In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Enterprise & Society 4.2 (2003) 379-381



[Access article in PDF]
Karen R. Merrill. Public Lands and Political Meanings: Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xix + 274 pp. ISBN 0-520-22862-6, $50.00.

Karen Merrill's Public Lands and Political Meanings contributes a fresh dimension to a longstanding twentieth-century political debate: [End Page 379] who has what rights to use America's western public lands? Her book offers a subtle and engaging reinterpretation of the issues surrounding this question by tracing the evolution of political fortunes for western grazing interests. She demonstrates that the heart of the public lands conflict is cultural; different interests have come to understand the meaning of property in the West in irreconcilably different ways.

Merrill argues against a prevailing interpretation among public land historians who locate the origins of the contemporary public lands controversy in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. She argues instead that we must shift our gaze into the realm of cultural ideas, where understanding and action prevail, and return to the late nineteenth century, when these ideas began to take shape. "If we look beyond the technical fundamentals of public land law and expand our understanding of property to mean not simply what the courts define as legal truths, but also how interpretations of property weave their way into political discourse," Merrill writes, "we find claims in almost every nook and cranny of the debates" (p. 4).

The livestock industry's claim on public lands began when grazing permits were created for the forest reserves, and institutionalized long-term permits under the Taylor Grazing Act bolstered their claims. "[I]n setting up permanent management of public grazing lands," Merrill concludes, "the federal government brought land managers and ranchers together in a political relationship fully defined by the structures and meanings of public property" (p. 4). By leasing land and connecting those leases to the private property holdings of western ranchers, the federal government had suddenly bundled ranchers' rights and interests into the western public rangeland. Whether or not these claims would stand in up in court, Merrill suggests, is clearly not the only issue. That they have political currency and have moved political power in their favor suggests the existing force of these rights.

She argues that the public lands controversy has been "so profoundly impossible to resolve and so cyclically volatile" (p. 3) because at its heart lies a "genuine political disagreement with federal policymakers" (p. 4), a disagreement over the meaning of property. This fact has been missed in previous studies of the public land because of the prevailing (and mistaken) assumption that property is a thing. Merrill reminds us that property is not a thing; it is not the land itself but an "an enforceable claim" attached to that land (p. 5), a set of rights used to limit the activities of other individuals and institutions.

A tenuous alliance between rancher interests and federal managers began to break down as economic depression swept the overstocked [End Page 380] western range in the 1920s. The Forest Service and conservationists sought ways to manage the crisis by bringing public lands into line with the private economy, charging market rates for grazing leases and limiting herd sizes and allotments. Livestock interests countered that grazing land represented a core property right for them and belonged in the hands of the western states: local use should mean control. By the time the Taylor Act was signed into law in 1934, two divergent notions of property in public land existed in the West: one in which the federal government held strict private property rights and a full scope of control over the range land, and another that saw western private property inextricably wrapped up in the public lands.

Merrill seems to suggest that ranchers based their interpretation of property in experience, whereas the federal government and environmentalists used a more problematic private property metaphor. She concedes that environmentalists have added new values to the policy-making process but worries that their engagement with...

pdf

Share