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When Mexico declared independence in September 1821, Chiapas, along with the rest of Central America, joined the new nation. Then, in 1823, precipitated by the collapse of Iturbide's Mexican Empire, the other former Central American provinces broke away to form the Central American Union. Chiapas, though, chose permanent annexation to the Mexican republic the following year. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the historiography of other regions of Mexico and Central America during these years in order better to understand the way that history and geography may have influenced political and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the half-century after independence. The second section looks at politics and state-building in Chiapas between 1824 and 1855, focusing on the relationship between regional elites in the central valley and the central highlands, national governments, and Indian communities. The third section provides an overview of commercial agriculture, population, and labour, and analyzes the agrarian laws which were passed in the state in the post-independence period. The fourth section examines the process of land privatization in different regions of Chiapas and the relationship between the alienation of public and communal lands and the spread of agrarian servitude — both labour tenancy (known as baldiaje) and debt peonage. The fifth section addresses the question of why, despite the growing dispossession of communal land, no peasant rebellion emerged in Chiapas during these years, while the next section examines the Labour Tenancy Law of 1849, a short-lived attempt to regulate baldiaje and limit the role of servile labour in commercial agriculture. Finally, the last section looks at the impact in Chiapas of the laws of the Reform and civil conflict between liberals and conservatives in the period 1855–67, and highlights the way in which local political factionalism contributed to Chiapas's Caste War of 1869–70.

This chapter discusses the issue of land ownership, with particular attention to the distinction between private and public lands. One major difference between private and public land ownership resides in who has the final decision over how land should be used. Decisions about public lands are mostly made by public decision-makers. On the other hand, private owners have a greater say in land-use decisions, but lawmakers commonly play important roles. Despite this distinction, there are some overlaps between two forms of ownership, owing mainly to the fact that both are defined by law and, as such, should serve to benefit the common good. The challenge in attempting to get truly good land use is coming up with better ways of combining public and private interests on the same piece of land. In discussions on land ownership and property rights, the idea that private and public ownership are two distinct categories should be eliminated to create better land-management arrangements.

This chapter investigates how the conflict over fees helped propel the political discussion of the public lands in new directions. It also presents the grazing debates, leading up to the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act. Within two years, the Taylor Grazing Act passed with relatively little trouble through both chambers of Congress. The Forest Service figured in the Garfield Committee's report as the bad child of the federal conservation program. The power of states' rights drew its inflammatory character both from the nineteenth-century language of western states' sovereignty and from opposition to federal management and expertise. The influence of state's rights ideas on the heels of the grazing fee conflict would have tremendous ramifications for public grazing policy in the next decade.

This chapter argues that the gulf between Harold Ickes' and Farrington Carpenter's understandings of the Taylor Grazing Act reflected the act's own profound ambiguities, which help explain the political explosions over the issue in the 1940s. Carpenter's seeming reluctance to build an administration was, in Ickes' view, matched only by his inability or unwillingness to engage in truly administrative work. As soon as Pat McCarran's hearings got off the ground in 1941, there was considerable criticism of the expanding bureaucracy of the Grazing Service. On the ranchers' side, the Taylor Grazing Act helped to create a belief that they had established property interests in the public lands. The grazing fee controversy was solved by the appointment of a California cattle rancher, Rex Nicholson, to make a study of fees and present a new set of proposals, just as Dan Casement had done in the late 1920s.

Starting from D. M. Lewis’ famous observation that ‘the Athenian state never retained, worked, or leased anything called ge demosia (public land), the author carries out a full-scale survey of the epigraphical and literary evidence for non-sacred non-private realty, including quarries, and premises other than sacred buildings. Such types of properties did exist and were often communal, in the sense of being readily accessible to members of the communities. Looking back to chapter 3, it becomes clear that it was properties of this type that were alienated in the case of the Rationes Centesimarum. The central administration was not directly involved in the administration of such properties, presumably because it had handed this jurisdiction over to local associations, mainly, but not exclusively, the demes.

