Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics

This is a nice collection of chapters on the management of western public lands. The papers are accessible to undergraduates or to the educated lay reader, but manage to convey the basics of sophisticated ideas about land management. Prior appropriation, externalities, ecosystem management, and other terms of art are introduced, explained, and made relevant. The authors do not have an ideological axe to grind, beyond the fact that they all care about what happens to the public lands that make up 30% of U.S. land area. When the book talks about western public lands, it mostly means the Intermountain West. The Pacific Coast is less visible in these chapters than Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. Alaska receives much less attention than its size warrants. Finally, the book lacks chapters about how non-land laws such as the Clean Water Act or Clean Air Act affect public land management.