Yeti GOBOX Collection

The Looting of America’s Public Lands

mfb99

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Sep 30, 2016
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I thought I might as well go all in and see if I can get all my posts locked up !!! :)

For all the Zinke water carriers and DJT fans, I challenge you to read this opinion piece from the NYT. When you are done, make you mind up. WHAT SIDE OF THE LINE ARE YOU GOING TO BE ON?

Make no mistake, the line is being drawn whether we like it our not. Sportsmen and Women are going to have to choose. Are you going to be on the side of protecting Public Lands or are you going to be on the side of giving them up?

We can beat around the bush on what ever rhetorical hands each side plays, but the decision is binary, this fight is not going to be one of gray area.

I have made up my mind. I am against Zinke and the DJT administrations policies for Public Lands. I will fight these guys as hard as I can and I will not give an inch to them.

I will support Public Lands by calling my Congressional leaders, I will join organizations like Back Country Hunters and Anglers, I will give money to conservation organizations, and when I pull that lever in the voting both I will vote for candidates that support Public Lands.

And now the article from the NYT:

The protections put in place over the last half-century by both political parties to guarantee Americans clean air, clean water and bountiful open space have been coming apart at the seams since President Trump took office
. The last few weeks have been particularly brutal for conservationists and, indeed, anyone who believes that big chunks of America’s public lands, however rich they may be in commercial resources, are best left in their natural state.

On Monday, Mr. Trump withdrew some two million acres of spectacular landscape from two national monuments in Utah designated by his Democratic predecessors. This followed the Senate’s decision last weekend to authorize oil drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area full of wildlife, of talismanic significance to environmentalists and of great economic importance to Native Americans.

The arguments in both cases were the same: America needs the energy buried beneath these lands — oil in the case of the refuge, coal in Utah. And both arguments were equally spurious: Coal is in free fall as an energy source, feared as a major cause of climate change and run off the market by cheaper natural gas. Oil, meanwhile, is in such plentiful supply that America’s net imports are at their lowest since 1970.

But none of these annoying facts can erode Mr. Trump’s belief that, in the continuing tug-of-war between commercial development and environmental protection, the environment has too often gotten the best of it, and the time has come to rebalance the scales. This mind-set is shared by all of Mr. Trump’s appointees who have anything to do with the environment, and it is a virtual copy of the thinking that prevailed among George W. Bush’s policymakers 15 years ago, many of whom have emerged like creatures from the crypt to occupy key positions in the Trump administration.

The shrinking of the two Utah monuments has been ordained ever since Mr. Trump ordered Ryan Zinke, his interior secretary, to review all national monuments of more than 100,000 acres that were designated after Jan. 1, 1996. While that order encompassed 27 monuments altogether, its main targets were its two bookends — the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears, a 1.35 million-acre expanse protected last year by President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump ordered the reduction of Grand Staircase by 800,000 acres, or nearly half, and Bears Ears by 1.1 million acres, or 85 percent, adorning his order with the usual boilerplate about having to rush to the rescue of local citizens trampled by “federal overreach” and “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington.”

A more honest accounting is that the people doing the trampling are, in fact, a small handful of Utah lawmakers. Most prominent among them is Senator Orrin Hatch,
who is most chummy with the president, but other members of the Utah congressional delegation have also resented public ownership of Utah’s lands. But they do not, by any means, have ordinary citizens behind them. Polls have shown considerable support among Utah’s citizens for the monuments — one of which, the Grand Staircase, has large though not easily marketable coal deposits; neither of which has much oil and gas; and each of which is a treasure trove of magnificent landscapes and priceless Native American artifacts.

With his order, Mr. Trump has plunged into uncharted legal territory. While the statute that underlies monument designations — the Antiquities Act of 1906, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s major conservation achievements — gives presidents unilateral authority to establish monuments, it does not give them the authority to abolish monuments. That right lies exclusively with Congress. Less clear is whether a president can significantly reduce the size of a monument, which Mr. Trump has clearly done.

