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4
Assessing the Social Effects
of Federal T and Acquisition
The successful acquisition of federal lands, whether in Me Santa Monica
Mountains of California or in the Green Mountains of Vermont, is more
than a matter of protecting rare taxa or whole ecosystems, important as
these are. Consideration must be given to longstanding ownership inter-
ests, social realities, and cultural continuity. Failure to address such
interests invites backlash and "sagebrush rebellions" by increasingly
vocal and organizationally sophisticated subsets of the American public.
An assessment too! for addressing such interests does exist: It is man-
dated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (P.~. 91-190,
42 U.S C. 4321-4347, as amended P.~.94-83) and calls for environmen-
tad and social impact assessment (SIA) when significant federal actions
occur.1
Between 4 and 5 million acres of private land have been acquired by
the federal government through the Land and Water Conservation Fund
~WCF) over Me past quarter century. One of the largest annual expen-
ditures occurred in 1985, indicating that even in administrations opposed
to federal acquisitions, Me American appetite for additional public land
continues unabated. As federal landholdings increase, the number of
inholders individuals, groups, corporations, and units of government
wig property interests inside of federal landholdings multiplies. The
~However, see MandeLker, 1984, regarding the ambiguous duty to prepare
social impact assessments under NEPA.
103
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104 SETTING PRIORITIES FOR LAND CONSERVATION
grown in the number of inholders is exacerbated by the rapid population
grown in counties adjacent to federally designated wilderness areas
(Ru~zitis and lohansen, 1989) and other federal holdings.
This chapter pursues several objectives. After an overview of He
inholder phenomenon, STA is defined and its procedures outlined. The
benefits of such assessments are listed. To illustrate the procedure and
its benefits, an STA case study involving federal land purchase and hu-
man relocation is summarized. Finally, the adaptive management poten-
tial of STA for national parks, forests, and other protected areas is dis-
cussed. The chapter ends win a look to He direction of public land
acquisition and management in He United States and suggests Hat more
social accounting is required if this new direction is to have broad public
support.
INHOLDERS AND
FEDERAL LAND ACQUISITION
Inholder concerns are an important part of American federal land
policy. The national media frequently report on property owners an-
gered over diminished property rights in and around federal landhold-
~ngs, and several accounts present the inholder perspective in detail
(Arnold, 1982; Williams, 1982~.2 Membership in the National Inholders
Association and kindred organizations is on the rise. Scholars have
studied He effects of federal land policy on local communities in Wash-
ington (O'Leary, 1976), He U.S. Virgin Islands (Olwig, 1980), New
Mexico (Knowlton, 1986), in West Virginia (Greer, 1984), in Montana
(Blahna, 1986), in Virginia (Perdue and Martin-Perdue, 1979-80, 1991),
The Shenandoah National Park offers an example of continuing conflict
between the federal government and local landowners in the face of federal
acquisitions. The park comprises 196,000 acres in eight Virginia counties. But
NPS claims authority to nearly three times this acreage. Were the federal
government to prevail, inholder buy-outs and concurrent social effects would
follow. For example, 15 % of rural Madison County is within the current park
boundaries; the county would cede 44 % of its land base to NPS at a time when
the county's population is expanding. County officials estimate that Madison
County would lose nearly $400,000 in land taxes and predict that residents who
were relocated when the park was established would need to move again.
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.
ASSESSING SOCIAL EFFECTS
105
and elsewhere. Various investigations point to the need for accommo-
dating the mutual interests of inholders and the public at large in the
United States (GAO, 1981; Crespi, 1984; Howell, 1984) and interna-
tionally (Rao and Geisler, 1990; West and Brechin, 1991~. U.S. history
is replete with cases where federal land policy might have harmonized
with the needs of local communities had social effects been accounted
for. Examples include U.S. Forest Service (USES) policy toward
Hispanic communities in northern New Mexico, National Park Service
(NPS) treatment of African-American communities in the Sea Islands of
Southeast, He recent efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(USFWS) to purchase wetlands from farmers in New York, the reloca-
tion program of the Bureau of Land Management (BEM) under the
Hopi-Navajo Land Resettlement Act, and the U.S. Man and the Bio-
sphere Program's attempt to establish the Voyageurs Biosphere Reserve
in northern Minnesota.
Inholders and related social issues on federal lands first entered the
pages of American conservation history with the creation of Yosemite
Park in 1864. Inholder claims to private property rights divided Con-
gress: The House of Representatives supported such rights, but the
Senate ardently sought a park without infolders a view that prevailed
after Supreme Court intervention. Despite this early defeat for inholder
interests, by 1890 some 65,000 acres of patented lands and 300 mining
claims were reported by the U.S. Army captain acting as the superinten-
dent of Yosemite. Thereafter, withdrawal petitions by infolding ciaim-
ants in Yosemite and elsewhere became "almost a perennial issue on
Capitol Hill'l (Runte, 1990~.
