Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range

Karl Hess, Jr.

Karl Hess, Jr., an ecologist and lover of the land, has written an eloquent plea for decentralizing and depoliticizing the Western range. Examining the American view of the land and ecology from Thomas Jefferson to the Progressive Era to the modern environmental movement, Hess challenges the assumptions that "the lack of a national land ethic" is responsible for environmental problems and that increased federal control over the environment is needed. He shows how federal mismanagement is responsible for the environmental decline of one-third of the surface land in the United States and calls on the federal government to divest itself of the Western range. To reverse the damage wrought by the forcible imposition of a single vision of how the land is to be managed, Hess proposes "a market of landscape visions" that would allow Americans to protect different parts of the Western range in their own ways. This is the first book to challenge the "environment welfare state" from an ecological perspective. Grounded as firmly in free-market economics as in ecological science, Visions Upon the Land demonstrates that freedom and a vibrant range land do not conflict. Published by Island Press.

Karl Hess, Jr., is a consulting ecologist based in New Mexico and a senior fellow of the Cato Institute.

"Karl Hess, Jr., combines a vision of the Western range with a vision of society. And he does it brilliantly and compassionately."
-Ed Marston
Publisher, High Country News

"Visions Upon the Land is an exceptional field guide to the great remaining mystery of the West-how to preserve the freedom and potential for independence of that region's people while preserving an ecology of which mankind is an integral part."
-John Baden
Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment

1992/278pp./$22.00 cloth ISBN: 1-55963-183-X

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