We have been immersed in another round of what some like to call “public lands theater,” the seemingly endless war over who best to manage or, perhaps even own, the federal land estate of the United States. Last year the Arizona legislature tried to demand almost all the federal lands within its boundaries, even the […]
John Freemuth
Posted inRange
A new vision for public lands
In 2012, the seemingly endless argument over what level of government ought to be the manager over part of the federal land estate flared up again, led by individuals in Utah and Arizona. In Arizona, in March, the state legislature passed a bill that called for federal land agencies to give up title to roughly […]
Posted inRange
A stand against racing in Colorado National Monument
I hold with Wallace Stegner that “national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, the 95-year old park system reflects us at our best rather than our worst.” The purpose of the national parks (and really, it is a system of diverse natural cultural recreational and historic areas) have always […]
Posted inRange
(Re)naming mountains
I having been using Tim Egan’ s book The Big Burn about the fires of 1910 that changed fire policy in the United States in my public land policy class this semester. A key part of his book is about the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, its Chief Gifford Pinchot, and the forest […]
Posted inRange
The role of higher education
Recently, the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote “We should be able to….establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support.” Instead, as former congressman (and now Chairman of the National Endowment on […]
Posted inRange
Community Forestry, or Not?
A new buzzword phrase appears to making the rounds in the natural resource policy world. The phrase is “social license”. I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant, so I looked it up on where else…Google. Here is what I found. Apparently it originally came to mean the unwritten approval that a corporation needed to gain […]
Posted inRange
Does the Forest Service Truly Believe in Collaboration?
Recently, the U.S. Forest Service announced another attempt to revise its planning regulations. While the agency takes aim at making its decision-making more collaborative, at the same time it’s running into conflict from other planning processes at the state level. Many readers are probably familiar with the Forest Service’s saga of revision, as the agency […]
Posted inRange
All Science is Political
Earlier this month, I was privileged to be part of a keynote panel at the 10th Biennial Conference for research on the Colorado Plateau. I chose, in part, to talk about the relationship of science and public policy making, because I had just finished writing an essay on that topic for the soon-to-be-published science assessment […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people push the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, now […]
Posted inWotr
Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people start pushing the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, […]