In his book The Federal Land Revisited, Marion Clawson proposed what he called the

“pullback concept”:

Under the pullback concept any person or group could apply, under applicable law, for a tract of federal land, for any use they chose; but any other person or group would have a limited time between the filing of the initial application and granting other lease or the making of the sale in which to “pull back” a part of the area applied for. . . . The user of the pullback provision would become the applicant for the area pulled back, required to meet the same terms applicable to the original application, . . . but the use could be what the applicant chose, not necessarily the use proposed by the original applicant.