Public land management and ownership came under increasing scrutiny in the 1980s, partly because of the increased value of federal lands; prized for their timber, minerals, energy, and amenity outputs. The personal touch and wisdom of one of these prolific and thoughtful writers on land use issues ensure that this book is a valuable addition to a literature to which Dr. Clawson already has made enormous contributions. For its readers, this book provides fresh insights and suggests new approaches to a problem that has been heavily discussed.
The federal government is by far the largest landowner in the United States. It is somewhat of an anomaly for the federal government to hold vast acreages of land in an economy where the prevailing ideology favours private ownership. The Reagan administration’s (1981-1989) proposal to increase energy and mineral development on federal lands, to accelerate timber harvesting in national forests, and to expand the sale of federal lands generated strong and vocal opposition. Originally published in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan era, Rethinking the Federal Lands examines why the U.S. has retained federal lands and questions how ownership affects the management of federal lands and the total benefits society derives from them. This title is ideal for students interested in environmental studies and policy making.
Among American conservatives, the right to own property free from the meddling hand of the state is one of the most sacred rights of all. But in the American West, the federal government owns and oversees vast patches of land, complicating the narrative of western individualism and private property rights. As a consequence, anti-federal government sentiment has animated conservative politics in the West for decades upon decades. In This Land Is My Land, James R. Skillen tells the story of conservative rebellion-ranging from legal action to armed confrontations-against federal land management in the American West over the last forty years. He traces the successive waves of conservative insurgency against federal land authority-the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982), the War for the West (1991-2000), and the Patriot Rebellion (2009-2016)-and shows how they evolved from regional revolts waged by westerners with material interests in federal lands to a national rebellion against the federal administrative state. Cumulatively, Skillen explains how ranchers, miners, and other traditional users of federal lands became powerful symbols of conservative America and inseparably linked to issues of property rights, gun rights, and religious expression. Not just a book about property rights battles over Western lands, This Land is My Land reveals how the evolving land-based conflicts in the West since the 1980s reshaped the conservative coalition in America-a development that ultimately helped lead to the election of President Donald J. Trump in 2016.
The contributions to this volume demonstrate how the principles of fiscal responsibility and individual accountability that have been applied to economic and social policies - essentially free market principles - can be applied successfully to environmental policy. The authors offer ten commonsense reforms as a starting point, all based on the compelling arguments that a new system of positive incentives can get us more environmental quality at lower cost. These reforms include land lease programs for nontraditional commodity production, long-term transferable land permits, landowner compensation for regulated endangered species property, and performance-based (as opposed to technology-based) water and air pollution laws.
In the third edition of this definitive book, Richard N. L. Andrews looks back at four centuries of American environmental policy, showing how these policies affect contemporary environmental issues and public policy decisions, and identifying key policy challenges for the future. Andrews crafts a detailed and contextualized narrative of the historical development of American environmental policies and institutions. This volume presents an extensively revised text, with increased detail on the fifty-year history of the modern environmental policy era and is updated through the Obama and Trump administrations.
