Public Lands Politics

First Published in 2011. During the 1970s, land managers in the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) often must have felt they lived in interesting times. The decade began with the first Earth Day, an event that revealed the increasing strength and militancy of the environmental movement; as it ended, western commercial users of the public lands, disaffected by environmentalist policymaking victories, had launched the "sagebrush rebellion." Those managers were expected to reco