Western Public Lands Management

ARSC 7010

Understanding environmental problems; justifying aspirations; administrative procedures; applicable to land use issues, aimed toward the first party participant.


This seminar is designed as a mixture of lectures by the professors, and seminar presentation and discussion by the students. Our goal early on is to give students out best insights and experiences in analyzing public lands management issues, drawing on our different expertise: Riebsame: general history and geography of public lands, the rolse of environmentalism and environmental perception in management of BLM grazing lands and National Parks; Lester: public administration/governance theory, outer continental shelf oil, and coal and mineral lands. The class is focused on what could be called the "governance problem" how do we manage public lands in an era of interest group pluralism, regulatory and agency change, and conceptual and scientific transformation? To make such questions concrete, we focus on three specific issue/problems: (1) Managing Rocky Mountain National Park; (2) California OCS leasing; and (3) BLM rangeland policy reform.