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Publication Date: 2001
Publisher: Island
Binding: Hard bound
Topics: Agriculture, Corporate Rule, Democracy: Theory & Practice, Economics, Energy, History: Local to Global, Nature, Toxics, United States, Visioning the Future

Description: For 200 years the federal public lands have been used almost exclusively to generate private wealth through mining, logging, grazing, and water development. Today this means almost exclusively the wealth of huge transnational corporations, since there are no more pick-and-shovel prospectors or local independent sawmills, and not many small, family ranches or irrigated family farms. Furthermore, the resource-extracting corporations are heavily subsidized in their capture of the public wealth, and they leave behind degraded landscapes, waters, and habitats. The astonishing public "asset" of the federal lands has become a substantial public liability with only corporate beneficiaries. Clearly the logging, mining, grazing, drilling, and water development on the federal lands must end, to dedicate the lands instead to the social and environmental services they can provide. The federal lands can then become, hopefully, the focal point for a regenerated sense of national community. This new book explains this history and proposes this remedy.

* How and why the U.S. Constitution promotes the well-being of individual private citizens instead of the common good.

* How federal lands policy was developed to further that end.

* How corporations gained Constitutional rights in the 19th century, becoming legal "private citizens".

* How corporations transformed "free market capitalism" into "corporate capitalism".

* How corporate capitalism savages the American people: the tragedy of "hyperconsumption".

* How corporations came to dominate American politics in the 20th century.

* How all this "institutional overshoot" plays out on the federal public lands: corporate welfare displaces the common good. (This is the "plunder".)

* Why and how the federal lands can be a source of public services instead of private wealth. (This is the "promise".)

From the book jacket: "This unique combination of social criticism, institutional analysis, history, and political science is guided by a strong moral compass bolstered by rigorous scholarship. 'Plundered Promise' is must reading for anyone interested in the past or future of our public lands, or in the influence of contemporary politics and capitalism."

Richard Behan has spent his adult life immersed in the subject matter of his book, by virtue of the vocational and leisure-time choices he has made. After 6 years of service in Alaska's national forests, he earned a Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science at UC Berkeley, and for 30 years taught natural resource policy at the University of Montana and Northern Arizona University. While Dean of the School of Forestry at NAU, he served on the boards of the Forest History Society, the American Forestry Association, and the Council of Forestry School Executives, experiencing at first hand the maelstrom of influence-politics in Washington DC. The author, his wife Ann, and their children have roamed the mountains, wild rivers, and canyons of the West, and he now lives and writes in the San Juan Islands of Washington state.

Review(s): "Finally, a book that brilliantly diagnoses how Americans have lost control of...their most precious common assets - the publicly owned forests, rivers, mountains, and grasslands that constitute one-third of the American land mass. This book is a clarion call...to reclaim the public lands for the public good." - David Bollier, author of 'Public Assets, Private Profits' and Director, Information Commons Project, New America Foundation

"...an unblinking critique of corporate capitalism's dominance of the American economy and of our federal government's complicity in corporate plundering of public resources." - Paul Hirt, author of 'A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War Two'

"...this book is fresh and original. [The author] is far more explicit about the influence of corporations and capitalism. ...a sound set of proposals, compellingly set forth." - Charles Wilkinson, Distinguished University Professor, Moses Lasky Professor of Law, University of Colorado, and author of 'Crossing the Next Meridian', 'Fire on the Plateau', and others

"It is not common for researchers examining environmental problems to seek causation in the Constitution and in a privileged class' manipulation of law and culture. But this is precisely what Behan has done, and good on him." - Richard Grossman, Co-Director, Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy

"His clarion call for an enlightened new agenda...makes this the preeminent book on environmental policy for the new millennium; scholarly, provocative, and compelling." - Dr. Carl Reidel, Sanders Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Vermont, and past president of the American Forestry Association