The lawsuits have already begun, pursued not only by Native American tribes and environmental groups, but also by Patagonia, the big outdoors company. The outcome of these suits (and they will take time) will affect not only the Utah monuments but also eight others Mr. Zinke has recommended for more modest downsizing or for changes in the way they are managed. Among these are a marine monument in the Pacific that was established by Mr. Bush and added to by Mr. Obama, and another in the Atlantic, established by Mr. Obama.

The order has also shredded what little is left of Mr. Zinke’s reputation in the environmental community. Mr. Zinke, it will be recalled, rode a horse to work at the Interior Department on his first day on the job, in plain imitation of Teddy Roosevelt, a comparison that he has since invoked several times but that now seems ludicrous. As president, Mr. Roosevelt gave federal protection to 230 million acres (including 18 national monuments). Mr. Zinke, only 10 months into the job, is already in negative territory to the tune of about two million acres, with more coming.

In any other week, Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, would have been public enemy No. 1 among conservationists. She deserves dishonorable mention nonetheless, for slipping a provision into the Senate tax bill that would open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil companies. The passage of that bill, which now goes to conference with the House, puts Ms. Murkowski on the cusp of winning a 40-year battle joined by her father, Senator Frank Murkowski, to allow drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain, a 1.5 million acre ribbon that was not protected as wilderness under the original laws establishing the refuge and that can be opened only by Congress.

One official estimate says the refuge may contain about seven billion barrels of technically (but not necessarily economically) recoverable oil, a huge find but not much more than one year’s annual consumption in this country. Like nearly all other Alaska politicians, Ms. Murkowski wants that oil extracted because Alaskans would benefit from its royalties. But all previous attempts to open the refuge have failed. President Clinton vetoed one attempt in 1995; moderate Republicans in the House rose up to help defeat another in 2005. In each case, the coastal plain’s value as wilderness and as home to an astonishing variety of wildlife — it has been called America’s Serengeti — trumped whatever temporary additions it could make to America’s domestic oil supply.

Buttressed this time by an unshakable Republican majority (and with no Democrat lurking in the White House with a veto pen), Ms. Murkowski sold her proposal as a way to raise revenue to offset the tax bill’s huge costs. It was a squirrelly argument, as shaky as many of the other provisions in that bill. It promises to raise a billion dollars by leasing 800,000 acres of the refuge, which assumes a huge per acre auction price (well north of $2,000 an acre, since Alaska gets half the proceeds). Data from previous lease sales across the North Slope since 2000, analyzed by David Murphy, an assistant professor at St. Lawrence University, suggest that the government will be lucky to collect one-fifth of that amount.

Members of Alaska’s small congressional delegation (the ineffable Don Young, who detests environmentalists, is the state’s only current member of the House) have always been extraordinarily resourceful in looking out for their constituents. It is not surprising, then, that Ms. Murkowski promises mischief elsewhere in the legislative landscape. Buried deep in the Senate’s Interior Department appropriation bill, and ready for inclusion in any endgame budget negotiations with the House, is a provision that would threaten rare and valuable old-growth forests in the Tongass National Forest. It would do so by exempting 9.6 million acres of the Tongass from the Roadless Rule, enacted by the Forest Service in 2001 under President Clinton. The rule, which has survived seemingly endless court challenges, effectively barred logging on 58 million acres of largely undisturbed forest land across the nation, including the Tongass. It remains one of Mr. Clinton’s finest environmental achievements, and putting Alaska’s old-growth trees back in the hands of the loggers would be a disgrace.

So it goes for the environment these days in Mr. Trump’s Washington. The Obama administration nixes a huge and potentially destructive gold mine in Alaska because it would threaten the world’s richest salmon fishery in Bristol Bay. Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, meets with mining company officials and tells them they can go ahead and file for a new permit. The Obama administration works for two years to save an endangered bird, the sage grouse, and after lengthy negotiations with state governments, conservationists and energy companies, develops an innovative plan to protect millions of acres of sage grouse habitat across 10 states. But as soon as Mr. Trump is elected, the oil and gas companies complain to Mr. Zinke, who orders a review of the plan and is likely to weaken it.

Somewhere, in retirement, Dick Cheney, who as vice president was the main architect of Mr. Bush’s retrograde environmental policies, has to be smiling. Mr. Trump is doing what Mr. Cheney always wanted to get done. The silver lining for the other side (admittedly a barely detectable one these days) is that Mr. Cheney ultimately failed.


