Customer Reviews

Keeping Faith with Nature: Ecosystems, Democracy, and America's Public Lands

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In this book, Robert Keiter reviews an extensive literature on ecosystem management in the United States, especially when ecosystems cross management or political boundaries. It's not obvious from the beginning, but he wants to make the case for a new approach to these transboundary problems - - an approach that reduces the role of federal agencies and increases the role of local citizens.

Keiter makes his argument through a series of case studies, too many to list here. The more famous cases include Yellowstone wolf reintroduction, the Northern spotted owl controversy, and wilderness designation in southern Utah. As background material, these cases are very good, and fairly thorough. Keiter's desire to tell the whole story in each case does mean that he gets distracted from the main line of his argument - - he'd rather relate additional details or discuss an important issue for the understanding of the individual case than trim the story down to the essentials. This makes the book longer than it need be for the overall argument, but useful as a reference for the cases. Whether he made the right choice or not depends on what you want out of the book.

The final prat of the book makes an argument for local collaboration as alternative to federal regulation. Keiter gives special attention to the work of the Quincy Library Group in the Sierra Nevada. The Quincy process includes environmentalists, extractive industries, recreationists and others in the community who try to reach a consensus on how to manage local public lands. Keiter uses that case to illuminate the political and legal challenges of ecosystem management in light of the political and legal framework that he discussed in earlier chapters. Though he recognizes its limitations and legal challenges, Keiter views this local collaboration as a more authentic, participatory form of democracy and thus a better way to manage ecosystems on public lands.

Clearly, these local processes can have the advantage of bringing in private land managers, though California's largest landowner (Sierra Pacific Industries) excludes its own lands from the Quincy Library Group discussions. My larger concern is that these local collaborations are only participatory for those who live locally. Those of us who visit public lands at a distance from our homes are excluded from the process. As a result, local economic interests will always receive greater weight in these collaborations than will wilderness designations, endangered species, and other national concerns. Keiter realizes this, but when the chips are down he sides with local participation over national environmental concerns. That's a defensible choice but will leave all of these collaborations open to lawsuits by national groups.

Whether you agree with him or not, Keiter has made a serious case here, and much of the background material is interesting for its own sake. I think it's longer than it needs to be, but the length does make the book a good source for its many case studies.