Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: After the Revolutionary War, the crown lands in the U.S. became the "original public domain," and from that the status of "federal lands" was derived.This is accurate history, but not complete, because it ignores the prior occupancy of the land by Native Americans.Initially by indifference and eventually by force, Native Americans and their land institutions were overridden and displaced.Patricia Limerick has correctly described this not as settlement, but as conquest in her text, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.We have federal lands today because the lands were taken in violence.This much can be said about such regrettable history: we cannot ignore it, and we must not forget it.* "[The Author] ... has spent his adult life immersed in the subject matter of.[public lands], by virtue of his vocational and leisure-time choices.After 6 years of service in Alaska's national forests, he earned a Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and for 12 years taught natural resource policy at the University of Montana.During that time, he served on the faculty committee appointed by Dean Arnold W. Bolle to investigate, at the request of Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, the controversial forest management practices on the Bitterroot National Forest.The committee's work, known quickly and widely as the Bolle Report, was sharply critical of Forest Service practices and was instrumental in stimulating the passage of the National Forest Management Act.Behan left the University of Montana to join the faculty of the School of Forestry at Northern Arizona University, and was appointed Dean of the School several years later.He served on the boards of directors of the Forest History Society, the American Forestry Association, and the Council of Forestry School Executives, traveling frequently to Washington DC and experiencing the maelstrom of influence-politics there.He served as a consultant at various times to the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Soil Conservation Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Congressional Research Service, and published nearly 100 articles and papers in the literature of public land management, economics, and politics . .."Richard W. Behan,
Source: The Mathematics Enthusiast
Author: R. W. Behan
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2037039