Idaho Librarian

Reviews

Contested Landscape is an intriguing attempt to bring the Western wilderness debate into clear focus by using the wilderness lands of Utah as its centerpiece. As the editors point out in the introduction, the book grew out of a course of the same name offered at the University of Utah in 1997. Students in the class contribute chapters to the book. A key emphasis is the attempt to find common ground between camps that can generally be defined as “pro-wilderness” and “multiple use advocates.”

The book is broken into sections, with section one providing three essays highlighting facts and laws pertaining to wilderness. Section two focuses on the politics of wilderness, section three on competition for resources (in essence an extension of the politics argument, but with specific examples) and section four looks at the past and future of wilderness.

 Many environmental, political science, and policy analysis themes are encountered, viz., land use versus leaving it alone, need versus value, the issue of opportunity costs to communities trying to survive around lands designated as wilderness, value conflict theory, and the concept that facts seem unwilling to yield to clear and satisfactory interpretation (cattle grazing is bad because of soil compaction but good because trampling breaks soil crusts and covers seeds).

Overall, the text is reasonably informative and ranges widely but the reader must overcome the sense that she is keeping company with a graduate-level political science project and all its attendant earnestness and relative lack of nuance. Furthermore, the editors, though they provide us with the final essay of the book, don’t provide a satisfying summary that might have encapsulated the lessons learned by the students over the course of this admirable project and encompassed the significant tensions that exist in the demographically and economically evolving West.

Contested Landscapes is suitable for academic audiences and anyone interested in the environmental politic debate.