"In Defense of Public Lands is a wide-ranging and macro-focused attempt to refute the ideas behind the intellectual and political movements to privatize public land resources in the United States"--

"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--

Throughout American history, “public lands” have been the subject of controversy, from homesteaders settling the American west to ranchers who use the open range to promote free enterprise, to wilderness activists who see these lands as wild places. This book shows how these controversies intersect with critical issues of American history.

"Subsidized liquidation of old-growth forests. Grazing rights leased at below-market rates. Mineral resources extracted with trifling royalty payments, or none at all. Water developments built with interest-free loans." "These and other actions serve private interests extremely well but inflict massive costs on society at large. They are but the most visible signs of the fundamental flaws in the current system of federal lands management. In Plundered Promise, leading resource management scholar Richard W. Behan presents a thought-provoking history and analysis of public lands management in the United States, as he describes how we arrived at the current situation and examines what we can do to rectify it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The inside story of the drug cartels on our public lands—and the game wardens taking them on.