Oft-cited as “America’s best idea,” the preservation of public lands in the United States is usually thought of in regard to federal government action. Similarly, scholarship on public lands in the United States has long been synonymous with that on federal public lands. The National Park System, overseen by the National Park Service, tends to dominate the popular imagination of what public land is and who owns it. Steven Davis’s The Other Public Lands offers a much-needed expansion of our understanding of public lands. As Davis points out, the bulk of federal land is in the western United States, whereas state and local lands are in every state and in most cities. Nearly 200 million acres, or about 9 percent of the US land mass, are held by the 50 states. Although this is only approximately one-third of the land held by the federal government, state and local government-owned land provides access to parks and recreation for millions of Americans, and it is these lands that most Americans encounter when engaging in outdoor recreation. Despite its ubiquity, state public land remains largely understudied. This book is the first comprehensive, comparative treatment of public lands controlled by the states, and it succeeds admirably in creating a more complete picture of public lands in the United States and laying a strong foundation for future scholarship.
As Davis notes, public lands serve three broad purposes: preservation, resource extraction, and recreation. The dual mandate of preserving biodiversity and natural and cultural amenities coupled with resource extraction, including that of commodities such as timber, minerals, or livestock, is often in tension. In addition, tensions exist between resource-based recreation, such as hiking and fishing, and user-based recreation, such as golf and boating. Across seven chapters, Davis draws on an impressive amount of data from all 50 states to examine how states manage their lands for multiple-use purposes. While largely descriptive, the empirical insights are interesting, valuable, and well-presented. The clear and compelling prose is punctuated with useful tables and maps that illustrate the wide variation across states in the amount and uses of their public lands. Also of value are the case studies of particular states that effectively illustrate the broader concepts discussed. The wealth of data coupled with the case studies makes the book valuable to scholars, practitioners, advocates, and the general public. Finally, Davis makes a compelling case for what the states and federal government can learn from each other regarding land management. The timing of the book is critical as the second Trump administration is attempting to expand energy production on public lands, shrink the size of national monuments, and shift more federal lands to state control, among other broad environmental policy changes. Davis provides compelling evidence about the mixed, often extraction-oriented record of existing state land management, which serves to illustrate that state stewardship may not necessarily improve outcomes for conservation or public access.
For scholars, Davis’s central analytical contribution lies in his account of institutional variation across the states. States, as “laboratories of democracy,” experiment with different institutional designs within their natural resource agencies. For example, Davis shows that the degree of centralization of a state’s land management apparatus, whether authority is concentrated in a single natural resources agency or fragmented across multiple bodies with competing statutory mandates, can influence outcomes. Similarly, whether trust lands are governed under strict fiduciary obligations to fund schools or given greater latitude for conservation can shape policy outcomes as much as, or more than, the partisan control of state governments. Davis provides a solid empirical grounding for comparing environmental policy and politics across states, and the book should be of interest to scholars of American political development and federalism, and others who are accustomed to thinking of natural resource policy primarily in terms of the federal-state divide rather than variation among the states. While environmental policy is broadly polarized, support for land preservation efforts is not as polarized as other environmental issues. Davis provides several examples that cut across ideological assumptions, including how California has pursued park privatization and commercialization more aggressively than several more conservative states. By contrast, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has largely left the state’s public land management practices untouched, even as he has been willing to reshape other state institutions. Such findings provide the needed nuance to the polarization narrative that dominates much of the work on environmental politics.
One limitation of the book is the breadth-over-depth issue that is common to ambitious comparative work. While the case studies provide some depth, some readers may be left wanting more explanation regarding why particular institutional configurations have emerged in certain states. Davis provides some speculative answers, but that speculation tends to focus on ideological and partisanship differences, particularly the growing conservatism of the Republican Party, to explain the variation across states, even as other parts of the book note where these factors may not explain outcomes. This speculation is likely partially correct, as, for example, the Southern and Great Plains states have the least amount of public lands. An analysis of other factors that may influence states’ institutional designs, however, is warranted. Similarly, systematic testing of the relationship between agency structure and outcomes would be welcomed. Second, the lack of engagement with existing theories of policy diffusion, bureaucratic structure, principal-agent dynamics, or fiscal federalism limits the situating of the findings within the broader public policy and public administration literatures. Additionally, the book raises important questions about equity and access, including who uses state lands and who is excluded by geography, fee structures, and infrastructure. Yet these themes are treated suggestively, and a careful, systematic, empirical analysis of the drivers of these inequities is warranted.
These limitations are minor and focus more on the book’s emphasis rather than its execution. Davis’s monograph is conceived as a primer, and on that measure, it is hugely successful. It provides a wealth of empirical data, opens up the possibility of comparative analysis, and serves as a foundation on which more theoretically ambitious work can be built. The Other Public Lands is a foundational text that scholars of environmental policy, American federalism, and subnational governance will find to be a valuable reference. Additionally, with its accessible prose and rich case material, it is well-suited for use in undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental policy and natural resource management. Practitioners, conservation advocates, elected officials, and state policy actors might also benefit from its account of how their states manage public lands and the outcomes that such management produces. In brief, Davis identified and filled a significant blind spot in the study of American natural resource governance. I hope that this volume prompts increased scholarly attention to state lands and to the variations in their management practices.
