Public Lands Politics Interest Group Influence on the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management

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 reconcile often sharply polarized interest group pressures with professional values, as well as with diverse federal statutes and regulations that reflected uneasy compromises among group and professional influences. Although the technical specifics of public lands management differ from those in other fields of natural resources management, the political tensions in public lands policymaking are similar to those in other natural resources fields. Thus, this description of the Forest Service's xiii xiv PREFACE and BLM's handling of those tensions should be of interest to many in the natural resources management community as a whole. This study should also be useful to students of public administrative politics generally.

Foreword by Marion Clawson, Preface, I. INTRODUCTION, 1. The Public Lands and the Clash of Conflicting Interests, II. THE NATIONAL CONTEXT/AGENCY HISTORIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESSES, 2. The Forest Service, 3. The Bureau of Land Management, 4. Multiple-Use Management Procedures, III. GROUP INFLUENCE AND LOCAL PUBLIC LANDS MANAGEMENT, 5. Local Land Management/The Actors, 6. Rangers' and Area Managers' Constituencies, 7. The Nature of Group Influence/Participants' Views, 8. Public Participation, 9. The Style of Local Public Lands Policymaking, 10. Interest Group Influence and Use Allocation Policies, IV. CONCLUSIONS, 11. Conformity, Capture, Multiple Clientelism, and Multiple Use, APPENDIXES, A. Data-Gathering Methodology, B. The Unidimensionality of Public Lands Attitudes, C. The Group Influence Model/Technical Aspects, Index

Culhane, Paul J.