As part of our Perspectives in Public Space project, we invited the students of the “Parks, Forest, Wildlife” course taught by Greg Gordon, professor of environmental studies at Gonzaga University, to explore the scholarship on public lands. Out of their explorations came this reading list, which focuses on the cultural, political, and legal dimensions of public land management in the United States. Below, you’ll find summaries of research that examines questions of access and use of public lands, the role such lands play in cultural identities, and the benefits (and drawbacks) of federal legislation related to public lands.
As always, linked articles are free to access, read, and download. If you want to learn more about the history of public lands in the US, be sure to check out our interview with John Leshy, emeritus professor of law at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as the rest of the episodes in our podcast Perspectives on Public Space.
Alan Watson, Roian Matt, Katie Knotek, Daniel R. Williams, and Laurie Yung, “Traditional Wisdom: Protecting Relationships with Wilderness as a Cultural Landscape,” Ecology and Society 16, No. 1 (March 2011): 1–14.
Watson et al. examine how wilderness should be understood as a cultural landscape shaped by traditional wisdom and human relationships with the land rather than as a recreational space or an ecological landscape. Drawing on interviews with tribal and nontribal residents on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Watson’s team focuses on multicultural perspectives of Indigenous peoples, highlighting the importance of wilderness as a source of identity, spirituality, and community. They stress that these cultural values must be included and acknowledged in wilderness management policies; ignoring them risks erasing significant Indigenous history and human connection to the land. By integrating traditional Indigenous knowledge with scientific management, wilderness policies can protect the ecological environment sustainably while also honoring cultural relationships and values.
Lincoln R. Larson, Jason W. Whiting, and Gary T. Green, “Young People’s Outdoor Recreation and State Park Use: Perceived Benefits from the Parent/Guardian Perspective,” Children, Youth and Environments 23, no. 3 (2013): 89–118
Larson, Whiting, and Green examine outdoor recreation habits of youth in state parks along with parent and guardian understandings of the benefits of outdoor recreation to children. While it’s well established that spending time outside can directly benefit a child’s social and physical development, less understood is the extent to which parents and guardians intentionally incorporate outdoor recreation into their children’s lives. The research team used surveys to gauge the children’s most common outdoor activities and whether parents understood the benefits of such outdoor recreation. Parents play a large role in youth access to public land and outdoor recreation and ensuring they’re aware of associated benefits including improved mental and physical health and social relationship development is important. Not only does a child’s health improve when parents and guardians have positive perspectives on outdoor recreation, use and appreciation of public lands increase as well.
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Matthew J. Sanders, “Are National Monuments the Right Way to Manage Federal Public Lands?” Natural Resources & Environment 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–7.
Since its inception in 1906, the Antiquities Act has remained controversial, igniting debates over how public land should be managed. The act gives the US president authority to designate historic structures, landmarks, and objects located on federal lands as national monuments. Many presidents have used the act as a means of protecting public lands from mining, logging, grazing, or other forms of exploitation. Because of the lack of requirement for congressional approval or public review, critics argue that the act is unlawful and allows for executive overreach. They also argue that designations often have adverse impacts on local economies and communities due to restrictions on allowable uses. However, supporters insist that the Antiquities Act is within executive powers and provides necessary authority for the president to protect lands in ways other environmental laws cannot. Sanders discusses the long history of the act, the impact of monument designations, and the long-running debate of the act’s scope and legitimacy.
Robert B. Keiter, “The Emerging Law of Outdoor Recreation on the Public Lands,” Environmental Law 51, no. 1 (2021): 89–160.
This article offers a timely and comprehensive exploration of how post-World War II outdoor recreation has reshaped the legal landscape of America’s public lands. Keiter traces the historical rise of recreation as a dominant public land use, highlighting its economic and growing political influence. He examines the fragmented legal frameworks governing recreation across different federal land systems: the national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, BLM lands, and wilderness areas, which reveals how agencies, courts, and presidents have informally constructed a “common law” of recreation in the absence of clear statutory guidance. He further offers recommendations on how to improve existing legal tools for managing modern recreation pressures. This article is valuable for readers interested in the tensions between access and conservation, the evolving role of federal agencies, and the need for more coherent recreation policy during a time of overcrowded trails and competing user groups.
David Scott and Kang Jae Jerry Lee, “People of Color and Their Constraints to National Parks Visitation,” The George Wright Forum 35, no. 1 (2018): 73–82.
