The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (review)

Although insider histories of the Bureau of Land Management (blm) by Clawson, a former director (1971), and by Muhn and Stuart (1988), former employees, exist, Skillen’s is the first book-length scholarly history of the agency written by an outsider.¹ Theoretical and analytical perspectives from political science, public policy, environmental ethics, regional planning and history—such as Heclo’s concept of issue networks—grace Skillen’s work, reflecting his interdisciplinary training.² For instance, Skillen uses Lowi’s critique of interest-group politics as a basis for evaluating tensions that arose in the 1970s between the blm’s autonomous, bureaucratic approach to planning and calls for democratic, grassroots involvement in policy formation.³

Skillen’s book rests upon traditional archival research. The author conducted careful historical research in the papers of former directors of the blm and in administrative files of the agency housed in the National Archives and at blm facilities in Denver and Phoenix. Unfortunately for researchers, the agency’s history seems to be documented primarily in relatively staid Congressional hearings, press releases, public speeches, and official reports. Apparently, few pieces of interoffice correspondence, minutes of meetings, transcripts of telephone conversations and rough drafts of reports are available. Such records, if they become available, might afford an unvarnished, close-up view of interpersonal dynamics and decision making in the Bureau. Some of Skillen’s richest insights into the personalities of administrators are drawn from interviews with agency personnel. In one such interview, Orren Beaty observes that blm director Karl Landstrom “‘couldn’t disagree with a senator without becoming disagreeable’” (232). Many of these gems enliven the endnotes.

Skillen relates the story of the blm chronologically. Originally, he intended to pursue a single narrative thread throughout the course of the work, but he found the agency’s history to be too diffuse. Instead, he chose to develop a series of interpretive threads. A key one involves the ambiguity of the agency’s mission, which has caused the blm to shift directions repeatedly in response to presidential and Congressional priorities and dispositions. He concludes that “the blm has struggled to articulate the public lands’ national value, to build a national constituency, and to think of itself as a national agency” (193). Other interpretive themes include the tension between public and private property rights, particularly as they relate to grazing rights for ranchers; tension between the federal and state governments about public-lands management; disagreement between Congress and the executive branch about the disposition of public lands; and the impact of environmentalism and environmental ethics upon policy since the 1960s.

Skillen approaches his topic with a barely detectable preference for ecosystem protection and preservation, agency goals that have often been at odds with the agency’s traditional emphasis upon resource extraction. Although he avoids polemics, words like “opportunities” and “victory” that subtly convey judgments hint at his values. For instance, Skillen writes that professionalization of the agency during the 1960s helped to “create opportunities for the blm to evade capture by a single clientele group,” the livestock industry (39). Likewise, he writes in positive terms of the agency’s “symbolic victory” when it raised grazing fees in 1969, and he refers to the Mining Law of 1872 negatively as “archaic” (76, 197). On balance, however, Skillen deftly describes contentious management issues in fair, neutral language.