One of the leading experts on public lands and land rights issues, Robert H. Nelson here brings together a collection of his finest essays. Nelson demonstrates that the 'progressive' goal of achieving scientific management of public lands has not been realized; instead, public land management has been dominated by interest group politics and ideology.

Robert H. Nelson is a professor at the University of Maryland. Originally trained as an economist, he has written widely over the past twenty-five years on the ways in which the "secular" thinking of contemporary economics and the contemporary environmental movement have an underlying Christian content, with books including Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion (2001), and The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (2010).