It is, perhaps, not well known that Indian people own about one-third of the country's western coal and uranium resources, as well as vast quantities of oil and natural gas. In the early 1960s, lurid news accounts about the Black Mesa strip mine in Arizona and the manipulation of the Navajos and Hopis shocked the American public, Indian and non-Indian alike. The mine became a symbol of the exploitation of Indian people and Indian resources to satisfy the nation's energy demands. In this book, Marjane Ambler explores the strides that both tribes and individual Indian mineral owners have made...

If the Park Service can't--or won't--protect our national parks, who will?

It's high time we figure that out, notes John Freemuth.

Saddled from the beginning with a contradictory mandate--to promote recreational use of parks yet preserve them for future generations--the Park Service has always walked an administrative tightrope. But within the last few years a new kind of threat has appeared, and the Park Service finds itself in an even more precarious position, its effectiveness impaired.

Increasingly national parks have come under environmental attack from sources outside the...

With the stroke of a pen, Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Without his quick action, commercial developers, already coveting this national treasure, would have invaded the canyon's floor. Not until eleven years later did Congress make it a national park, an act that provided funds for development and preservation unavailable to national monuments.

According to Hal Rothman, the designation of national monument--decided at the discretion of the president--was the saving grace for many natural and archaeologically significant sites as debates on national...

"Got the fire under control. My knees have scabbed over and feel pretty good today, but my hands are in a hell of a shape. Damned if I'll ever fight fire with my bare hands again."

Typical of turn-of-the-century forest rangers in the Inland Northwest--northern Idaho, western Montana, and eastern Washington--this diarist faced fire and other tribulations far from civilization, often alone on foot or horseback, with little equipment and no means of communication.

In this engaging collection, Hal Rothman has selected and provided context for the best and most informative letters written...

Popular writers and historians alike have perpetuated the powerful myth of the rugged-individualist single-handedly transforming the American West. In reality, William Robbins counters, it was the Guggenheims and Goulds, the Harrimans and Hearsts, and the Morgans and Mellons who masterminded what the West was to become. Remove the romance, he shows, and a darker West emerges--a colonial-like region where "industrial statesmen," aided by eastern U.S. and European capital, manipulated investments in pursuit of private gain while controlling wage-earning cowboys and miners.

Robbins argues...

In 1979 the Nevada state legislature passed a bill providing for state control of certain lands within the state boundaries under the administration of the Bureau of Land Management. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming immediately followed suit. Public land users reacted swiftly and the Sagebrush Rebellion was on.

Westerners, driven by the sheer size of the federal estate (99 percent of BLM lands are located in twelve western states) and angered by what they perceived as undue influence by the environmental movement on federal policies, sought to protect and control the resource and...

Endangered ecosystem or renewable resource? How we feel about forests has to do with more than trees.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the history of forestry in the United States, exploring the impact of the discipline on natural and human landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Through important articles that have helped define the field, it assesses the development of the forestry profession and the U.S. Forest Service, analyzes the political and scientific controversies that have marked forestry's evolution, and discloses the transformations in America's...

Before the federal constitution was written, the Confederate Congress established a policy providing land grants for local and state governments to support public schools. Since 1802, when Ohio joined the Union, every new state has benefited from that policy. Yet today, despite the fact that states still hold 132 million acres in trust, very little is known about the management and use of these lands.

Compiling information from the twenty-two states that still own such trust lands, the authors provide a rare look at public land management from a state rather than federal government...

The West is popularly perceived as America's last outpost of unfettered opportunity, but twentieth-century corporate tourism has transformed it into America's "land of opportunism." From Sun Valley to Santa Fe, towns throughout the West have been turned over to outsiders--and not just to those who visit and move on, but to those who stay and control.

Although tourism has been a blessing for many, bringing economic and cultural prosperity to communities without obvious means of support or allowing towns on the brink of extinction to renew themselves; the costs on more intangible levels may...

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, a conservation trust helped stabilize and regenerate the damaged area. When bird habitats along the Platte River were threatened by Grayrocks Dam, a similar trust came to their rescue. And if a family wants to protect its land for future generations, establishing a trust may be the best solution.

For more than a century, bequests of land and funds for environmental protection have been common, but in recent decades the trusts used to address conservation issues and resolve environmental disputes have diversified and grown significantly. This book...