The Nation's Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 3 the Forest Service (let aloneAmerica),it is true enough that the fire did facilitate the passage of this legislation. Still, Egan’s summary of the Weeks Act is incomplete and symptomatic of his failure to reckon fully with the most important consequence of the fire, which far from savingAmerica probably did the country damage over the long run. For a more convincing assessment of the fire’s legacy, serious readers will want to consult Stephen Pyne’s Year of the Fires:The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (Viking, 2001).Pyne,a historian who knows more about fire than anyone else,points out that one of the key provisions of the Weeks Act, ignored by Egan, allowed for the federal government to provide grants to states to promote fire protection .This established a framework for the Forest Service to develop a massive agenda for fire suppression over the next several decades. The problem,as Pyne and other fire historians have made clear, is that excluding fire from forests has made the forests vulnerable to disease and created massive fuel build up, thus enhancing the conditions for conflagrations. Egan is aware of Pyne’s larger argument and attempts to take it into account,quoting Pyne’s conclusion that“the Great Fires of 1910 shaped the American fire landscape more than any other fire in any year throughout the twentieth century” (p. 273). Still, in an effort to preserve a heroic image of Roosevelt and Pinchot, Egan takes pains to separate the Forest Service’s commitment to fire suppression from TR’s and Pinchot’s original vision of conservation. Egan acknowledges that Pinchot “considered fire prevention to be a job of the service” but makes a distinction between “firefighting as an idea” for Pinchot and a “raison d’être,” as it was for others like William Greeley, Chief Forester in the 1920s (p. 270). This distinction is unconvincing. Egan himself notes that in promoting conservation, Pinchot “professed that wildfire was akin to slavery — a blight on the young country but something that could be wiped out by man”and that it was not until the 1930sthatPinchotrethoughtthese views(p.52). In the end, The Big Burn is informative and highly readable, though its narrative appeal comes at the expense of analytical nuance. A story of TR and Pinchot as crusading heroes whose agenda finds redemption through tragedynotonlyhastowritearoundtheevidence ,it also has to ignore a substantial body of scholarship that treats conservation, fire, the Progressive movement, and Roosevelt himself in a far more complicated way than takes place here. Jeffrey Ostler University of Oregon The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West by James R. Skillen University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2009. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 320 pages. $39.95 cloth. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had a complex and turbulent history since its creation in 1946 out of the General Land Office and U.S. Grazing Service. James Skillen’s The Nation’s Largest Landlord is the first comprehensive and analytical history of the BLM.The agency, the largest land manager in the United States, oversees 256 million acres, covering grazing, minerals, timber, wilderness, fish and wildlife, and recreation activities. The BLM had its main roots in the General Land Office, the federal agency that oversaw the dispersal of much of the public domain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Great ambiguity marked the BLM’s early history as the agency attempted to deal with the inherited issues surrounding property rights, federalism, and environmentalism. It had an often conflicting mandate to encourage natural resources developmentwhileprotectingthepublicinterestand encouraging recreation on public lands. To make sense of the BLM’s history, the authorfocuseshisnarrativeontwooverlapping  Reviews questions: what were the evolving purposes and goals of public land administration, and what was the decision-making process for determining those goals and purposes? Skillen divides his study into three main periods. During the first era, 1946 to 1970, the agency was dominated by resource interests bent on controlling the grazing, timber, and mineral development of public lands, while the agency sought to exert professional management based on a U.S. Forest Service model. In the second period...