The Administrative Presidency Revisited: Public Lands, the BLM, and the Reagan Revolution.

Presidential Influence and Environmental Policy.

Public Policy Issues in Wildlife Management.

The three books under review are all of interest to political scientists who study environmental policy, though to differing degrees. The theoretical importance of the books also varies, and I will examine them in order of importance from this perspective.

In The Administrative Presidency Revisited, Robert Durant analyzes the use of the administrative presidency by the Reagan administration to recast public lands policy. He does this by examining five Bureau of Land Management (BLM) policy making cases in New Mexico: energy policy, grazing management, land exchange, groundwater regulation, and coal leasing in wilderness study areas. The author argues that the administrative presidency did not lead to the results favored by the Reagan administration, most frequently because of conflicting goals within the administration. Cuts in BLM budgets and personnel (supply-side management) were part of Reagan's philosophy of smaller government and less regulation, yet this reduction in BLM capacity hurt in efforts to achieve other administration goals: resource production, states' rights, and economic development.

This book will be useful to three main audiences. To those interested in public lands politics, Durant offers five well-researched cases about the detailed workings of the BLM. To those interested in the administrative presidency, he offers empirical evidence on the workings of this approach, especially patterns that form based on policy validity and policy softening. And to those interested in more general theories on the relationship of political appointees and career civil servants, Durant offers an empirically- informed theoretical discussion of ways to improve this relationship. As this suggests, the book is geared more to the specialist in public administration rather than public policy.

Although Durant is to be commended for his use of a series of cases in a theoretically informed way, the design of the research does place certain limits on how much we can generalize from it. Because all five cases involved BLM actions in New Mexico, we cannot be sure that the patterns that emerge are not due to specific aspects of the BLM or New Mexico politics. The theoretical importance of the study would have been magnified if cases were included that examined policies not involving the BLM and that were outside of New Mexico.

Robert Shanley's Presidential Influence and Environmental Policy examines the same general topic as Durant's book, the administrative presidency in the realm of environmental politics, but it does so in a different way. Shanley's book covers a broader time horizon, from Nixon through Bush, though the Reagan administration receives the most treatment, and encompasses a broader substantive scope, ranging from pollution control policies to public lands policies to risk management policies. The strength of Shanley's book is its useful summary of presidential involvement in environmental politics over the last twenty-four years. Especially useful are his discussions of the use of Executive Orders by Presidents, case studies of cancer risk assessment and enforcement of the Surface Mining and Control Act, and his discussion of the environmental policies of the Bush Administration. As a teacher of environmental and natural resources policy, I found this book a most useful source. At times, though, I wished the author had focused more on environmental policy and less on generic administrative procedures.

Although it is broader in scope than The Administrative Presidency Revisited, Presidential Influence and Environmental Policy suffers in comparison to this volume. This is because it is not as theory-driven as Durant's work, whose examination of the administrative presidency at work in BLM politics in New Mexico is guided by a clear set of hypotheses drawn from relevant theories. Shanley's work, though theory-related, serves more as a descriptive summary of how different tools, most importantly information collection, Executive Orders, and enforcement policy, were used in the administrative presidency. Although Shanley does discuss theory in this book, it is not integrated with the empirical reporting. A tighter connection of this material with theory would have made for a stronger work.

Public Policy Issues in Wildlife Management is the expanded book version of a symposium on wildlife conservation, parts of which were published in the Policy Studies Journal (1991). The volume contains eleven essays covering a variety of topics. Eight of the essays fall into two categories: efforts to educate wildlife scientists on the importance of the policy process, especially on the uses of public participation, and case studies of international wildlife management policies. The three additional essays include a general introduction to wildlife policy, a case study of wildlife and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and a study of professional subcultures within the United States Forest Service. The lack of a unifying theme or common thread connecting these essays is a real weakness of the book; most of the essays appear unconnected to one another.

For political scientists, only those specifically interested in wildlife policy might find the book useful. Even then, they might not find many of the essays to be very helpful since there is very little political science involved in these essays. That is, there is little connection to the political science literature or to political science questions. Additionally, the book does not serve as an introduction to wildlife policy in general, but rather to specific aspects of it. The essay of most interest to political scientists is by Bullis and Kennedy. The conducted a survey of foresters, engineers, and biologists within the Forest Service and discovered that each profession had a distinct set of values that they relied on when making decisions and regarding the agency mission. Clearly, the existence of these different subcultures affects implementation within the agency.

Christopher McGrory Klyza
Middlebury College