Cheers,

Mark

Ye Shall Be Free To Roam……
 
Randy, can you get rid of this guy? He adds very little to this site and although he brings up topics regarding public lands, they are so full of bullsh*t that it takes away from good discussions regarding public land issues.
 
Randy, can you get rid of this guy? He adds very little to this site and although he brings up topics regarding public lands, they are so full of bullsh*t that it takes away from good discussions regarding public land issues.

Interesting request.
Does somebody get the Val Kilmer for profusely "spouting propaganda" (boring, irritating, over the top, redundant, whatever) in which no real attacks against anybody - personally or as a group - take place. No one has to open a thread, if they so chose.
If I truly am a snowflake, my internet feelings are hurt, and am offended by the [libtard, leftie, commie, etc] dumb ass labels, which with some frequency appear in threads to do with public land, am I justified in asking the upstanding individual who uses those to get axed?
Really don't give a hoot either way, everybody is an adult:rolleyes: on here. All responsible and accountable for our own actions.....
Just wonderin......
 
Interesting request.
Does somebody get the Val Kilmer for profusely "spouting propaganda" (boring, irritating, over the top, redundant, whatever) in which no real attacks against anybody - personally or as a group - take place. No one has to open a thread, if they so chose.
If I truly am a snowflake, my internet feelings are hurt, and am offended by the [libtard, leftie, commie, etc] dumb ass labels, which with some frequency appear in threads to do with public land, am I justified in asking the upstanding individual who uses those to get axed?
Really don't give a hoot either way, everybody is an adult:rolleyes: on here. All responsible and accountable for our own actions.....
Just wonderin......

I have no problem with the topics that he brings. I believe that his tone hurts the overall discussion and does very little to raise awareness for the issues that we face with public lands. For me, it has nothing to do with being a snowflake,liberal, or anything else. I could care less what labels are used. My feelings toward the author of this thread might be different if he actually posted once in a while on anything else. Like maybe hunting? Fishing? I’m not asking for much here....1 thread regarding the great things that can be done in the outdoors.
 
I have no problem with the topics that he brings. I believe that his tone hurts the overall discussion and does very little to raise awareness for the issues that we face with public lands. For me, it has nothing to do with being a snowflake,liberal, or anything else. I could care less what labels are used. My feelings toward the author of this thread might be different if he actually posted once in a while on anything else. Like maybe hunting? Fishing? I’m not asking for much here....1 thread regarding the great things that can be done in the outdoors.

If Mark actually posted a grip and grin or two, then went right back to the same old same old - all would be just fine?
Your point is well taken.
Is the "censorship" question I posed understood as well?
 
If Mark actually posted a grip and grin or two, then went right back to the same old same old - all would be just fine?
Your point is well taken.
Is the "censorship" question I posed understood as well?

I understand what you are saying. I don’t care if he posts a grip and grin....it would just be nice to know that he actually uses the public lands that he seems to be very vocal/supportive of.
 
IMHO I'd let the guy post what he wants to post and members can click on his threads or not as they see fit. I hate to see the forums shut down to just one line of thinking and I also hate to see the same old few guys that don't like particular people that visit this site that try to contribute as best they can get mocked and scorned to the point where it's getting disgusting! Everyone, including the boss, knows who they are and yet they just keep on with their BS and several never add a single positive thing to any thread.
 
I'm with Topgun on this. Why censor him? If you don't like it don't waste your time reading it. Only you can choose to be offended.
 
I like hearing & seeing different view points,always have. I don't like being told what to see or hear.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't know what to believe anymore? I am more fearfull of hunters/sportsman dividing an conquering ourselves on the issues than any back door agenda from a politician. Left or Right, gun or bow, DIY or guided, public or private we need all the info we can get. What the heck the news regardless if you watch Fox or CNN is more like gossip and who you choose to believe anymore is your choice thanks for no censorship.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't know what to believe anymore? I am more fearfull of hunters/sportsman dividing an conquering ourselves on the issues than any back door agenda from a politician. Left or Right, gun or bow, DIY or guided, public or private we need all the info we can get. What the heck the news regardless if you watch Fox or CNN is more like gossip and who you choose to believe anymore is your choice thanks for no censorship.

