colorado Plateau country. Robert Keiter uses these case histories to analyze the ideas, forces, and institutions that are both fomenting and retarding change. Although Congress has the final say in how the public domain is managed, the public land agencies, federal courts, and western communities are each playing important roles in the transformation to an ecological management regime. At the same time, a newly emergent and homegrown collaborative process movement has given the public land constituencies a greater role in administering these lands. Arguing that we must integrate the new imperatives of ecosystem science with our devolutionary political tendencies, Keiter outlines a coherent new approach to natural resources policy.
Rangelands comprise between 40 and 50 percent of all U.S. land and serve the nation both as productive areas for wildlife, recreational use, and livestock grazing and as watersheds. The health and management of rangelands have been matters for scientific inquiry and public debate since the 1880s, when reports of widespread range degradation and livestock losses led to the first attempts to inventory and classify rangelands. Scientists are now questioning the utility of current methods of rangeland classification and inventory, as well as the data available to determine whether rangelands are being degraded. These experts, who are using the same methods and data, have come to different conclusions. This book examines the scientific basis of methods used by federal agencies to inventory, classify, and monitor rangelands; it assesses the success of these methods; and it recommends improvements. The book's findings and recommendations are of interest to the public; scientists; ranchers; and local, state, and federal policymakers.
This volume incorporates case studies that explore past and current land use decisions on both public and private lands, and includes practical approaches and tools for land use decision-making. The most important feature of the book is the linking of ecological theory and principle with applied land use decision-making. The theoretical and empirical are joined through concrete case studies of actual land use decision-making processes.
