Human beings have always cared about natural resources. In the beginning, natural resources were a concern as food, clothing, and shelter. Early conservation efforts in the United States were aimed at preventing the nation from running out of natural resources, such as game animals that provided food and clothing and timber that provided fuel and shelter. The concern over adequacy of long-term timber supplies was one of the original reasons for establishing the National Forests in 1891. However, conservationists also worried about preservation of unique natural environments, not for their consumptive values but, rather, for their aesthetic and spiritual values....

Although most of the human population lives in urban and suburban areas, urban land uses make up only a small fraction of total land use in most countries, including the United States. Table 2.1 illustrates that urban land uses make up only 2% of the land area in the United States. By comparison, agriculture is a major land use, utilizing 17% of the land area. However, forests and rangelands are the two dominant land types in the United States, representing nearly two-thirds of the U.S. land area. As Table 2.1 illustrates, natural resource management on rangelands and forests (about half...

As the review of the public land laws in Chapter 2 demonstrated, Congress and the President often had very specific reasons for reserving various types of lands in federal ownership. These reasons included protection of unique scenic and historical resources of the United States that might be lost if the lands were developed by the private sector. A common theme for reserving lands for National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, and Wilderness Areas was to protect and provide services of natural resources that would not be adequately supplied by private ownership. To make sense of the economic reasons for continued government ownership...

Determining the desirability of any particular management action requires standards to guide judgments. Analysts often call these evaluation standards, or measures of desirability, criteria. For example, an increase in the number of wild horses on BLM lands may be judged by some to be desirable, whereas others may see it as deleterious. Differences of opinion over natural resource management often stem from differing frames of reference or criteria by which each group judges the action. For ecologists and many wildlife biologists, wild horses are nonnative species that further disrupt the ecological balance of vegetation and soils; hence, increases in wild...

Literally dozens of times each week a field biologist, botanist, hydrologist, or recreational planner must make a decision in which he or she uses a formal or informal model. A field biologist might be required to determine whether the minimum instream flow for trout should be 100 cubic feet per second (cfs) or 150 cfs. A botanist or range conservationist may need to decide which type of plant species would be best for surface mine reclamation.

Historically, these decisions were made using the employee’s best judgment from years of experience. This approach has two limitations, however. First, a new biologist...

Throughout the preceding chapters of this book, we have alluded to the fact that monetary values could be inferred for a variety of the social benefits arising from natural resources. In general, these economic values can be determined from human actions such as market transactions, number of recreational trips taken, housing locations, and so on. The time has come to describe the concepts and techniques used to value the many types of social benefits that arise from natural resources, particularly those found on public lands.

Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is a process of comparing in common units all the gains and...

The need to quantify the change in local income and employment related to public land management actions has been referred to frequently in Chapters 4 (on criteria of public land management) and 6 (on benefit-cost analysis). In terms of Chapter 4, addressing the distributional equity criterion often requires some information on changes in local jobs and income (i.e., wages, rents, and business income). That is, does a particular public land management action affect local economic activity? Is the change in local economic activity relatively small in magnitude compared with the scale of the local economy (i.e., a loss of 100...

In many ways multiple use is as much a philosophy of land management as it is an operational guide to appropriate management activities. The evolution of the concept of multiple use was discussed in Chapter 2. The recognized multiple uses include minerals, outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife (and fish), and wilderness. To continue that discussion, in this chapter we start by analyzing a generic version of the often-quoted definition of multiple use from Section 4(a) of the Multiple Use Sustained yield Act of 1960:

(a) The management of all the various resources so that they are utilized in the...

Having established the basic principles of multiple-use planning in Chapter 8, it is now time to see how they are applied in the management of National Forests. As discussed in Chapter 2, the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and its implementing regulations not only give objectives for planning and management of the National Forests but also specify how such planning and management is to be done. Thus, the NFMA and its initial implementation in Forest Plans and recent Forest Plan revisions will serve as our foundation for discussion in this chapter. First, we review the 1982 planning regulations, because these...

As we saw in Chapter 2, the BLM is the other major federal multiple-use land management agency. The BLM manages 264 million acres, about one and a half times more land than does the Forest Service, and BLM-administered land is by some measures more heterogeneous. Despite this, the BLM receives only about one-third the budget the Forest Service receives. On a per-acre basis, the BLM receives about one-fourth the amount the Forest Service receives for land planning and management. Although the Forest Service administers lands throughout the United States, nearly all the acreage of BLM-administered lands is within the 11...

As discussed in Chapter 2, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has numerous responsibilities as the lead federal wildlife agency. One of its major missions is to manage refuges in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The agency’s planning and management of these refuges is the primary focus of this chapter. As the lead federal wildlife agency, however, the USFWS also is involved in planning and managing fish hatcheries, managing migratory waterfowl under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1913 (as discussed in Chapter 2), developing mitigation plans on numerous development projects the agency evaluates under the Fish and Wildlife...

As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, the National Park Service (NPS) manages a dozen or so different types of lands in the National Park System. These lands range from the National Parks that are the “crown jewels” (e.g., Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Mt. Rainier, Shenandoah, Yellowstone, Yosemite) to National Historic Sites, Battlefields, National Seashores, National Parkways, and several National Recreation Areas. This chapter emphasizes the management of the National Parks and Monuments units and notes differences in management of the other units or categories of lands. As mentioned in Chapter 2, each of these many land...

We now return, in part, to a theme stressed at the beginning of this book. We started in Chapter 1 by discussing the need for integrated resource management on public and private lands. In Chapter 2, we reviewed laws that required public land managers to abandon resource-by-resource plans in favor of one integrated plan that simultaneously considers all the natural resources on their respective lands.

Although these laws place more emphasis on integrated management of the agency’s natural resources, they still are “inward” focusing. That is, they focus only on the lands over which the agency has direct control and...