Once great, wide and untrammeled, the American West, where wolves roamed in gray multitudes and sage grouse puffed and plumed in splendor, is diminishing against cattle herds, gas and oil drilling, and federal agencies that have forsaken their duty to protect the nation’s magnificent and mistreated frontier. Tales of destruction have been going on for decades, but Christopher Ketcham’s important book, “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, ” is an urgent cry to expose the greed, stubbornness and neglect that is harming public lands. Journalist and wanderer, Ketcham has written a psalm to nature and a manifesto to stop the forces that are threatening a territory that stretches from Colorado to the Pacific Coast. The West is a saga of God and commerce, homesteaders and cowboys, politicians and opportunists, wagon trains and slaughtered natives, grizzlies and coyotes, and mesas, buttes and gorges. Its vistas, forests and canyons are branded in the nation’s imagination, an expanse where the soul is unbound across 450 million acres of public lands. But grazing, fracking, logging, mining and permits for other private interests are imperiling wildlife, soil and vegetation already under siege by global warming. The intention of “This Land” is clear: “We are not safeguarding our public domain. The government agencies overseeing it are failing us. The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government. The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only. I went west to see what we were losing as a people.” Ketcham takes particular aim at cattle barons and what conservationists call the cheap mythology of the cowboy. Cattle grazing herds poison water and ravage the land through desertification. (A cow can deposit 1 ton of waste on the soil every month). But the legend of the cowboy is enshrined in movies and books, and these days in the resistance of men such as Cliven Bundy, whose band of anti-government followers held a standoff in Nevada with federal authorities over unpaid grazing fees in 2014. One of the book’s many paradoxes is that President Teddy Roosevelt perpetuated cowboy lore even as he safeguarded public lands: “The irony is that the beloved Teddy, who as president expanded our national forests, defended our national parks, signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, and said of the Grand Canyon, ‘Leave it as it is ... man can only mar it,’ is the same Teddy who worshipped the cattle culture that produced the likes of Cliven Bundy.”...MORE
There is nothing new in the proposed solutions, either:
“This Land” lays out measures, a few of them drastic, to reclaim what’s been taken: evict all cattle and “welfare-chiseler ranchers” from public lands; rip up 251 miles of paved roads in Yellowstone National Park; sabotage logging and mining equipment; band together against industry; demand stricter stewardship from Washington; and “throw our bodies on the gears of the machine and make it stop.” It is an infuriating battle when the agencies deemed to guard our public lands are the same ones putting them in jeopardy.
Is their an antidote to all this venom? Yes, the Property and Environment Research Center: The Home of Free Market Environmentalism.
1 comment:
O.K. Jeffy lets take a look at your land, if you have any to show us. Don't use the old saw of the public land is my land because it isn't yours it is OURS! Therefore if you want to control land buy some along with your commie friends and manage that. We have seen the disaster of lefty management in the Valle Grande in New Mexico. They read a book somewhere then threw it in the garbage and decided to manage for their own interests. It wasn't too long before they had to give it up because they didn't have the feds supporting them financially. So, Jeffy take you "the land cries out" and throw that in the garbage. You would not know how to manage a carrot patch in your back yard if you have a backyard.
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