On these issues, it has pretty much always been that way; who to believe? I learned my lesson the hard way. I trusted someone to be stating the truth (pre-Al Gore internet), only to realize that they had an agenda and my naivety allowed me to take what he said as being objective and factual. Wrong. You only make that mistake once.

I've found the manner in which to be most informed is to be engaged. When you engage, you quickly realize you need to do your own homework and not rely on the word of others. It is far more important in today's world when, as you asked, the big issue is, "Who can I trust?"

When you engage, you are putting your name, your neck, your credibility on the line. We are not inclined to risk all of that based on the word of others who have agendas and little to no skin in the game. I wish I had a better answer, a Cliff's notes version, but this is complex stuff with so many moving parts it is impossible to understand it all.

I am lucky to have a cadre of HuntTalkers and other trained professionals who I can call on certain topics and know they will give me the straight poop. This forum has been invaluable in me making a fool of myself far less regularly than I did in the past, because it is a useful resource to get the real information that I would never hear in the media world that follows the good guy vs. villian model of professional Wrasslin'.

I'm not big on censorship. If a member doesn't like a stated opinion, they should go to the next thread. If it is about behavior and being an ass that cannot carry on an adult discussion, that is something I will moderate.
 
I understand what you are saying. I don’t care if he posts a grip and grin....it would just be nice to know that he actually uses the public lands that he seems to be very vocal/supportive of.

Who cares if he uses it or not? The fact that he is a big supporter of keeping public land public is commendable. We already have a lot of apathy on this subject from many who live on the east side of the country because they don't use our public lands out west and most will never see it.
You want him banned because you don't agree with his views? Why not ask Randy to ban everyone with a political lean in their views, including those on right?
 
Who cares if he uses it or not? The fact that he is a big supporter of keeping public land public is commendable. We already have a lot of apathy on this subject from many who live on the east side of the country because they don't use our public lands out west and most will never see it.
You want him banned because you don't agree with his views? Why not ask Randy to ban everyone with a political lean in their views, including those on right?

Disagree with his views??? Hmmm thats weird...I don't remember saying I disagreed with his views at all. Don't put words in my mouth. I'm a huge supported of keeping public lands public as well. I think his tone hurts his overall message he is trying to convey.....one that i agree with. If you can find where I said I disagreed with his post then please enlighten me...until then, don't accuse me of shit I didn't say.
 
Carnage-
The OP is simply shouting from the rooftop that the house is on fire. I had great hope for Sec Zinke. Fooled me once, next time I support him will be my fault. We must be pragmatic and fight the fight that is front of us, today, the fight is Public Lands. His tone is fine. Move along, please
 
Carnage-
The OP is simply shouting from the rooftop that the house is on fire. I had great hope for Sec Zinke. Fooled me once, next time I support him will be my fault. We must be pragmatic and fight the fight that is front of us, today, the fight is Public Lands. His tone is fine. Move along, please

This thread is 12 days old...I haven’t commented on it since the original until 5 minutes ago. I’ve moved along. Just didn’t feel like letting Gr8 put words in my mouth. I’m not a fan of Zinke either. I think he’s been a complete flake. My only reason for my post is I believe Mark has the right idea, but his tone puts some people off. I’m all about fighting the same fight that he is...
 
Thanks for the gentlemanly reply, I too was not looking to pick a fight (w/ you). Let us hope all who use and appreciate this forum share the ideal of public land ownership. While we may disagree aboout many political thoughts, we should all stand shoulder to shoulder on hunting/fishing and public lands (Hell, I even shopped at Patagonia this Christmas). Merry Christmas
 
I don't know what to make of these kinds of threads. When the rhetoric reaches "my dead fingers", "line in the sand", "not give an inch", etc nothing gets done. Everyone wants everything their way with zero compromise. What has changed in this country to make so many unwilling to reach across the isle and get something done for the greater good of all? Honestly I am tired of the fringe right and the fringe left thinking they are the middle...it's BS.

Everyone seems to want everything, but no one seems to want to pay for it...SMH.
 

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