Visions of the Grand Staircase Escalante

In September 1996, President Clinton surprised the nation by designating a new 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase -- Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. For the first time ever, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was given responsibility for managing a national monument. The BLM, charged with preserving the new monument's scientific and historic resources while integrating existing multiple-use activities through a three-year public planning process, faces a daunting task.This book provides the first comprehensive review of the new monument's natural and human attributes, the planning framework, and issues of paramount concern. The views reflected here, according to The Deseret News, bring "all of the debates -- scientific, cultural, economic -- together into a single forum". If, as Wallace Stegner observed, "the natural world is a screen onto which we project our own images", then this book should sharpen our images of the Grand Staircase-Escalante.