Gotta keep locking ground away under federal "protection" where it will never be productively managed again. Keep re-wilding the west and keep herding people into ever densifying urban centers. How much land was the federal government supposed to own again?
These bills sound great, preserving public lands, etc., but it never benefits the public. We have to pay to enter national parks. They tell us the National Park System belongs to the people, but unless you know how to sneak in, they charge you to enter and, in the case of our Rocky Mtn Park, charge you to drive on a public highway built with public funds.
Federal natural resource "management" is a complete joke. It is blatantly designed to prioritize earth-first over the concept of utilizing natural resources to benefit people.
Federal land management is based in part on the concept of "non-use" or "intrinsic" value, which is the concept that some fuck back east derives pleasure from simply knowing that land out here in the west exists in an unmanaged state. Federal "conservationists" place those non-use values into the mix with the values of people who live nearby those lands and who historically worked on and derived a living from natural resource management on that ground.
But now the coastal urbanite is treated as a stakeholder, and not just in the sense that everyone benefits from clean air and water. Their feelings are given weight and used to influence management directives.
I absolutely agree, you touched on the main problem, that wildness or unused resources are considered superior to well managed, appropriately used lands. As the owners of these lands, not only are we responsible for maintaining the health of the forests, but we’re also entitled to use them and harvest the resources within, responsibility. Some things sound scary, clear cutting is considered bad, yet it is the cure for many tree diseases/parasites. If a person has a cancerous tumor everyone agrees that it’s better for the body to remove the growth, even though cutting into flesh is frightening and messy.
The alternative is to give control of federal lands to the states, at which point they can be moonscaped and parceled out to sell to developers to put up a bunch of housing developments and bullshit. No thanks. I like my public lands. I like having places to hike and hunt. I like having healthy populations of game animals so i dont have to eat beef and pork.
Theres a big difference between national parks and wilderness areas
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