Lands cape E cology 18: 207–217, 2003. 207

Book reviews

Integrated Public Lands Management: A Coarse-Scale Economic Perspective

Integrated Public Lands Management: Principles andApplications to National Forests, Parks, WildlifeRefuges, and BLM Lands. Second edition. 2002. JohnLoomis. Columbia University Press, New York, USA.544 pp., illus., maps; Hardcover, ISBN: New York: 0-231-12444-9. US$69.50, EUR71.50.

Approximately 30% of the land in the United Statesis federally owned. Of this public land, 94% is man-aged by four federal agencies. Understanding howeach of these diverse entities manages the land underits jurisdiction requires knowledge of the operationalmandates of each agency, the public demands on theirlands, and an understanding of the methods used toweigh, balance, and integrate diverse and often con-flicting interests and objectives. This comprehensivevolume provides the historical background, economictheory, and a plethora of case studies for understand-ing the relatively high-level management and planningprocesses of the Forest Service (FS), National ParkService (NPS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM),and Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Loomis begins with a historical background detail-ing the different legislative genealogies that producedthe four agencies. These histories provide the readerwith an understanding of the agencies’ diverse objec-tives. The FS is charged with providing recreation,timber, range, fish, watershed services, and wildlife.The NPS has the goal of preserving national treasuresas well as providing recreational opportunities. TheBLM was mandated to safeguard “multiple use”, si-multaneously balancing resource extraction (predomi-nantly grazing and mining) and recreation. Finally, theFWS has evolved a broad range of duties centered onmanaging and conserving fish and wildlife. Determin-ing how to allocate resources to these diverse and oftenconflicting objectives is the subject of the remainder ofthe book.

The heart of the book centers on the basic eco-nomic tools for natural resource management anddecision-making. Chapters four through eight dis-cuss several techniques for integrating multiple ob-jectives into management decision frameworks. Usingcopious examples, Loomis explains relatively sim-ple matrix-based approaches, weighting and rankingof evaluation criteria, and also provides a full ex-planation of benefit-cost analyses and input-outputmodels. These chapters include discussions of re-gional economic analysis, methods for the valuation ofnon-market resources, and linear programming mod-els. The economic models are presented in full detailwith comprehensive explanations fit for a neophyte.Although this detail may be tedious for those withsome background in the subject, those with a morestrictly ecological training and graduate students newto the field will likely welcome the straightforwardintroduction to resource economics.

The uniqueness of the book is brought out inchapters nine through twelve which contain in-depthdiscussions of the decision-making processes of eachof the four federal agencies. These chapters providedetailed examples of national forest plan revisions,national park management allocations, comprehensiveconservation planning procedures of the USFWS, andresource management plans of the BLM. The bookreveals the degree to which the different economicdecision-making techniques discussed in the previouschapters are integrated into the planning processes ofeach of the agencies. While the Forest Service takesadvantage of the more involved benefit-cost analy-sis in many of its forest plans, the BLM and theFWS have tended to use less rigorous methods inchoosing among management options. Loomis cri-tiques the different approaches of the agencies andprovides insightful criticisms and useful suggestionsfor improvement.

One of the main reasons for developing a secondedition (the first was published in 1993) was to providea discussion of ecosystem planning and management.

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The successful management of large natural systemsrequires planning to be based on ecological boundariesand hence often must involve multiple federal agenciesand local managers. The new edition concludes witha discussion of multi-agency ecosystem planning andmanagement that describes the successes and failuresof the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, the InteriorColumbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, andplanning for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Thesecond edition also updates the current state of man-agement in the FS and the FWS through the inclusionof more recent laws (i.e., the Wildlife Refuge SystemImprovement Act of 1997 and the new regulations forthe revision of national forest plans). In this respectthe book is quite current, discussing the implicationsof the Clinton administration’s actions and forecastingthe actions of the subsequent Bush administration. Thenew edition claims to provide an expanded coverage ofthe use of geographic information systems (GIS) forpublic lands management, but the book makes onlybrief reference to the use of GIS with the exceptionof a rather superficial five-page discussion in chapterfive.

Although the book provides a comprehensive dis-cussion of public land management from an economicperspective, one is left to look elsewhere for detailedecological discussions. Loomis provides a limited de-scription of some of the models used in wildlife man-agement (e.g., habitat suitability indices) and toucheson the importance of a landscape perspective in deal-ing with the multi-scale nature of ecological processesin the final chapter about ecosystem planning. Thesepassages, however, are the exception in a book de-signed to address the economic aspects of public landsmanagement. More specifically, Loomis addresses thecoarse-scale question of what should be managed for,not the finer scale question of how individual resourcesshould be managed. To that end, readers looking for anecological discussion of forest, wildlife, or rangelandmanagement will be largely disappointed.

The book’s primary targeted audience consists ofupper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Al-though the book is an excellent text for a resourceeconomics course on public lands management, moregeneral courses will want to sample from the textand find other sources for more in-depth discussionsof ecological issues. The book is well written andprovides a solid index and a table of acronyms (a ver-itable godsend in a book revolving around four U.S.government agencies). Although the elementary in-troductions to many topics make it a bit tedious at

times, the book is a good read for ecologists look-ing for an economic perspective on land management.Loomis provides an excellent introduction to resourceeconomics for those interested in engaging in inter-disciplinary research and a thorough look into thesometimes complex, sometimes disturbing, decision-making processes of the agencies managing over 90%of the public land in the United States.

JOSHUA LAWLER

U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyCorvallis, Oregon 97333, USAemail: lawler.joshua@epa.gov

Early forestry and conservation in America

Gifford Pinchot and the making of modern environ-mentalism. 2001. Char Miller. Island Press, Wash-ington DC, USA. 458 pp. 24 cm. Illust. Hardcover,US$28.00, ISBN 1-55963-822-2; Softcover, ISBN 1-55963-823-0.

One might wonder why a biography of Gifford Pinchot(1865-1946) is being reviewed in Landscape Ecology.I admit to having more than a casual interest in Pinchotand his era. As an employee of the USDA (Departmentof Agriculture) Forest Service, I am always interestedto learn about the early history of the agency and itsfirst Chief. In fact, this volume constitutes a valuablehistory lesson for those working in landscape ecologyand conservation.

In both Pinchot’s time and today, natural re-source specialists have recognized that good scienceis needed but also that the greatest impacts on theland originate in the political arena. According to au-thor Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot above all else knewhow to get things done politically, though it didn’thurt that be was born into wealth and privilege. Pin-chot’s grandfather was a land and timber baron at atime when huge sections of the eastern forests in theUnited States were being denuded to feed an insatiableappetite for wood. Such ever-increasing demand wassparked by a “transportation revolution” which saw thenation’s network of turnpikes, canals, and railroadsexpand rapidly from 1830 to 1860. Even during thisremarkable expansion, the general consensus amongmen like Pinchot’s grandfather was that the supply ofwood was inexhaustible. In the late 19th and begin-ning of the 20th centuries, Gifford Pinchot, perhaps