Responsible Land Use Research Articles

A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. By David Hancocks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xxii + 280 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $35.00

Federal land management agencies in the United States, particularly those responsible for overseeing public forestlands, are under constant vigil by those demanding environmentally responsible land use. Since the early 199os, many agencies have responded to these political demands by brandishing Ecosystem Management -a framework for environmentally friendly forestry. In 1993, for instance, the United States Forest Service, the National Park Service (NPS), and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), pledged to work with each other to protect and restore biological diversity and preserve wildlife species in the Pacific Northwest. These agencies collaborated on land management plans that would cover over 2omillion acres of federally administered forests from Northern California, Oregon, and Washington to Idaho and western Montana.! These federal agencies embraced Ecosystem Management to varying degrees The NPS, which encountered little criticism, has been content to cooperate with the other two agencies in managing endangered and threatened wildlife species, particularly in the western states. The BLM and the Forest Service, on the other hand, faced both public outrage for their logging policies and court rulings that halted timber operations across the Pacific Northwest-their most profitable forests - and they went further in their engagement with Ecosystem Management. Of these two agencies, the Forest Service's Ecosystem Management has been more involved and has drawn far more media attention, though BLM Director Jim Baca pledged to work "diligently to develop an approach to Ecosystem Management on the 270 million acres of public lands ... for which it has stewardship responsibilities."3 The BLM is and has been significantly smaller agency (in terms of budget and workforce), and it has been significantly less influential in national politics than the Forest Service. Its efforts toward Ecosystem Management have involved playing a junior partner to the larger agency in efforts to meet federal law.4 The Forest Service made Ecosystem Management its policy mantel piece, following a decade of severe internal and external conflict that culminated in a political

Mandating Negotiations to Solve the <em>NIMBY</em> Problem: A Creative Regulatory Response

The (not in my backyard) syndrome has long frustrated the efforts of policy makers, land use planners, and developers to site locally undesirable but socially beneficial facilities. This paper discusses and evaluates an innovative generation of regulations that employ negotiation strategies to resolve problems. conflicts arise from projects that typically generate widely dispersed benefits while imposing concentrated costs, such as homeless shelters, prisons, airports, sports stadiums, and waste disposal sites. (1) Despite the social desirability of such projects, they often provoke intense local resistance that harnesses the political process to block construction of the proposed facility. Since the mid-1970s, opposition has been particularly fierce in confronting efforts to site waste disposal facilities. (2) Organized and persistent public opposition has scored consistent victories over attempts to construct facilities that are essential to an industrialized society. Noteworthy illustrations include enduring opposition to develop new landfills to meet the demands of expanding urbanization, an alarming inability to build electric power plants that is partially responsible for recent electricity crises in western states, and the Department of Energy's persistent difficulties in locating a permanent site for high-level radioactive waste. (3) For solid and hazardous waste facilities, the siting problem has become so acute that one policy maker has suggested that the NIMBY syndrome is perhaps better characterized as BANANA--build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. (4) The persistence of disputes represents a failure of the political process. fights are too bitter and divisive for public institutions to deliberate and devise careful legislative and regulatory solutions. Political leaders thus tend to defend the targeted neighborhoods instead of implementing responsible land use policy. To counter this impasse, some states have enacted innovative regulations to help site waste facilities using procedures that bypass the standard political fight. Moving away from traditional siting strategies that relied chiefly on aggressive and combative tactics, (5) these regulations use negotiation strategies to resolve NIBMY problems. Site developers and local community leaders are required to bargain directly with each other. They enter into a structured negotiation process designed to induce agreements that will site regionally needed facilities while addressing local concerns. This paper seeks to understand disputes as a contracting problem where developers and communities struggle to reach an agreement to site a waste facility. It explores the underlying challenges that have motivated policy makers to institute mandated negotiations and examines the early results of their implementation. This approach begins with a simple model and then introduces complexities: the first section characterizes the contracting problem as a simple transaction, and the second identifies the specific contracting difficulties that explain why disputes emerge instead of easy agreements. Regulations that mandate negotiations, discussed in the third section, can then be understood as responses to these particular contracting difficulties, and the final section reviews two case studies to evaluate the preliminary impact of these regulations. The central objective of this paper is to understand how problems emerge and understand the logic that motivates this new generation of siting regulations. Understanding the problem, however, does not necessarily translate into a simple regulatory solution. While this analysis speaks to the efficacy of relying on negotiations as a vehicle to resolve disputes, it also addresses the effectiveness and limitations of employing regulatory solutions. AS A CONTRACTING PROBLEM Underlying a dispute over siting a waste facility is a contracting problem between a developer and a host community. …

The will to conservation: A Burkeian analysis of dust bowl rhetoric and American farming motives

The 1930s Dust Bowl has been accepted as the worst environmental disaster in United States history. Analysis of the rhetoric of agricultural conservationists which focuses on this issue reveals that its potential for promoting environmentally sound land‐use practices was limited. This essay relies on Kenneth Burke's theory of identification and pentadic ratios to identify the hierarchy of motives associated with land use. I argue that the vulnerability of conservation efforts to competing forces was largely a function of that hierarchy and suggests that an action‐oriented perspective would be more conducive to responsible land use.