Did changes in western federal land management policies improve salmonid habitat in streams on public lands within the Interior Columbia River Basin?

“Recreation” connotes revitalization, the re-creation of spirit. In an increasingly urbanized culture, people recreate in natural settings to lift their spirits and revitalize their outlook and motivation. Public lands in the western United States, which embrace much of the nation’s remaining natural and wild areas, are especially attractive—and most are open for recreation. We authors certainly have found solace from camping, hiking, climbing, and skiing in backcountry areas. But latetwentieth- century American affluence has created a massive and unprecedented invasion of these lands, and particularly an invasion of motorized recreation. All human uses of natural areas can, and generally do, degrade soils, kill plants, and increase erosion rates, with resultant water pollution and ecosystem damage. In small numbers, and spread out widely, recreational disturbances can be minor, but millions of people regularly play on western public lands in mass gatherings that have large cumulative impacts. More now drive vehicles across forested or desert areas than pursue the less-damaging activities of hiking and small-group camping. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (USFS) oversee the largest amount of western land available for recreation. By law, the agencies must manage public lands for multiple uses and “sustained yield.” Instead, federal land-management agencies are partitioning them to separate incompatible pursuits, including many that consume land. For example, as logging, mining, and grazing pressures ease, recreational pressures are exploding in Colorado’s White River National Forest, a short 50 miles west of Denver on Interstate Highway 70. Along with Denver’s increasing population, snowmobile registrations jumped 70% in Colorado since 1985. Off-road vehicles (ORVs) are everywhere, and mountain bike use has jumped more than 200%. Between 1990 and 2004, all ORV registrations in Colorado increased more than 650%. Ski facilities also burgeoned, along with hiker and equestrian demands for greater backcountry access. The USFS’s efforts to bring the conflicting uses under control is losing ground rapidly.

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The Productivity of Privatization

Privatizing Public Lands ◽

10.1093/oso/9780195089721.003.0009 ◽

1995 ◽

Author(s):

Scott Lehmann

Keyword(s):

Land Management ◽

Public Lands ◽

P Value ◽

P Values ◽

Indirect Approach ◽

Federal Land ◽

Federal Land Management

If we agree that resources should be employed as efficiently as possible, then the case for privatizing public lands can be reduced to two issues: (1) Would privatization make resources more productive? (2) If so, is it worth the trouble? None of the improvement standards that give definite content to (1) appear to advance the argument for it. Judged by the Pareto standard, it’s clearly false: someone is going to prefer what federal land management delivers. Understood in terms of one of the net-gain standards, (1) may be true, but these standards are so hard to apply that we’re going to have trouble justifying a belief that it is. They are too closely tied to facts about individuals (or what we hope are facts) that are inaccessible to the analyst. So we must either find a way to apply them indirectly or develop some other standard. The indirect approach involves seeking to correlate productivity with some measurable feature of allocation systems. Were such a feature P to be identified, we could determine whether II was more productive than I simply by comparing their P-values. Unfortunately, if there’s something about an improvement standard that makes it hard to decide whether II is productively superior to I, then it’s also going to be hard to establish that systems with higher P-values are more productive, at least for any measure P we can easily ascribe to them. Now we could propose replacing the problematic standard with whatever index is developed: “II uses resources more productively than I” just means that II has a higher P-value than I. The problem here is arguing that systems with higher P-values direct resources to uses that better satisfy the desires of consumers. The net-gain standards derive from analyses of this notion. If we abandon them because they are difficult to apply, we may at the same time break the connection between greater productivity and better satisfying desires. Some of the arguments of privatization advocates can, I think, be construed as appealing indirectly to net-gain standards or directly to other notions of productivity.

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