Steven Davis. In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer

Wallace Stegner famously proclaimed that United States' public lands were "the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst" (131). This quote begins Steven Davis's timely and well-argued "gentle polemic" (xi), defending the public retention of these lands in the face of contemporary privatization efforts. Davis carefully details the privatizer's arguments and convincingly shows how these arguments fail through a detailed empirical analysis of the biological, economic, and political dimensions of America's public lands. Although the book sometimes misses the cultural context informing public land transfers, Davis's intellectual rigor and well-crafted arguments are persuasive and the humility, honesty, and thoroughness of the analysis easily impress the reader.