From Conquest to Conservation: Our Public Lands Legacy

Chris Wood and Jack Williams have similarly spent their careers working to steward public resources, and the authors bring unparalleled insight into the challenges facing public lands and how those challenges can be met.Here, they examine the history of public lands in the United States and consider the most pressing environmental and social problems facing public lands. Also featured are lyrical and heartfelt essays from leading writers, thinkers, and scientists— including Bruce Babbitt, Rick Bass, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Gaylord Nelson—about the importance of public lands and the threats to them, along with original drawings by William Millonig.. Dombeck also directed the Bureau of Land Management from 1994 to 1997 and is the only person ever to have led the two largest land management agencies in the United States. As chief

soooo repetitive! I am very disappointed with this book. The writing is fine. It is clear and accessible to a lay audience. Much of the material in important as well. All that said, the book is largely a failure because it is so repetitive and poorly organized that there is no linearity to the narrative whatsoever. Which, if this was an edited collection, might be expected. But it's written and organized like a monograph. So, largely for that reason, I find the book fairly worthless. Simply put, there is just a ton of much better and better organized material on this same subject. Much of it also on Island Press, even (try Knight and Bates' New Centu

"Drawing upon their experiences as agency insiders, Michael Dombeck, Christopher Wood, and Jack Williams bring not only a wealth of experience and insights to the task, but a refreshing sense of candor and openness about the internal conflicts, competing interests, and contradictions in the federal agencies charged with managing our public lands in From Conquest to Conservation."