Earlier this year Interior Secretary
Sally Jewell delivered what could best be described as a doom and gloom
speech about the state of disappearing “natural” lands in this country,
primarily the West.
She
claimed there is an “emergence of an extreme movement to seize public
lands — from Oregon to Puerto Rico — putting lands that belong to all
Americans at risk of being sold off for a short-term gain to the highest
bidder. This movement has propped up dangerous voices that reject the
rule of law, put communities and hard-working public servants at risk,
and fail to appreciate how deeply democratic and American our national
parks and public lands are.”
Communal ownership of vacant land is democratic? I thought there was another word for that.
That extreme movement must include
the Nevada Legislature and a majority of Nevada’s Washington delegation,
who have put forth modest efforts to transfer to the state control a
little more than 10 percent of the federal public lands in the state —
which currently amounts to about 85 percent of the state, the highest
percentage of any state.
That
extreme movement must include the voters of Nevada, who in 1996 voted to
remove from the state Constitution the so-called Disclaimer Clause, in
which the residents of the Nevada Territory in 1864 agreed that the
residents of the state of Nevada would forgo forever all claim to
unappropriated land inside its borders.
Jewell
claimed that an analysis by a non-profit group found that natural areas
in the West are disappearing at the rate of a football field every two
and a half minutes.
“If you add
that all up, you’re looking at a pretty bleak picture,” she warned. “If
we stay on this trajectory, 100 years from now, national parks and
wildlife refuges will be like postage stamps of nature on a map.
Isolated islands of conservation with run-down facilities that crowds of
Americans visit like zoos to catch a glimpse of our nation’s remaining
wildlife and undeveloped patches of land.”
In a mere century we will have paved paradise and put up a parking lot!
According to the
Congressional Research Service, there are 623 million acres of land in
this country controlled by various federal agencies — Bureau of Land
Management, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, Park Service and
Department of Defense. If one bulldozed a football field-sized tract
every two and half minutes, why there would be no federal land left in a
mere 2,700 years.
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