Trashing Rural America

by Robert Gordon

...People often assume — erroneously — that all federal lands were set aside expressly for the preservation of an animal, plant, vista or other natural resource. The environmental movement has promotes this false assumption because it helps advance their goal, which is to treat the entire federal estate as a national park.

In pursuit of that agenda, the greens — abetted by allies in Congress and the land managing agencies — have steadily sought to strangle beneficial economic uses of the federal estate. Some are placed off limits by wilderness designations or restrictive land management plans. Or cumbersome National Environmental Policy Act assessments or Endangered Species Act challenges are launched to thwart use. Swath by swath, the greens are blanketing the West with “Human — Keep Out” signs.

It’s killing rural economic activity. Over the last 50 years, grazing on public lands, which is measured in AUMs (the amount of forage needed to sustain one cow and her calf for a month), has plummeted from 18.2 million AUMs to 7.9 million AUMs. Between 2009 and 2013, as crude oil and natural gas production surged on non-federal lands, it fell – by 6 and 28 percent, respectively — on federal lands. Timber harvesting on public lands has fallen from 12 billion board feet in the Reagan years to under 3 billion board feet in FY 2013. The statistics for miners on public lands are equally grim.

The environmental movement often uses “flagship species” to strangle economic activity. The spotted owl, for example, was used to close off huge tracts of federal timberland. As Andy Stahl of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund put it: ”thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s a perfect species to use as a surrogate.”

The owl was weaponized through the Endangered Species Act. Small wonder that many Western ranchers now see desert tortoises as crawling legal land mines.

The irony, of course, is that rural Americans actually walk the walk unlike most professional environmental activists who seek to shut them down. Ranchers, farmers, loggers and miners actually live in rural communities and spend their days in the desert, mountains, forest, pasture and on the range. They enjoy the hoot of the owl or the flash of a lizard skittering across their path. It’s part of why they choose to stay in the boondocks — a partial trade-off for foregoing the comforts of urban life. It’s hard for them to swallow the environmental self-righteousness of people paid to yammer on about “saving family farms” from their stylish concrete and glass edifices.

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