This chapter explores the way that the Forest Service began articulating a different vision of settling the West, which involved settlers using public property rather than homesteading it. It also concentrates on the powerful influence of the homebuilder on the politics of public grazing. The very livelihood of the West depended on keeping government control out of the public domain. The Forest Service was the first experiment to adjudicate and negotiate the competing claims of ranchers to public lands, and this experiment involved ranchers and federal bureaucrats in creating a new institution for property rights in the West. By World War I, ranchers saw their use of those lands through their private real estate; that private real estate, in turn, served as the institutional foundation for their access to public lands; those public lands were owned by a government, whose ownership was understood to be like that of an individual.

This book is about the remarkable set of slippages in Joe Starrett and Rufus Ryker's conversation about the public range, where opposing visions of righteousness justify property rights and opposing assertions of property rights involve the government, which, on the surface, seems so absent from the scene. It is also about the political resonance of that conversation throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when ranchers engaged in a national debate over the kinds of claims they could make to western rangeland. It explores the industry's changing ideas about public rangelands from the time when ranchers began to organize to the time when they had clearly become a significant political lobby. The chapters in this book argue that relations of property stand at the center of the conflict between the federal government and public land ranchers. Finally, an overview of these chapters is presented.

This chapter describes how Theodore Roosevelt and like-minded writers saw manly virtues in the ranchers' way of life, but Roosevelt and others also believed that only the agricultural settlement of the West, with its emphases on private landownership and improvements, would bring the frontier region into the nation. The spread of the cattle industry over the northern plains only became possible with the destruction of the bison population and the suppression of Native Americans. The dichotomy in Roosevelt's description of the ranching industry of the late nineteenth century would continue into the public land debates in the early twentieth century. The public domain, both Richards and Mead believed, had to be tied to a homestead or a home ranch. The homesteader — also known as the “home-builder,” the “home-maker,” and the “little fellow” — would do more political work for ranchers in the early twentieth century than they could ever have imagined.

This chapter shows how government agencies have consistently treated desert land as something to give away to those favoured by the regime and as a consequence has not attracted many serious investors. Issues addressed include patronage, land speculation, flawed land allocations, and public land scandals.

Public land ranchers of an earlier day would likely have agreed with Senator Steven Symms' characterization of what the public rangeland meant: that whatever the technical, legal meaning of “public lands,” the government was the owner, and “public good” meant little. At the level of policy, public grazing law went through dramatic changes. Two legislative acts had profound effects on public grazing: the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the Public Rangeland Improvement Act (PRIA). Ranchers and government officials were trapped in a struggle from which they could not break free: unable to agree on that meaning, they were nonetheless bound together in a relationship of politics and property, with each side laying claim to the lands that stood between them.

The historical disposition and development of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) landscapes have resulted in land ownership mosaics and differences in environmental qualities among land managers that influence today's conservation planning. Early land-use policies following major land acquisitions from 1776 to 1867 in the western United States were designed to transfer the vast public resources to private ownership. Federal legislation enacted during the late 1800s and early 1900s encouraged development of arable regions, facilitated livestock grazing, created transportation corridors, and provided for access to minerals, coal, and petroleum. Privately owned lands are a major constituent of sagebrush landscapes in the Great Plains and Columbia Basin and are intermixed with public lands in other Sage-Grouse Management Zones. The public still retains large areas and 70% of current sagebrush habitats. More recent legislation reflects changing public values to maintain or restore natural components, such as plants and wildlife, and minimize the impact of land uses in sagebrush landscapes. Very little of the land used by Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) has protected status in national parks or reserves.

