Skip to main content

Land Use

March 2023
1min read

I have always respected A MERICAN H ERITAGE ’S accuracy and historical information. But the June/July 82 issue has an article with so many inaccuracies and so much blatant political bias that it makes me wonder about the credibility of past issues. I am referring to “Does the West Have a Death Wish?” by Dyan Zaslowsky. She rehashes some articles of the 1940s by Bernard De Voto which were answered and rebutted by other authors at the time. She makes statements about the ecology of the West that can be easily proved inaccurate. She is misinformed about much of the history of this area. And she rails against the American way of life—private ownership of land and property. She seems to think that public ownership of the “public lands states” of the West is historic and best for the preservation of this land.

Robert J. Smith, an environmentalist, has been quoted in the Denver Post as saying, “It is only when we have a system of private property rights that the resource owners not only reap the full gain and benefit from their resources, but also bear the full costs of their misuse.” In other words, when the wicked rancher overgrazes his land, his own cattle will suffer from poor nutrition and his land will not yield the forage for the following season’s herd of livestock. A true rancher is never thinking of the short-term moneymaking gain. To the contrary, the rancher never gets full use of public land that is trammeled and abused by the recreation-oriented public, who produce nothing but litter.


The author replies: While you state at the outset that my article has many inaccuracies, not once do you give an example, so I regret that I can’t address this complaint. As for “blatant political bias,” I think your charge is unfounded since !quote heavily from both sides of the 1940s land squabble. Your own “political bias” seems much more apparent in your letter when you refer to the public land that has been “trammeled and abused by the recreation-oriented public, who produce nothing but litter.” I agree that the pleasure-seeking public has often harmed the land, but the real outdoor recreationist, like the true rancher you mention, knows how to love the land without hurting it.

I think your complaints are based not on my inaccuracies but on your own interpretations. There are many problems with federal ownership and management of land. But I reject outright Robert J. Smith’s contention that private property owners bear the full cost of their misuse. The rancher, logger, or miner need not consider damage beyond his boundaries—damage to larger watersheds, to downstream users of silt-packed rivers. Let me offer a recent quote from Colorado governor Richard Lamm: “When decisions of rate, pace and location of development are ceded to the private sector, public resource goals such as conservation, multiple use and environmental protection are similarly left to the marketplace. It should be obvious that the marketplace cannot advance individual investments and at the same time balance the public interest.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "December 1982"

Authored by: Adam Smith

The most influential economist in the United States talks about prudence, productivity, and the pursuit of liquidity in the light of the past

Authored by: Robert Bendiner

One man measures his life-span against the length of recorded history and finds tidings of comfort and hope

Authored by: Marcus Cunliffe

Conjectural or speculative history can be a silly game, as in “What if the Roman legions had machine guns?” But this historian argues that to enlarge our knowledge and understanding it sometimes makes very good sense to ask …

Authored by: Ross Anderson

He loved women so much he painted wings on them. After years of neglect, he is now being appreciated.

Authored by: James Dill

A soldier remembers the freezing, fearful retreat down the Korean Peninsula after the Chinese armies smashed across the border

Authored by: Judson Mead

Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think

Authored by: Peter Andrews

But was Louis Moreau Gottschalk America’s first musical genius or simply the purveyor of sentimental claptrap?

Authored by: James Mckinley

How the colossus of the “social expression industry” always manages to say it better than you do

Authored by: Joan Paterson Kerr

From Germany and Switzerland, farmer-potters transplanted their skills to Pennsylvania and produced a distinctive ceramic found nowhere else in America

Authored by: Shirley Abbott

How the mistress of the plantation became a slave

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.