Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska
The National Park Service
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Public Land Agencies in the West
The American people have four public land agencies that manage our lands in the West on our behalf. While not perfect and often the focus of controversy, these agencies were designed to operate under democratic principals. The public has every opportunity to interact with agency managers and to influence management decisions. These agencies are: 1 The National Park Service 2 The US Fish and WIldlife Service 3 The US Forest Service 4 The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) |
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The National Park Service (NPS) is America's premier land management agency charged with preserving and protecting the most important public lands, historic and cultural sites of the United States. The agency manages more than 80 million acres and has a number of management categories it works within including national parks, national preserves, national monuments, national historic sites and others. Most Americans know about high profile areas like Yellowstone National Park or the Great Smoky Mountains National Park but there are hundreds of more obscure areas where the NPS manages places or sites for "present and future generations."
www.nps.gov/index.htm Watch this excellent film about climate change and the giant Sequoias: www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1eSPs8vrrG4 |
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The US Fish and Wildlife Service This Interior Department agency is responsible for managing over 560 National Wildlife Refuges and thousands of special management areas totally over 150 million acres. Many of these are areas devoted to migratory birds protected under international treaties. Since a majority of wildlife habitat is on non federal land, the USFWS has partnerships with private and state interests to help protect wildlife including endangered species. The agency manages some high profile areas such as the Malheur National Wildlife Refguge in eastern Oregon and the Arctic National Widlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope. The agency is responsible for 6 national monuments and has a full law enforcement division and 9000 employees.
https://www.fws.gov/ |
San Juan National Forest, Colorado
The US Forest ServiceThe US Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. It's roots lie in the Forest Reserves that were set aside from the public domain under the Land Revision Act in 1891. The Forest Service was created in 1905 and the Forest Reserves became the National Forests. Today there are 155 national forests containing 190 million acres of land. The national forests have a central "supervisor's" office and "districts" with offices in dispersed areas. www.fs.fed.us/
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The BLMThe Bureau of Land Management manages 247.3 million acres of public land, most of it land that was never set aside by the federal government for other purposes and which was previously "public domain." The land includes vast areas of sage and desert in the western states and some lands in the Pacific Northwest that were taken from railroads in the Coast Ranges. The BLM lands were made permanement federal public lands in 1976 when the Federal Land Policy and Managment Act of 1976 passed Congress. BLM lands have a large and loosely regulated cattle grazing program which charges below cost rates to ranchers. The BLM also manages oil and gas permits which industry can obtain with little regulation. https://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en.html
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