Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management.

• Author: Carlson, Marinn F.

By Robert H. Nelson. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995. Pp. xxiii, 373. $24.95 (pbk.).

I

A new breed of lawmaker has come to town--to Washington, D.C., that is--with guns blazing in the direction of a whole range of government agencies and programs. In Public Lands and Private Rights, Robert H. Nelson could well be supplying "wanted" posters to Speaker Gingrich and his deputies, identifying a villain in one of big government's biggest responsibilities: over 350 million acres of federal land that occupy almost forty-eight percent of eleven Western states (p. 206).

Nelson, an economist and eighteen-year veteran of the Department of the Interior's Office of Policy Analysis, has done much more than supply "dead or alive" warrants spelling out the misdeeds of the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and other federal agencies that administer public lands. His latest book provides an intellectual springboard for anyone looking to rethink, retool, or even dismantle the federal land management system.

That project may well be underway. The 104th Congress, led by Republicans from Western states who head up public land and natural resource committees, is delving into public land management.(1) In 1995, bills were introduced to mandate specific levels of logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest,(2) to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling,(3) and to allow development of twenty million acres of federal land in Utah.(4) Other measures contemplate reforming the distribution of federal lands for mining,(5) overturning federal grazing regulations,(6) and closing some national parks.(7) Nelson's analysis of federal land management's failings provides ammunition for some (though not all) of these assaults on the status quo. It also offers an intellectual compass that appears to be lacking in this legislative flurry.(8)

II

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Nelson is in part telling a story of federal land management gone wrong, of "one bad public land policy after another" (p. 5). He begins the descriptive level of his analysis with the history of how the federal government came to be in the "land business," detailing the often-bumbling evolution of land policy from homesteading-style land disposal to federal stewardship of the remaining parks, forests, and rangelands. In addition to providing a useful primer for readers unfamiliar with the government's role as Western landlord, the opening chapter introduces Nelson's nemesis--the Progressive ideal of scientific management--as the latest fashion in a long history of government "mistakenly applying the lessons of the past to new and different problems in the present" (p. 34).

Nelson goes on to explain how scientific management has failed on public lands. For example, the Forest Service's rhetoric of "scientific forestry" (pp. 48-49) has served as a facade for economically nonsensical (even "obviously silly") timber-harvesting policies (pp. 81-82). BLM efforts to allocate rangeland investments according to complex economic and environmental analyses have routinely cost more than the rangeland itself is worth (pp. 115-16). Comprehensive land-use planning has proven to be a "hollow exercise" (p. 133) that consumes tremendous resources, is swayed by politics, and has little impact on land-use decisions (pp. 133, 143). Nelson sees these bureaucratic misadventures not as failures of implementation, but as symptoms of the emptiness of the scientific management ideal itself--"there is no separation of politics and administration, fact and value, science and religion" possible in the management of public lands (p. 145).

Having made a strong case for how federal...