Survey Responses From the Intermountain West: Are We Achieving the Public?s Objectives for Forests and Rangelands?

The survey on values, objectives, beliefs, and attitudes, implemented as a module of the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment, asked over 7,000 respondents nationwide about their values with respect to public lands, objectives for the management of these lands, beliefs about the role the USDA Forest Service should play in fulfilling those objectives, and attitudes about the job the agency has been doing. This report-one of a series of similar regional reports-shows that respondents from the Intermountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming) are somewhat more strongly in favor of allowing more diverse uses of our forests and grasslands than respondents from the rest of the United States, and slightly less inclined toward protection of ecosystems. Nationwide, as in the Intermountain West, the most important objective was conserving and protecting forests and grassland watersheds.