While the proportion of ethnic and racial minorities is increasing in the United States, this demographic shift in national park visitation hasn’t followed suit. The long-term survival of the National Park Service (NPS) depends on making parks more welcoming and accessible to everyone. This article identifies key factors that constrain national park visitation among people of color. These include limited access to socioeconomic resources; discrimination and White racial frames; and cultural factors and boundary maintenance (cultural norms, value systems, and socialization practices that make outdoor recreation a less relevant part of one’s identity). Limited access to socioeconomic resources, including discretionary income, safe transportation, and easily found information, mean that people don’t have the ability to act on their leisure preferences, such as visiting national parks (assuming that visiting national parks is desirable to people of color). Visitation may not even be desirable if it isn’t a cultural norm or if someone encounters discrimination—whether explicit and tacit—within the parks. Cultural norms are associated with boundary maintenance which prescribes culturally relevant leisure activities for various social or cultural groups. Addressing these three categories of issues, which discourage ethnic and racial minorities from visiting national parks, can create a more inclusive environment and help the NPS reach its goal of attracting a broader visitorship.
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National Parks Are for Everyone
Carolyn Finney, “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land: People and Public Lands Redux,” The George Wright Forum 27, no. 3 (2010): 247–54.
Exploring how social justice and public lands interact, Finney encourages readers to evaluate their relationships with public lands based on identity, privilege, and representation. She discusses the inequities in access, participation, and belonging that have plagued American public land history. People from marginalized groups may feel unwelcome in outdoor spaces due to stereotypes or lack of representation in the outdoors. Those who get to voice their opinions, make decisions, and feel at peace on public lands have privilege. Race, class, and gender issues are not separate from the environment. She frames this interwoven privilege as needing to “seed a new conversation” to include more people in using public lands. Accessing and preserving nature is not just for a specific class and race, but for everyone. There are people who have loved and cared for land but are not recognized for that dedication. These people could be caretakers who lived on land for many years, but ultimately when land gets sold, they are not recognized for their work, but the owners are praised for their preservation of the land.
Jonathan W. Long and Frank K. Lake, “Escaping social-ecological traps through tribal stewardship on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, United States of America,” Ecology and Society 23, no. 2 (June 2018).
Prior to colonization, North America was tended to and managed by Indigenous communities. For many tribes, much of their ancestral lands are now managed as national forests or other forms of public land. Public lands in the Pacific Northwest have become locked in social-ecological traps—cycles of ecological and cultural degradation reinforced by colonial land management practices. Long and Lake argue that tribal stewardship, grounded in Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and governance, offers a pathway out of these traps. By restoring Indigenous management practices like cultural burning, place-based harvesting, and watershed care, tribal nations can revitalize ecosystems and restore cultural connections to the land. Escaping these traps requires not only ecological interventions like dam removals and species reintroduction but also shifts in power and policy. The future of public lands depends on recognizing tribal sovereignty, embracing collaborative governance, and integrating Indigenous TEK into land management strategies.
Colin B. Talbert, Richard L. Knight, and John E. Mitchell, “Private Ranchlands and Public Land Grazing in the Southern Rocky Mountains: Why the Private Land Matters When We Think about Public Lands Grazing,” Rangelands 29, no. 3, 2007, pp. 5–8.
Talbert, Knight, and Mitchell explore the differences between public and private land in the southern Rocky Mountains, where ranchers depend on access to public land for grazing. They conclude that if such access is reduced through privatization, ranchers and other land users would not only lose these grazing areas, but the natural landscapes would likely be developed. Land development can include housing, infrastructure, or more intensive agricultural use, which can bring lasting cultural, economic, and ecological effects. Talbert and colleagues found that private land, on average, was 600 feet lower in elevation, had shallower slopes, higher soil productivity, greater conservation potential, and denser stream networks in comparison to public lands. These findings suggest that private ranch properties are valuable for conservation efforts, and if public land access for grazing is reduced, an intensification of ranching would result in further environmental degradation. Allowing public land grazing forestalls privatization and development, which fragments ecosystems, restricts wildlife habitats, accelerates loss of biodiversity, and contributes to soil degradation, water scarcity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions through land intensification and resource extraction.
Daniel Pulver, “This Land is Your Land, This Land Is My Land: Allowing Third Party Standing to Address Environmental Harms on the Federal Public Lands,” Ecology Law Quarterly, 39, no. 2, Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resources Law (2012), pp. 507–533.
Pulver analyzes the benefits and challenges of private citizens suing on behalf of the government to protect environmental measures on public lands. He argues that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management aren’t always able to monitor all leases, permits, or use of public lands due to constraints on time and resources, resulting in environmental damage. He examines the legal barriers of third-party standing and argues that authorizing private citizens to sue on behalf of the government would reinforce environmental protections without overloading the courts with meaningless cases. Pulver concludes that courts should allow third-party standing when the public’s environmental interest is systematically underserved and subverted by concentrated interest groups. Failing this, he suggests that Congress should add citizen suit provisions to public land laws.
John W. Ragsdale Jr, “The American Legacy of Public Land Rebellion,” The Urban Lawyer 48, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 599–614.
