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In the spring of 2014, rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters engaged in a standoff with Bureau of Land Management agents, and once again, the federal management of public lands was in the national spotlight. The conflict arose because Bundy had not paid required grazing fees and a federal judge ordered the confiscation of his cattle. The ensuing media coverage highlighted information that may have surprised those outside the rural West: the federal government manages 640 million acres of public land, with over 90 percent of it in the West.

In Open Spaces, Open Rebellions, Michael J. Makley offers a succinct and compelling history of the federal government's management of public lands. As Makley reveals, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, debates over how best to balance the use of these lands by the general public, fee-paying ranchers, and resource developers have always been complex and contentious. Indeed, these debates have often been met with demands for privatization or state control, best exemplified by the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1980s and the 2016 occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

This study of the Gamtoos River floodplain in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province traces its transformation from an eighteenth-century natural landscape of thick bush into an agricultural zone now threatened by climate change. The first half of the book explains how missionaries from the London Missionary Society and residents of the Hankey Mission Station introduced irrigation, turning the area into a community of small-scale farmers. Despite early failures, by 1849 they had constructed South Africa’s first major irrigation tunnel and aqueduct. However, conflicts between the missionaries and residents led to the loss of communal lands to privatization, which ultimately impoverished the local farmers. The second half explores efforts to develop the valley for large-scale agriculture, addressing challenges like drought, flash floods, and saline water. By the mid-twentieth century, Afrikaners dominated the area, benefiting from the construction in 1970 of the Kouga Dam, which provided fresh water for the floodplain. This led to the rise of a wealthy white farming community, sustained by apartheid policies and labor from the “Coloured” and African populations. In the early twenty-first century, however, this prosperity has become threatened by severe droughts linked to global climate change. In view of these historical transformations, the Gamtoos River floodplain exemplifies the complex interplay between human ambition, environmental challenges, and sociopolitical forces.

Oregon Plans provides a rich, detailed, and nuanced analysis of the origins and early evolution of Oregon’s nationally renowned land use planning program.

 

Drawing primarily on archival sources, Sy Adler describes the passage of key state laws that set the program into motion by establishing the agency charged with implementing those laws, adopting the land-use planning goals that are the heart of the Oregon system, and monitoring and enforcing the implementation of those goals through a unique citizen organization.