In Visions upon the Land, Karl Hess, Jr., a leading thinker on western environmental issues, applies the concepts of laissez-faire politics to the management of western rangelands. He looks at how the history of the American West has been shaped by people's visions of the land as it should be, rather than as it is, and proposes a radical new system for the management of western public lands. Hess argues that three distinct visions - the Jeffersonian agrarian vision, the Progressive landscape vision, and the environmental vision - have had an enormous impact on the development of the West, and that it is these visions, not the lack of a national "land ethic," that have led to widespread environmental degradation. The decline of public lands is attributed to actors usually ignored in traditional analyses - to fundamental failures in government policy, to ecological destabilization caused by government intrusion, and to the destructiveness of sweeping ideologies. Rather than looking to the popular but ultimately futile solution, of more laws and regulations to control natural resources, this book examines innovative reforms that go beyond a simple prescription.