Struggle Over Utah’s San Rafael Swell: Wilderness, National Conservation Areas, and National Monuments

Amazon.com Price: $29.95 (as of 12/04/2019 09:29 PST- Details)

Description

The vast public lands of the American West are being transformed Nowadays, not geologically but conceptually. A century ago, visitors to western public lands were likely to be ranchers or miners. Nowadays, the lands are popular destinations for campers, hikers, rock climbers, river runners, artists, and off-road-vehicle enthusiasts. These new visitors have proved to be a challenge for managers of public lands, in particular the federal Bureau of Land Management. Most likely no area has been more suffering from changing users and shifting policies than the San Rafael Swell, 1,000,000-acre expanse in southeastern Utah. In this insightful and useful book, Jeffrey Durrant follows the trail of decisions and events that have had—and continue to have—a transformative have an effect on on this ancient land.

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.

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