Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management, Robert H. Nelson, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1995), 364pp.
Understanding environmental problems; identifying stakeholders; administrative procedure; market approaches; approaches to environmental policy-making; applicable to land use issues; written for the first party participant.
Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management is an examination of scientific management as it has, or more accurately has not, been applied to public lands. It offers a history of the changing conceptions of public lands and offers a re-conceptualization for future use.
Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management is required reading for ARSC 5010/7010 as taught by Professors Charles Lester and William Riebsame. This work will be of interest to those who require an understanding of the different management strategies which have been, and are being, used on public lands. It is divided into six sections. The first section addresses the history of public lands from its acquisition and the drive to privatize as much public land as possible to the present view toward preservation and conservation.
The second section examines the alleged failure of scientific management of the National Forest lands. The author asserts both that scientific management has failed to adequately manage the National Forest lands and that scientific management was never applied to those lands. The mutually exclusive nature of these two possibilities and the resultant logical impossibility don't seem sufficiently troubling to the author. Nelson addresses the inadequate economic analysis and illusory planning that resulted from the failed application/non-application of scientific management of forest lands.
Section three examines the contemporary version of the range wars. Nelson addresses: judicial policy-making in the public rangeland movement, the demise of the sagebrush rebellion, and the failure of the privatization movement. Section four examines three possible re-conceptualizations of public lands. The author: proposes a long-term strategy for the public lands, discusses the move from progressivism to interest group liberalism and finally the decentralization of the National Forests.
In section five, Nelson offers options for change which are all market approaches. He proposes: improving market mechanisms on public land and private forests, planning a market for federal coal leasing, and privatization of public lands. Further, Nelson offers instructions for dismantling the Interior Department. He concludes with a discussion of private rights to public lands and how these rights evolved.
Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management offers an examination of, the history of, and theoretical foundations for, the management of public lands. It raises some significant concerns over the (mis)management of public lands.
T. A. O'Lonergan