Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 396
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-5381-2638-7 • Hardback • February 2020 • $116.00 • (£89.00)
978-1-5381-2639-4 • Paperback • February 2020 • $44.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-5381-2640-0 • eBook • February 2020 • $41.50 • (£35.00)
Randall K. Wilson is professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College. The first edition of America’s Public Lands won the J. B. Jackson Prize from the American Association of Geographers.
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction: Why Public Lands?
Rethinking Old Stories
Setting the Stage
Part I: ORIGINS OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
1 Building the National Commons
Colonial Antecedents
The National Commons Expands
The Federal Indian Reserved Lands
Summing Up
2 Disposing of the Public Domain: From Commons to
Commodity
Privatizing the Commons: Two Visions
The Homestead Acts, Land Grants, and Railroads
Logging, Ranching, and Mining
Federal Indian Reserved Lands Revisited
The First Public Land Policy?
3 A Public Land System Emerges
Tragedy of the National Commons
From Crisis to Conservation
Building the Public Land System
Part II: AMERICA’S PUBLIC LAND SYSTEM
4 National Parks
The Story of Yellowstone
John Muir and Yosemite
Teddy Roosevelt and the Antiquities Act
The Fight for Hetch Hetchy
Stephen Mather and the National Park Service
The Jackson Hole Conflict and Postwar Expansion
Stewart Udall, Jimmy Carter, and Alaska
From Deregulation to Collaboration . . . and Back Again
Parks in the Twenty-First Century
The 2016 Park Service Centennial and Beyond
Cases
5 National Forests
The First Forest Reserves
The 1897 Forest Organic Act
Gifford Pinchot and the USDA Forest Service
A Burning Issue: Fire Policy
The Idea of Multiple Use
Clear-Cutting, NFMA, and Below-Cost Timber Sales
Conflict Soars to New Heights: The Northern Spotted Owl
The Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003
The Twenty-First Century and the Triple Threat
Coming Full Circle
Cases
6 National Wildlife Refuges
Who Owns Wildlife? State Rights and the Separation of Land and Life
Sport Hunting and Conservation, or When a Refuge Is Not a Refuge
The First (Actual) National Wildlife Refuge
Going International to Save the National Commons
Building a Federal Wildlife Agency
But What Are Refuges For?
Turning the Corner to Conservation
The 2000s: From Deregulation to Historic Expansion
Refuges under Siege
Cases
7 Bureau of Land Management Lands
Rethinking the Unwanted Lands: John Wesley Powell
Tragedies of the (Rangeland) Commons
The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934
Creating the BLM
The BLM Organic Act
1980s and 1990s: From Sagebrush Rebellion to Rangeland Reform
Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument
The National Landscape Conservation System
The New Century: To Drill or Not to Drill?
What Will the BLM Stand For?
Cases
8 National Wilderness Preservation System
Origins: The Wilderness Idea
Aldo Leopold and the First Wilderness
Bob Marshall and the Wilderness Society
Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Act of 1964
The Wilderness Act in Practice
Wilderness and the National Forests
Expanding the Wilderness System
The Next Fifty Years
Cases
9 National Wild and Scenic Rivers and Trails
Wild and Scenic Rivers
Case: The Klamath River
National Scenic and Historic Trails
Case: The North Country Trail
10 Parting Thoughts
Mapping Conceptual Continuities
Diversity within the Public Land System
The Promise of Collaborative Conservation
Appendix A: Major U.S. Public Land Laws and Other Key Turning Points
Appendix B: Units within the National Park System
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
This valuable new edition of Randall Wilson’s prize-winning book on public lands offers timely updates on Obama and Trump administration legislation and important new material on wild and scenic rivers and trails. Wilson also serves up plenty of fresh examples that reflect the author’s ongoing passion for America’s greatest gift to itself. If you love the nation’s public lands, you will love this book!
— William Wyckoff, Montana State University; author of How to Read the American West: A Field Guide
Wilson’s America’s Public Lands set a new standard in bringing the US public domain into clear view for a broad array of readers. The second edition keeps pace admirably with the changes afoot in environmental politics with Wilson’s deft insight, nuance, and wide-ranging expertise. The book guides us to understand the significance of America’s public lands and teaches us not to take these lands and waters for granted.
— David Havlick, University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Thanks to Randall Wilson, we now have a splendid perch from which to view the broad sweep of public lands management in the United States, both spatially and temporally. Eschewing the hackneyed nature-as-commodity versus nature-as-wilderness dichotomy in favor of an approach that tacks much closer to reality, Wilson reminds us that resource conservation and management is—and always has been—a messy business. Perhaps most important, he provides us with the context, tools, and inspiration we need to find common ground as a people and address the environmental challenges that confront us in the twenty-first century.
— Geoffrey L. Buckley, Ohio University