This chapter addresses how The New York Times challenged the long-held claims of Arizona officials that their state was entitled to a portion of the Colorado River by rights, a claim recently upheld by the Supreme Court. The paper also argued that Arizona's attempt to realize those claims endangered the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon itself. Transforming the flowing energy of water into flowing electricity, the Times suggested, was not in the national interest. Such critiques of Arizona's growth emerged in the wake of the Interior Department's development of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, a plan designed in 1963 to realize Arizona's Colorado River claims. The critiques emerged from several different conservationist groups, but most powerfully from the Sierra Club, which was gradually changing the description of its politics from “conservation” to “environmentalism” and assuming a far more public voice in disputes over the proper use of public lands.

The application of the resource-oriented approach used in this book confirms the prominent role of the resource Property in the resource portfolios of each of the three policy actors. Property consists of the ownership of property and use rights to material and immaterial (natural, manufactured, social and/or human) resources and the various bundles of goods and/or services they provide to the owner. One of the prominent services of such resources involves their role as policy resource (abstract use of such resources as opposed to concrete uses). The most prominent material resource is the ownership of (strategic) land, which enables both public and private actors to play a predominant role in policy formulation and, especially, implementation processes. The chapter illustrates the mobilization and use modes of the resource Property in the areas of spatial planning, institutional policies (creation of a Swiss canton) , public accounting and state infrastructural policies (land acquisition policies for communal land use policy). It stresses the role of legal appeals by target groups or beneficiary organizations and the privileged position occupied landowners in the planning and implementation of large urban projects.

This chapter focuses on preservation and public land policy. It is now understood that undeveloped wilderness serves as the last refuge for many of the most imperiled species, making it both the real and symbolic heart of any ecosystem management strategy. The traditional enclave strategy of nature conservation does not meet contemporary biodiversity concerns and ecological needs. The chapter reveals that public land preservation decisions are inherently political decisions, and that Congress has routinely deferred to local political preferences in shaping new wilderness legislation, effectively devolving this power to local congressional delegations. It argues that large-scale wilderness preservation proposals must surmount major political obstacles, which often leaves them languishing in legislative limbo, and also presents a discussion on the Montana wilderness debate.

This chapter focuses on the spotted owls controversy and its impact on ecosystem management in the Pacific Northwest's ancient forests. As that controversy unfolded, the federal courts played a pivotal role in bringing ecosystem management principles into the public domain. By the early 1990s, finding themselves enjoined from selling any more timber, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) were finally forced to address the needs of the region's forest-dependent species. The chapter finds that the spotted owl controversy pushed biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management into the mainstream public land policy debates. The Northwest Forest Plan restored a semblance of order to the region. Both the Forest Service and BLM moved to incorporate ecosystem management principles into their overall management agendas, giving biodiversity protection a prominent position on public lands.

This chapter illustrates how federal and state governments and their agencies own 48 percent of Hawaiʻi’s land. The federal government owns or leases roughly 19 percent, and the Hawaiʻi State government owns 28 percent. While much of this land is in undevelopable park and reserve, management policies in federal and state statutes—especially those pertaining to the state’s public lands—permit a variety of private residential and commercial uses on these public lands. Moreover, federal land management and disposal policies affect the use of nearby private land in significant ways. Those aspects of public land policy that affect private uses on or near public lands are an indirect but potent tool for the management of private lands.

This chapter discusses attempts of ecological restoration on public lands. Ecological restoration is a key component of ecosystem management and an essential element in any meaningful biodiversity conservation or sustainability strategy. On public lands, the return of the wolf and fire epitomizes the commitment to making the landscape whole again, representing a sea change in how humans value the natural world. The chapter discusses how these restoration proposals have stirred passionate policy debates with profound economic, social, and cultural overtones that transcend the immediate environmental impacts. It also reveals that the current law, though not framed in explicit ecological restoration terms, provides the public land agencies with sufficient authority to pursue an active restoration agenda, and that they are plunging ahead into this yet-uncharted realm.

This chapter examines policy that would lead to more sustainable desert development and reduce land speculation. It advances basic principles for a new public land management system for Egypt that is more equitable and certainly more transparent, and that preserves the rights of future generations to use the desert sustainably.