BiblioVault - Books about Davis, Steven

In Defense of Public Lands

The Case against Privatization and Transfer

Steven Davis

Temple University Press, 2018

Debates continue to rage over the merits or flaws of public land and whether or not it should be privatized—or at least, radically reconfigured in some way. In Defense of Public Lands offers a comprehensive refutation of the market-oriented arguments. Steven Davis passionately advocates that public land ought to remain firmly in the public’s hands. He reviews empirical data and theoretical arguments from biological, economic, and political perspectives in order to build a case for why our public lands are an invaluable and irreplaceable asset for the American people.

In Defense of Public Lands briefly lays out the history and characteristics of public lands at the local, state, and federal levels while examining the numerous policy prescriptions for their privatization or, in the case of federal lands, transfer. He considers the dimensions of environmental health; markets and valuation of public land, the tensions between collective values and individual preferences, the nature and performance of bureaucratic management, and the legitimacy of interest groups and community decision-making. Offering a fair, good faith overview of the privatizers’ best arguments before refuting them, this timely book contemplates both the immediate and long-term future of our public lands.

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Linguistics, Philosophy, and Montague Grammar

Edited by Steven Davis and Marianne Mithun

University of Texas Press, 1979

This volume presents significant developments in the field of Montague Grammar and outlines its past and future contributions to philosophy and linguistics. The contents are as follows:

Introduction by Steven Davis and Marianne Mithun

Emmon Bach, "Montague Grammar and Classical Transformational Grammar"

Barbara H. Partee, "Constraining Transformational Montague Grammar: A Framework and a Fragment"

James D. McCawley, "Helpful Hints to the Ordinary Working Montague Grammarian"

Terence Parsons, "Type Theory and Ordinary Language"

David R. Dowty, "Dative 'Movement' and Thomason's Extensions of Montague Grammar"

Muffy E. A. Siegel, "Measure Adjectives in Montague Grammar"

Michael Bennett, "Mass Nouns and Mass Terms in Montague Grammar"

Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof, "Infinitives and Context in Montague Grammar"

James Waldo, "A PTQ Semantics for Sortal Incorrectness"

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The Other Public Lands

Preservation, Extraction, and Politics on the Fifty States' Natural Resource Lands

Steven Davis

Temple University Press, 2025

For most Americans, state lands are the most readily accessible type of public land; however, despite their ubiquity, they remain largely terra incognita. The Other Public Lands is a primer on state public lands and the political dynamics that underlie their management. Offering a wide-angle overview, Steven Davis focuses on how states prioritize competing claims related to conservation, resource development, tourism, recreation, and finances.

The Other Public Lands looks at both differences and common patterns in state land management, including the structure of natural resource agencies. Davis examines the privatization and commercialization of state parks, and the tensions between recreation, revenue and the preservation of biodiversity and natural landscapes. He also raises issues about equity, access, appropriate development, and ecological health. Chapters review state forests, state wildlife management areas, and school trust lands. In addition, the roles of interest groups, the courts, and agency culture and behavior are compared and analyzed both between states and the federal government and between states with differing approaches to specific issues.

As there has been a demand to transfer at least some federal lands to the states, The Other Public Lands concludes with an appraisal of whether states could handle this transfer and goes on to suggest ways to ensure adequate access in an era of increased demand.

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