Contested landscape : the politics of wilderness in Utah and the West

Wilderness means many things to many people across the United States, but in Utah it is only a slight exaggeration to say that it means one thing to almost everybody: political warfare. If the impression conveyed by this multi-authored history of the wilderness debate in Utah is correct, the controversy over how much of the state’s millions of acres of unspoiled public lands should receive wilderness designation from Congress is more of a contest between political ideologies than a debate over the wild character of this vast labyrinth of rugged canyons and soaring sandstone mesas. If the reader is looking for a political history of the long, drawn out, vitriolic battles that have highlighted a 30-year policy war, Contested Landscape is the primer. Fourteen clear, concise chapters expose the political anatomy of the key issues constituting the corpus of opposing political strategies regarding the designation of wilderness areas in Utah’s expansive public lands administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Nowhere else could a curious reader find intelligible explanations of the tactics that have generated the convoluted rhetoric and resulting animosity that define this wilderness debate. The authors address arcane issues such as the demographics of public opinion-shaping; “hard” vs. “soft” release language that would open to development lands not designated as wilderness; the relationship between mining claims and wilderness study areas; facts and figures regarding livestock grazing; and the complexities introduced by the interspersion of BLM and State Trust Lands. Each chapter lays out one aspect of the debate in crisp prose, and the relevant statutes and legal precedents are clearly referenced. The book also explains how opposing political interests have exploited the intricacies of federal wilderness policy to draft a succession of opposing wilderness bills, none of which has yet garnered enough support to break the political logjam in Washington or Salt Lake City. Contested Landscape is a great book for wilderness scholars and newcomers to the Utah political scene. It should help battle-weary wilderness advocates and their opponents avoid the repetition of past failures and smooth the path to more productive debate in the future. If the reader is looking for information on the contested landscapes themselves, however, she will be largely disappointed. This political history of Utah wilderness, it turns out, has little to do with the wilderness itself. Spare mention is given to specific places, although interesting analyses of roads and mining issues are more grounded. The lack of specifics about the wilderness study areas themselves suggests that the wilderness debate no longer focuses on the evaluation of lands and recommendations for their disposition. Instead, wilderness designation has become a political contest that pits local communities against conservation groups and states rights advocates against federal land managers. The authors address issues emanating from the differing ways that humans experience, value, and conceive of wilderness. However the cultural divide separating interest groups could be discussed in more detail, especially because Utah’s unique history of European settlement has much to do with the seemingly irreconcilable differences in the wilderness debate. The tightly knit rural communities of southern Utah, mostly founded by persecuted Mormon pioneers, developed resource-based economies that nourish perspectives on land use and the purpose of nature that are defiantly different from the preservationist views of many recent settlers and observers from outside the region. Does the primary value of wild places still lie in the natural resources that are extracted to support human communities, or does greater value lie in their very wildness and the outstanding opportunities for solitude and recreation? This question, the authors suggest, is pivotal in the debate about wilderness designation, per se, but the perennial issue of state vs. federal authority in setting policy for public land management lurks menacingly in the shadows. Strangely absent from Contested Landscapes is a detailed analysis of national perspectives, political strategies, and public opinion, despite the fact that the political impasse has turned Utah wilderness into a national issue. The authors do address many of the national political issues resulting from the legislative action, such as Congressional wrangling over guidelines for the reviews of roadless areas undertaken in the 1980’s, but their analyses might have benefited from a more detailed look at the role of national organizations that are weighing in with increasing political leverage. Contemporary Human Ecology