Policy toward inholdings took a new turn in the 1930s when the
Taylor Grazing Act all but terminated federal land disposition in the 48
states. Remaining unappropriated and unreserved lands were turned
over to the newly established Bureau of Land Management in 1946, and
land acquisition programs were begun to augment the public lands of
USES, the War Department, and NPS (Bariowe, 1965~. Thus, in the
wake of the Great Depression, when a record number of Americans had
returned to the land to subsist, federal lawmakers opted to guard what
remained of He public domain and add to it from the private estate
(Castle, 1982~. The number of property owners adjacent to or surround-
ed by federal holdings grew apace, especially in connection with newly
established national parks and forests.
Commenting on this condition in 1946, the NPS director stated that
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106 SE'ITING PRIORITIES FOR LAND CONSERVATION
Me problem caused by infolding Threat of fire, road construction, and
over development) was one of the most serious facing his agency (Dru-
ry, 1946~. Between 1940 and 1960, the federal reacquisition agenda led
to major emphasis on inholder buyouts, a priority carried on in the
EWCF legislation (Glicksman and Coggins, 1984~.3 By the early 1970s,
however, roughly half the land within the 51 national forests in the
Eastern United States remained in private hands (Heritage, 1974), and
inholder protests against buy-out strategies surfaced in many national
parks, monuments, battlefields, seashores, and wild and scenic river
corridors.
As federal holdings have expanded from one-quarter to roughly one-
~ird of the nation's land, inholdings have multiplied. According to the
National Inholders Association, inholders number nearly 1.4 million and
represent a broad spectrum of American society. Not all infolders
oppose federal ownership of land, nor are they necessarily opposed to
conservation per se. Inholder concerns and issues, however, can have
far-reaching social and political effects that could be addressed if SIA
routinely accompanied federal land acquisition.
SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT
Social impact assessment is Me discovery, comparison, and evaluation
of Me effects of significant actions before Hey occur. The effects con-
sidered vary from one assessment to another, but include change in
residency patterns, recreation use, public health (e.g., noise pollution
and physical well-being), transportation, economic well being, and de
3With passage of LWCF, Congress agreed that inhold~ngs nought to be
acquired for either their recreational value or in order to improve admmistra-
tion.. A substantial part of the LWCF was to be used to purchase such inhold-
ings as one of three original objectives of the act. The 1968 amendments to the
LWCF Act permitted the secretary of the interior to acquire privately held lands
within the boundaries of national parks in exchange for other federal lands
under the secretary's jurisdiction on an approximately equal basis. Under the
1977 amendments, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Clearly recognized that the intent of Congress is to eventually acquire all in-
holdings located in the National Park Servicer (Glicksman and Coggins, 19841.
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110 SETTING PRIORITIES FOR LAND CONSERVATION
hand. Furthermore, the possibility was left open to repeat certain facets
of the STA later in the life of the project, an acknowledgement that social
effects change with time and require ongoing evaluation.
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND SIA
Lands acquired for preservation and protection are dynamic systems
subject to surprise, accident, natural disaster, and value shifts among
managers. Consider our oldest national park, Yellowstone. A century
ago, an unlimited number of tourists were welcome, hunting was permit-
ted, and predators, such as wolves, were viewed by many as a scourge
rather than an integral part of the ecosystem. Even two decades ago, the
idea of a Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, supported with sophisticated
satellite imagery and computer models, was unimagined. The thought
of Yellowstone geysers being diverted for private thermal power was
unsinkable. Status as a national park, forest, seashore, or grassland is
clearly not synonymous with unchanging social, technological, and
natural conditions.
This reality has long been noted by Holling (1978, 1986, 1992) and
constitutes Me basis for adaptive environmental management, a process-
oriented, "whole project" approach to impact assessment. Social and
environmental impact assessments have been modified in the past decade
to adopt this contingency-based, longitudinal approach to their subjects.
The longer the life of a project or action, the more guarded initial SIA
predictions must be and Me more compelling periodic replication and
restudy becomes.
Social scientists have been receptive to the challenge of adaptive
management in SIA. Llewellyn (1974) and Soderstrom (1981) stress the
importance of going beyond the preproject emphasis of most SIA re-
search. Wolf (1983) explicitly calls for project monitoring and sustained
analysis of effects. Finsterbusch (1985), in seeking greater SIA sensitiv-
ity to cumulative effects, similarly extends social accounting beyond the
planning stage. Taylor and Bryan (1990) propose an issues-oriented
approach to SIA to provide ongoing assessment processes over a proj-
ect's multiple phases. Freudenburg (1986) calls for STA procedures that
confront Me profound turbulence and disorder in society. Elsewhere,
Freudenburg and Gramling (1992) articulate the importance of more
longitudinal as well as comprehensive STA strategies.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
social impact
