John D. Leshy - Our Common Ground: A History of Americas Public Lands

PREFACE

This is a political history of the more than 600 million acres of land that the American people now collectively own and manage through their national government. Nearly all of it is administered by four agencies. The least known of these, the Bureau of Land Management, looks after the most, about 256 million acres. The other three are the U.S. Forest Service (193 million acres), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (91 million), and the best known, the National Park Service (78 million). This book does not deal with the much smaller amounts of land managed by the military or by niche agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Two things about these lands stand out. One is simply how extensive they are, covering about 30 percent of the nations land surface. This is especially noteworthy considering that American culture has long extolled private property and regarded governmentparticularly the national governmentwith considerable wariness. The second is that even though some of these lands have been subject to mining, logging, and other industrial activities, and a significant portion are grazed by domesticated livestock, today most primarily serve values of recreation, inspiration, environmental conservation, science, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

This book aims to explain how this came about. All of the public lands share a political history, one that is deeply rooted in the history of the nation and the events that have shaped our culture and the structure and operation of our government. There is a huge literature on the public lands, but nearly all of it tends to focus on particular categories, such as national parks or national forests, or on particular historical episodes or eras, or on particular activities, such as logging or mining. This volume, by contrast, considers the entire history of these lands as a single American institution.

I have had the great fortune to spend much of my professional career on matters involving public lands. For a dozen years I served in the U.S. Department of the Interior (in two different administrations) and on the staff of the Natural Resources Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. I have taught and written on public land issues for decades in legal academia. I have litigated and advocated on public land questions for nonprofit groups. All of these experiences have deeply informed my approach here.

The narrative proceeds chronologically in eight parts, from the American Revolution down to the modern era. Within those parts, chapters are divided by subject matter. Although every tract of public land has a political story behind it, the focus here is on the more important decisions, mostly made by Congress and officials in the executive branch, plus some from the courts, that have produced todays public lands.

This book does not give much attention to the actions and decisions by which the U.S. government first acquired these and other lands from foreign governments and from Native Americans. Nor does it deal in detail with Congresss decisions to transfer ownership of many lands to states and private interests.

After the nation secured its independence from Great Britain, an often repeated sequence of events led to Native Americans losing title to nearly all of their lands. It usually began when indigenous peoples were dispossessed through chicanery, duress, and sometimes violence by an evolving cast of charactersspeculators, squatters, miners, and other developersoften backed by the U.S. military. The government then acquired formal title to the lands from Native nations through arrangements that, while providing Natives some compensation, would never make up for the injustices that were perpetrated or the enormity of their losses.