‘Public Land, Private Profit’

The series by Mark A. Stein and Louis Sahagun paints a bleak picture of the BLM’s stewardship of the nation’s public lands. However, this story pales against the enormous waste of taxpayer money and the rape of the Western environment perpetrated by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the last century. The bitter rivalry between these two giant bureaucracies over the right to manage the invaluable water resources west of the Mississippi has led to waste, fraud and abuse of unprecedented proportions.

This appalling saga has been documented by Marc Reisner in a book titled “Cadillac Desert.”

DANIEL W. PAINTER

Sun Valley