Cawley objectively investigates the Sagebrush Rebellion, looking at the driving force behind the movement, the strategies used by the Rebels, and the consequences of the controversy. He also offers a provocative interpretation of events in federal land policy from the 1960s to the 1990s and establishes a framework for assessing future developments in federal land policy. Includes an analysis of James Watt's beleaguered tenure as Reagan's Secretary of the Interior.

Armed protesters who occupied Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January focused national attention on local anger over federal management of public land in Western states. But for several years, a quieter rebellion has occurred in the West, where the federal government owns nearly half the land. In 2012, Utah enacted a law demanding that the federal government relinquish more than 31 million acres of public land in the state, and Arizona's governor vetoed a similar bill. Five Western states have enacted laws to study the issue. Proponents of land transfers say federal mismanagement of public lands contributes to catastrophic wildfires and costs logging, ranching, and mining jobs. But opponents say courts settled the federal land ownership issue long ago and that the federal government does a good job of managing public lands under often-conflicting mandates, such as conserving lands and facilitating resource extraction. Moreover, the opponents say if states controlled federal lands they would increase commercial development or sell land to private interests.

Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of “land” and “the West” have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The essays in Land in the American West deal with complex, troublesome, and interrelated questions regarding land: Who owns it? Who has access to it? What happens when private rights infringe upon the public good, or when one ethnic group is pitted against another, or when there is a conflict between economic and environmental values? Many of these questions have deep historical roots. They all have special significance in the modern American West, where natural resources are still abundant and large areas of land are federally owned.

Examines the conflict surrounding public land management, revealing how problematic language in public land laws, scarcity of resources, and mistrust cloud the debates, and offering a range of solutions to help move beyond the dysfunctional status quo management.

Environmentalists and the timber industry do not often collaborate, but in the years immediately following gray wolf reintroduction in the interior American West, a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana brought these odd bedfellows together. The partnership won praise from diverse interests across the country and in 2000 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan for reintroduction. When the Bush Administration took office, however, it promptly shelved the project. In Grizzly West Michael J. Dax explores the political, cultural, and social forces at work in the West and around the country that gave rise to this innovative plan but also contributed to its downfall. Observers at the time blamed the project’s collapse on simple partisan politics, but Dax reveals how the American West’s changing culture and economy over the second half of the twentieth century dramatically affected this bold vision. He examines the growth of the New West’s political potency, while at the same time revealing the ways in which the Old West still holds a significant grip over the region’s politics. Grizzly West explores the great divide between the Old and the New West, one that has lasting consequences for the modern West and for our country's relationship with its wildlife.

"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--

First Published in 2018. An explanation of changes in US Congress policies that affect the management of rangeland, timber, energy, mineral, and wilderness resources in the West of the country. The contributors examine policy decisions within the context of political, economic and demographic forces.

As the Democratic congressman from Colorado's Fourth District from 1949 to 1973, Wayne Aspinall was an advocate of natural resource development in general and reclamation projects in particular. A political loner, considered crusty and abrasive, he carved a national reputation by helping secure the passage of key water legislation—in the process clashing with colleagues and environmentalists alike. Fiercely protective of western Colorado's water supply, Aspinall sought to secure prosperity for his district by protecting its share of Colorado River water through federal reclamation projects, and he made this goal the centerpiece of his congressional career. He became chair of the House Interior Committee in 1959 and ruled it with an iron fist for more than a dozen years—a role that placed him in a key position to shape the nation's natural resource legislation at a time when the growing environmental movement was calling for a sharp change in policy. This full-length study of Aspinall's importance to reclamation in the West clarifies his role in influencing western water policy. By focusing on Aspinall's congressional career, Stephen Sturgeon provides a detailed account of the political machinations and personal foibles that shaped Aspinall's efforts to implement water reclamation legislation in support of Colorado's Western Slope, along the way shedding new light on familiar water controversies. Sturgeon meticulously traces the influences on Aspinall's thinking and the arc of his career, examining the congressman's involvement in the Colorado River Storage Project bill and his clash with conservationists over the proposed Echo Park Dam; recounting the fight over the Frying Pan-Arkansas Project and his decision to support diverting water out of his own district; and exploring the battles over the Central Arizona Project, in which Aspinall fought not only environmentalists but also other members of Congress. Finally he assesses the Aspinall legacy, including the still-disputed Animas-La Plata Project, and shows how his vision of progress shaped the history of western water development. The Politics of Western Water portrays Aspinall in human terms, not as a pork-barrel politician but as a representative who believed he was protecting his constituents' interests. It is an insightful account of the political, financial, and personal variables that affect the course by which water resource legislation is conceived, supported, and implemented—a book that is essential to understanding the history and future of water in the West.

How it is that the United States—the country that cherishes the ideal of private property more than any other in the world—has chosen to set aside nearly one-third of its land area as public lands? Now in a fully revised and updated edition covering the first years of the Trump administration, Randall Wilson considers this intriguing question, tracing the often-forgotten ideas of nature that have shaped the evolution of America’s public land system. The result is a fresh and probing account of the most pressing policy and management challenges facing national parks, forests, rangelands, and wildlife refuges today. The author explores the dramatic story of the origins of the public domain, including the century-long effort to sell off land and the subsequent emergence of a national conservation ideal. Arguing that we cannot fully understand one type of public land without understanding its relation to the rest of the system, he provides in-depth accounts of the different types of public lands. With chapters on national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management lands, and wilderness areas, Wilson examines key turning points and major policy debates for each land type, including recent Trump Administration efforts to roll back environmental protections. He considers debates ranging from national monument designations and bison management to gas and oil drilling, wildfire policy, the bark beetle epidemic, and the future of roadless and wilderness conservation areas. His comprehensive overview offers a chance to rethink our relationship with America’s public lands, including what it says about the way we relate to, and value, nature in the United States.