Wilderness Management

The best book in Wilderness Management! This book is by far better then the previous edition. A must for any resource manager or student looking into the field.

This is a book on wilderness and wilderness management policy, intended for use in undergraduate courses on forestry, recreational management, and similar topics. The book would also be a useful resource for professionals to have on their shelves, since it includes texts of some legislation, planning document guidelines, and other reference material in addition to a long bibliography. The book does not assume any specialized knowledge in a particular discipline but would be accessible to any college-level reader. Like other textbooks, it can be a bit dry, but it's better than most. The book's coverage of wilderness issues is both exhaustive and authoritative, and specialists contributed several of the chapters. Using specialist contributors has one important disadvantage: the book is repetitive in many places. The problem is that issues that contributor X views as essential for his or her topic are either (a) the subject of a previous chapter; or (b) also essential for contributor Y's chapter, and thus addressed in both places. I would estimate that one-fourth of the entire text could be eliminated by a strong editor - - or by forcing each contributor to read the entire book, which will never happen. (Voice of experience on this one, folks.) Though it includes chapters on the history of wilderness legislation, and brief summaries of how countries outside the US handle wilderness, the bulk of the book is intended to help people who manage wilderness areas. Their approach is technical and managerial, and tries to ignore the political environment as much as possible. For example, the authors don't discuss political pressures on management decisions in wilderness areas. To take one illustration, it is well known that outfitters make strong demands for certain uses in some wildernesses, and that they have the local and/or state clout to make those demands effective. Dealing with politics is part of the management problem, and it would have been helpful to address those issues in the book. That said, this is really the best book out on there on the topic, though in some respects, it's the only book. It does a good job but there is room for improvement as I have noted, so it's a four-star effort.

I have searched for a comprehensive, all-in-one resource for a long time. Here it is. Previously, I would have to gather info piecemeal and try to filter and organize. No longer. Engaging writing, easy to follow. Good index. 5 stars based on the fact that there's not much else out there in this arcane field. Otherwise 4 stars because both glossaries could be improved. Only a few acronyms are covered in the existing glossary of acronyms. Biggest complaint? Authors take pains to date citations in the text but sometimes overlook placing dates to establish timeline in the text. One must sometimes backtrack to learn a timeline and at times, one must just out-and-out guess.

Collaboratively written by John C. Hendee (Professor Emeritus of the University of Idaho Wilderness Research Center) and Chad P. Dawson (Professor of Recreation Resources Management, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York--Syracuse), and in an completely updated third edition, Wilderness Management: Stewardship And Protection Of Resources And Values is a comprehensive, 640-page reference and resource on wilderness stewardship and the protection of wilderness resources. Individual chapters present resources and information on U.S. legal authority with regard to wild areas, wild ecosystems, managing wilderness recreation, and a great deal more. Especially written for wilderness stewards and U.S. federal land management agencies, is also very highly recommended for environmental activists and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the upkeep of natural lands. Wilderness Management is a benchmark publication and an essential, core addition to professional, academic, and community library Environmental Studies reference collections.