Description
In detailing political and environmental squabbles over the San Rafael Swell, Durrant illuminates issues that confront land managers, bureaucrats, and elected officials right through the country. He describes struggles between county commissioners and environmental activists, conflicts over water rights, proposals that again and again fail to gain government approval, and political posturings. Caught in the crossfire, and continuously overwhelmed, the Bureau of Land Management has seen its long-time mission—once centered on grazing and mining rights—transmogrify into a new and, to a few, unsettling responsibility for recreation and preservation.
The sandstone crags and twisting valleys of the San Rafael Swell present a formidable landscape, but as this book clearly shows, the political landscape could also be even more daunting, strewn with bureaucratic boulders and embedded with fixed positions on the functions and values of public land.