These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands: Revised and Expanded Edition

This book summarizes the types of US public lands - - national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, BLM lands, scenic rivers and trails. Like many other books, it treats all of Alaska's public lands together, regardless of type (park, forest, refuge). Each chapter includes a historical overview, a discussion of current management, and a section of advocacy making recommendations on how to improve management. The writing is clear and effective, and this would be a good place for anyone interested in an introduction to these lands. The book is organized in terms of preservation resources, and not chronologically or analytically. For example, the national parks come first. That makes sense in terms of preservation, since the parks are the crown jewels of public lands in the United States. But chronologically, the history of land acquisition in the United States - - which Zaslowsky and Watkins discuss under the Bureau of Land Management in Chapter 3 - - shaped the national parks in important ways. Since Congress didn't want to appropriate money for national parks, only those lands not yet taken - - the "worthless lands" in Alfred Runte's formulation - - were available for being reserved as parks. Presidential power to reserve national monuments (and originally national forests) by unilateral proclamation also make more sense if you put the land question first. In historical terms, then, the BLM chapter should have come first. Why does this matter? Because the book's organization obscures problems of preservation by not telling the story right. Putting the parks first gives us a "heroic" narrative in which visionary people come up with ideas and then exercise leadership to carry them out. This tends to downplay the political interests behind these lands, and it makes BLM lands incomprehensible. What are these, and why are we preserving them? This heroic narrative also makes the challenges of the national forests less understandable. The book also suffers from a largely unthinking conservationist bias. For example, they argue for retaining BLM lands in the public domain. Clearly, roadless lands could be designated wilderness, but why should the US keep degraded, overgrazed, roaded lands instead of selling them off to livestock producers? That question never enters the authors' minds. As long as conservationists don't confront that issue, many national forests and BLM lands will continue to provide huge subsidies to an inefficient and ecologically harmful livestock industry. Selling some lands off might, ironically, reduce the livestock impact because grazing is simply not an efficient use of these lands. Of course, this kind of bias is shared by many people, and those people represent this book's core audience. It does what it seeks to do very effectively. It doesn't dig deep but provides a good introduction to the topic.