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of yesterday. These lords are not people but rather are a bat- tery of 19th century laws, policies, and ideas that arose under wholly different social and economic conditions but that remain in effect due to powerful lobbying forces and a lack of public awareness. In other fields, the lords of yesterday include the Hardrock Mining Law of 1872; the dedication of the public range to unmanaged, subsidized grazing of domestic stock; the dedica- tion of many of our national forests to below-cost timber sales; and the domination of the rivers of the Pacific Northwest by hydropower, to the detriment of the great salmon and steelhead runs. In water, the lords of yesterday include those branches of prior appropriation that give absolute protection to inefficient existing uses under the rubric of vested rights; allow extensive, unregulated nonpoint source pollution; fail to provide a fair return to the government for the use of public water; give inade- quate protection to rural communities; and leave our rivers and canyons mainly to the discretion of individual appropriators with little public oversight. Western resources law and policy has begun to loosen the grip of the lords of yesterday in several respects. In most major resource areas -- land use, timber, range, minerals, wildlife, recreation, wilderness, and, increasingly, water -- governments make decisions on the basis of planning and resource management, including the regulation of private uses, to the extent constitutionally allowed. The idea is that these issues are too site-specific for a legislature; not fully amenable to -11-