Lands cape E cology 18: 207217, 2003.

207
Book reviews
Integrated Public Lands Management: A Coarse-
Scale Economic Perspective
Integrated Public Lands Management: Principles and
Applications to National Forests, Parks, Wildlife
Refuges, and BLM Lands. Second edition. 2002. John
Loomis. 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 States
is federally owned. Of this public land, 94% is man-
aged by four federal agencies. Understanding how
each of these diverse entities manages the land under
its jurisdiction requires knowledge of the operational
mandates of each agency, the public demands on their
lands, and an understanding of the methods used to
weigh, balance, and integrate diverse and often con-
icting interests and objectives. This comprehensive
volume provides the historical background, economic
theory, and a plethora of case studies for understand-
ing the relatively high-level management and planning
processes of the Forest Service (FS), National Park
Service (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 produced
the four agencies. These histories provide the reader
with an understanding of the agencies diverse objec-
tives. The FS is charged with providing recreation,
timber, range, sh, watershed services, and wildlife.
The NPS has the goal of preserving national treasures
as well as providing recreational opportunities. The
BLM was mandated to safeguard multiple use, si-
multaneously balancing resource extraction (predomi-
nantly grazing and mining) and recreation. Finally, the
FWS has evolved a broad range of duties centered on
managing and conserving sh and wildlife. Determin-
ing howto allocate resources to these diverse and often
conicting objectives is the subject of the remainder of
the book.
The heart of the book centers on the basic eco-
nomic tools for natural resource management and
decision-making. Chapters four through eight dis-
cuss several techniques for integrating multiple ob-
jectives into management decision frameworks. Using
copious examples, Loomis explains relatively sim-
ple matrix-based approaches, weighting and ranking
of evaluation criteria, and also provides a full ex-
planation of benet-cost analyses and input-output
models. These chapters include discussions of re-
gional economic analysis, methods for the valuation of
non-market resources, and linear programming mod-
els. The economic models are presented in full detail
with comprehensive explanations t for a neophyte.
Although this detail may be tedious for those with
some background in the subject, those with a more
strictly ecological training and graduate students new
to the eld will likely welcome the straightforward
introduction to resource economics.
The uniqueness of the book is brought out in
chapters nine through twelve which contain in-depth
discussions of the decision-making processes of each
of the four federal agencies. These chapters provide
detailed examples of national forest plan revisions,
national park management allocations, comprehensive
conservation planning procedures of the USFWS, and
resource management plans of the BLM. The book
reveals the degree to which the different economic
decision-making techniques discussed in the previous
chapters are integrated into the planning processes of
each of the agencies. While the Forest Service takes
advantage of the more involved benet-cost analy-
sis in many of its forest plans, the BLM and the
FWS have tended to use less rigorous methods in
choosing among management options. Loomis cri-
tiques the different approaches of the agencies and
provides insightful criticisms and useful suggestions
for improvement.
One of the main reasons for developing a second
edition (the rst was published in 1993) was to provide
a discussion of ecosystem planning and management.
208
The successful management of large natural systems
requires planning to be based on ecological boundaries
and hence often must involve multiple federal agencies
and local managers. The new edition concludes with
a discussion of multi-agency ecosystem planning and
management that describes the successes and failures
of the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, the Interior
Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, and
planning for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The
second edition also updates the current state of man-
agement in the FS and the FWS through the inclusion
of more recent laws (i.e., the Wildlife Refuge System
Improvement Act of 1997 and the new regulations for
the revision of national forest plans). In this respect
the book is quite current, discussing the implications
of the Clinton administrations actions and forecasting
the actions of the subsequent Bush administration. The
newedition claims to provide an expanded coverage of
the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for
public lands management, but the book makes only
brief reference to the use of GIS with the exception
of a rather supercial ve-page discussion in chapter
ve.
Although the book provides a comprehensive dis-
cussion of public land management from an economic
perspective, one is left to look elsewhere for detailed
ecological discussions. Loomis provides a limited de-
scription of some of the models used in wildlife man-
agement (e.g., habitat suitability indices) and touches
on the importance of a landscape perspective in deal-
ing with the multi-scale nature of ecological processes
in the nal chapter about ecosystem planning. These
passages, however, are the exception in a book de-
signed to address the economic aspects of public lands
management. More specically, Loomis addresses the
coarse-scale question of what should be managed for,
not the ner scale question of howindividual resources
should be managed. To that end, readers looking for an
ecological discussion of forest, wildlife, or rangeland
management will be largely disappointed.
The books primary targeted audience consists of
upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Al-
though the book is an excellent text for a resource
economics course on public lands management, more
general courses will want to sample from the text
and nd other sources for more in-depth discussions
of ecological issues. The book is well written and
provides 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 resource
economics for those interested in engaging in inter-
disciplinary research and a thorough look into the
sometimes 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 Agency
Corvallis, Oregon 97333, USA
email: 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 Pinchot
and his era. As an employee of the USDA(Department
of Agriculture) Forest Service, I am always interested
to learn about the early history of the agency and its
rst Chief. In fact, this volume constitutes a valuable
history lesson for those working in landscape ecology
and conservation.
In both Pinchots time and today, natural re-
source specialists have recognized that good science
is needed but also that the greatest impacts on the
land originate in the political arena. According to au-
thor Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot above all else knew
how to get things done politically, though it didnt
hurt that be was born into wealth and privilege. Pin-
chots grandfather was a land and timber baron at a
time when huge sections of the eastern forests in the
United States were being denuded to feed an insatiable
appetite for wood. Such ever-increasing demand was
sparked by a transportation revolution which sawthe
nations network of turnpikes, canals, and railroads
expand rapidly from 1830 to 1860. Even during this
remarkable expansion, the general consensus among
men like Pinchots grandfather was that the supply of
wood was inexhaustible. In the late 19
th
and begin-
ning of the 20
th
centuries, Gifford Pinchot, perhaps