Give and Take

How the Clinton Administration's Public Lands Offensive Transformed the American West

A “Bold Stroke” or “The Mother of All Land Grabs?”

In September 1996, President Clinton stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and declared the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, providing permanent protection for 1.7 million acres in southern Utah.

Was this, as his detractors claimed, a stealth political decision undertaken to shore up his presidency? Or was it, as his supporters claimed, the only way to protect pristine lands from being permanently scarred by resource exploitation? And what of the people on the ground, the Utahns who hated it or hailed it?

Drawn from the pages of High Country News, the American West’s most respected environmental journal, Give and Take is a lively and in-depth insider’s view of the political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that shaped the debate over not only the Grand Staircase-Escalante, but the 19 other national monuments Clinton declared in his final moments in office...and the Bush administration’s attempts to undermine them.

Give and Take is essential reading for anyone interested in the tug-of-war battles over the nation’s most pristine public lands and in what respected legal historian Charles Wilkinson labels, “the grandest, most electrifying moments in American conservation history.”

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