My perception is that there are a number of individuals who have been engaged in federal public land use and management for decades who have an incredibly vast knowledge of and reflective perspective toward public lands issues, but that at the institutional/organizational level things get simplified into stakeholder language that flattens the complexities of the situation and that a variety of points of view get taken-for-granted as obvious, natural, or inherently right/good. From individuals who have sought to work within agencies I've heard tales of frustration of the obstacles to effective and flexible management created by bureaucratic structures and political timescales, as well as the frustration of working in a space where many visions of good governance and use exist and long-standing tensions seem to discourage desires to build alliances or compromises. These individuals, some retired and some still working, have opted for trying to further their own understandings of what good management is through their individual actions, aiming to do the best they can in the structures that exist, rather than trying to rock or restructure the boat they are in.
Many agency employees responsible for managing wilderness and other recreation areas seem acutely aware of the challenges of regulating land use that arise from misaligned and permeable boundaries in space and legal designation--that is, the rules guiding use in any particular space have the potential to affect other spaces that may or may not have the same designations. Beyond just wilderness/non-wilderness or monument/non-monument designations, land uses on prviate land can impact public lands due to the interconnectedness of ecosystems and watersheds.
The broader impacts of oil and gas drilling on public lands (e.g. through greenhouse gas emissions) and the impact of climate change on public lands ecosystems and future use appear in discourses produced somewhat distant to these spaces (e.g. at UC Irvine) and circulate online, but my perception is that this multi-directional connection to broader global and regional earth system processes has been thus far on the margins of public lands management debates in southern Utah.
