The Nation's Largest Landlord:The Bureau of Land Management in the American West, and: The Governance of Western Public Lands: Mapping Its Present and Future (review)

What is public land? If you wanted a definition of this slippery and much-used term, you could do worse than consult two recent books on the subject, James Skillen's The Nation's Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West and Martin Nie's The Governance of Western Public Lands: Mapping Its Present and Future. The books share a focus on public lands, plus a careful look at the quagmire of management and decision making in the American West, where most public lands lie.

More public land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management than by any other agency. Skillen's The Nation's Largest Landlord emphasizes the BLM's difference from the Forest Service: he includes an appendix showing the two agencies' "developmental differences," even though, as he says, the two "have almost identical missions" based on the National Forest Management Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, both of 1976 (213). Ultimately, however, the BLM is seen as the Forest Service's poor cousin.

Skillen makes reference to public land in a number of different ways, and not just through the lens of the BLM proper. He mentions the Public Lands Foundation, composed primarily of retired BLM managers (178-79). The foundation's website states that its mission is to advocate for "the management, protection, development and enhancements of the National System of Public Lands, which is managed by the BLM, U.S. Department of Interior." They are specifically concerned with multiple-use management. This makes sense in light of Skillen's book, where he stresses that the BLM's difficulties lie in how different people interpret "multiple use." In 1964, Skillen remarks, Congress stipulated in the Classification and Multiple Use Act that the BLM "should identify lands with multiple-use values including outdoor recreation, wilderness preservation, and preservation of public lands," in addition to grazing and mining (45). Still, navigating those uses is what makes the BLM "born into controversy," as Skillen puts it (14).

Of particular interest is Skillen's distinction between the old BLM and the new BLM. He introduces this topic in chapter 3. The new BLM came into existence during the political upheaval of the 1960s. During that time, BLM leaders "tried to nationalize the public lands," that is to "abstract them" from their former complex meaning in the American West (39). Partly, this was a reaction to criticism the BLM received—it was seen as being held hostage by the livestock industry—compared to the Forest Service. The "new" BLM, under Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, accomplished this by focusing on outdoor recreation, noncommercial uses, and a new conservation philosophy as well as maintaining its earlier ties to mining and livestock. Still, just what constituted multiple use—should it be motivated by economic value?— and whose uses were prioritized continued to haunt the BLM through what Skillen calls the "Environmental Decade," beginning in the 1970s. In 1976, the passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act established that BLM lands are in public ownership and mapped out the multiple-use guidelines.

That managing the BLM has been a steep challenge is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in Charles Stoddard's acceptance speech as the agency's new director in 1963:

I have been extremely reluctant to accept this new appointment. ... I am fully aware that the BLM Directors are, by the nature of the job, the most expendable and vulnerable people in the Department [of Interior], if not the Government—caught as they are between the cross fire of the Hill Committees, the booby traps laid by special interest groups and archaic laws which tie their hands. ... I know...