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18 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 405 (1994)
Public Choice Theory and the Public Lands: Why Multiple Use Failed

handle is hein.journals/helr18 and id is 411 raw text is: PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY AND THE PUBLIC LANDS: WHY MULTIPLE USE FAILED Michael C. Blumm* I. INTRODUCTION Wallace Stegner, perhaps the greatest of western writers, passed away in April of 1993. In his writings, he characterized the West as the geography of hope. In one essay, Stegner wrote: Angry as one may be at what careless people have done and still do to a noble habitat, it is hard to be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.2 After Stegner's death, at a gathering to celebrate the writer's life and work, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt remarked: Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way .... We've never yet succeeded in finding this balance between exploitation and conservation of our natural resources; that duality, that tension, has never been resolved.3 In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles Wilkinson argues that the West has failed to achieve this balance because of laws that subsidize local irrigators, ranchers, miners, and timber companies. * Professor of Law, Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College. This Article is based on remarks delivered at Northwestern School of Law's Conceiving the West conference on May 13, 1993. Thanks to David Voluck, Class of 1995, Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College, for help with the footnotes. 1. WALLACE STEGNER, WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO THE LEMONADE SPRINGS: LIVING AND WRITING IN THE WEST XV (1992). See Donald Snow, Wallace Stegner's Geography of Hope, 24 ENVTL. L. xi (1994); see also Janet C. Neuman & Pamela G. Wiley, Hope's Native Home: Living and Reading in the West, 24 ENVTL. L. 293 (reviewing Stegner's last book, WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO THE LEMONADE SPRINGS: LIVING AND WRITING IN THE WEST (1992)). 2. WALLACE STEGNER, THE SOUND OF MOUNTAIN WATER 38 (1980). For a brief evaluation of Stegner's influence on the law of the West, see Charles F. Wilkinson, The Law of the American West: A Critical Bibliography of the Non Legal Sources, 85 MICH. L. REV. 953, 979-80 (1987). 3. Quoted in Western Heroes, NEW YORKER, May 10, 1993, at 41. 405

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