These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands - Hardcover

Zaslowsky, Dyan; Wilderness Society

4.2

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9780805000849: These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805000844 ISBN 13: 9780805000849

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1986

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Over 634 million acres of the United States - nearly a million square miles - are federally owned. These American Lands is both a history and a celebration of that inheritance. First published in 1986, the book was hailed by Wallace Stegner as "the only indispensable narrative history of the public lands." This completely revised and updated edition is an unsurpassed resource for everyone who cares about, visits, or works with public land in the United States. With over 75 pages of new material, the volume covers:

national parks
national forests
national resource lands
wildlife refuges
designated wildernesses
wild and scenic rivers
Alaska lands
national trails

Each chapter outlines the history of the unit of public lands under discussion, clarifies the resource use and policy conflicts that are currently besetting it, and provides a detailed agenda of management, expansion, and preservation goals.

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From the Back Cover:

This authoritative and stirring assessment of our public lands - the first book ever published to give the history and propose the future of each unit of a federal trust that today accounts for approximately one-third of America's landmass - begins with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The national park concept, which the historian Lord Bryce called the best idea to come out of the New World, was the first attempt by a national government to preserve land for future generations. Since then, hundreds of additional parks, monuments, historic sites, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges have been added to a vast system of public lands that also includes national forest and Bureau of Land Management holdings. The preservation of our nation's natural heritage has become a model throughout the world, but the fight to keep public land unspoiled - from the Everglades to Alaskan mountain ranges - is never-ending, as this lively and dramatic history of America reveals. This preservationist idea did not come naturally: the myth of the land's superabundance dominated the thinking of Americans even after the frontier was officially closed one hundred years ago. Frontier greed and carelessness, combined with business and political pressures for local control, continue to threaten our parks, forests, and wilderness lands today. The battles over these lands, especially as their outcomes determine present and future patterns of land use, will continue to define our civilization. These American Lands assesses management policy within each unit and demonstrates why the citizen's vigilance is necessary today if future Americans are to look upon our natural legacy as the crowningachievement of the twentieth century.

From Library Journal:

This collaborative volume is part history and part aggressive advocacy on behalf of conservation of America's federal lands. The history is legislative and administrative, covering a series of congressional acts and the federal managers who tried to administer them. There are separate chapters on the work history and conflicts among such agencies as the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Then, at the end of each chapter, the authors spell out how federal land policy should be changed to assure sound preservation and conservation. The suggestions are judicious and sensible, and the case that such conservation is in our national interest is convincing. A helpful appendix to federal land laws and statistics concludes the work. Recommended for academic and public libraries. James W. Oberly, History Dept., Univ. of WisconsinEau Claire
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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