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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