Ragsdale examines the origins of the Sagebrush Rebellion though case law and then explores the legal arguments used by modern land use rebels. Despite losing multiple cases, Sagebrush rebels continue to pin their legal arguments on the Tenth Amendment and contract law. In addition, Ragsdale dismantles the legal case for reassigning federal lands to state ownership and control. Even if states prove successful in court at transferring lands out of the federal domain, Ragsdale concludes the Property Clause of the US Constitution could still be used to maintain public lands.
Jonathan K. London, “Case Study: American Indian Management of Federal Lands: The Maidu Cultural and Development Group,” in Nontimber Forest Products in the United States, ed. by Eric T. Jones, Rebecca J. McLain, James Weigand (University Press of Kansas, 2021), 327–44.
London focuses on the Maidu Tribe of northeast California. He explores how their culture and history, combined with federal policies and organizations, have led them to take alternative routes to reclaim culturally significant practices and landmarks. Lacking federal recognition, the Maidu tribe lacks access to their traditional land practices, as their ancestral lands were absorbed into the Pulmas and Lassen National Forests. Nevertheless, the tribe has sought cultural revitalization through initiatives such as restoring non-timber forest products and advocating culturally important landmarks using Maidu names. London highlights the challenges that non-federally recognized tribes face in preserving their culture and ancestral lands.
Mark David Spence, “Crown of the Continent, Backbone of the World: The American Wilderness Ideal and Blackfeet Exclusion from Glacier National Park,” Environmental History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 1996), pp. 29-49.
In examining the exclusion of the Blackfeet Tribe from Glacier National Park, Spence illustrates the clash between two very different world views about wilderness and cultural identity. In seeking to preserve the majestic scenery of what would become Glacier, Progressive reformers, such as George Bird Grinnell, convinced the Blackfeet to cede the western portion of their reservation in 1895 but guaranteed the tribe usufruct rights so long as the area remained in “the public lands of the United States.” With the establishment of the national park in 1910, however, the Interior Department concluded that national parks were no longer public lands and thus began a decades long campaign to prevent tribal members from hunting inside the park boundaries and even on their adjacent reservation as the game migrated from the mountains. For the Blackfeet, the eastern half of Glacier has provided caloric, cultural, and spiritual sustenance since time immemorial. For Euro-Americans, Glacier offers a glimpse into an uninhabited wilderness. The resolution of these two very different conceptions of nature remains unresolved in the twenty-first century.
James Morton Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 1 (June 2009): 123–148.
Turner highlights the relationship between the environment and politics in the US beginning with the Wilderness Act of 1964, which initiated a new level of preservation on federal lands. While Nixon’s embrace of environmental issues showed bipartisan support for environmental legislation, the Sagebrush Rebellion, a populist protest in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at restrictive federal policy on natural resource use, illustrates the difficult balance between local economic and environmental interests. By the 1990s, the Sagebrush Rebellion transitioned into the Wise Use movement, emphasizing its opposition to public lands regulations and promoting a states’ rights-based approach. Both movements reflect the complexities of conservation and conservatism, which were often in conflict with federal oversight. Republican strategies in particular were reshaped through the Wise Use movement and similar strategies, highlighting the growing partisanship in environmental politics.
Michael C. Blumm and Olivier Jamin, “The Trump Public Lands Revolution: Redefining the ‘Public’ in Public Land Law,” Environmental Law 48, no. 2 (2018): 311–75.
The first Trump administration dismantled natural resources policies in public land management, including reducing national monuments, removing protections for sage grouse habitat, and supporting fossil fuel-friendly policies. Trump also approved several oil pipelines and rescinded numerous conservation regulations. Congress assisted this campaign by eliminating land-planning regulations, authorizing oil leasing, and threatening to make Trump’s rollbacks permanent by preparing to dilute NEPA. These are the most substantial rollbacks for public land policy in American history. Blumm and Jamin consider Trump’s changes from three perspectives: the attack on national monuments, the demise of BLM planning regulations and revisions of FLPMA, and the leasing of public lands for fossil fuel production. The authors maintain that rolling back these policies is undemocratic because of the lack of public support for the changes. Overall, they argue that Trump’s revolution on public land law and policy is a ploy to fundamentally redefine “the public” in public lands to be more accommodating to fossil fuel companies, and the consequences will be disturbing in terms of costs which will be disproportionately paid by those who cannot yet vote and those who aren’t yet born.
This work was composed by undergraduate students enrolled in a class on public lands called “Parks, Forest, Wildlife.” Most of these students are juniors and seniors majoring in Environmental Studies and Sciences at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. This course combines academic and experiential education, whereby the students undertake excursions to nearby national forests and state parks to conduct service projects such as trail maintenance.
