These attacks on our public lands could be serious! Way back when during the early "Ray Gun" years, they came up with a program called the"asset management program" to sell off the public lands to pay off the national debt. They issued their rules from Washington, and by the time it reached us field types we were being told we had to do it and now. The political appointees were telling us to do it now it was an order. We had developers, energy folks, all sort of people coming in with lists of public lands they demanded we sell to them. You know what stopped them, two things(1) as mentioned in the article, land up for disposal has to be identified as part of the planning process-a legal mandate that we had to do every so many years. Other lands can be gotten rid of as part of equal land exchanges, and other land programs. The amount of land they wanted to sell off was way, way more than we had identified in our planning documents (go to the meetings and be heard) and the program begin to fall apart!
The second reason was that as I noted above and the article mentions, there are lots of rules regulations, laws-not to mention FLPA, NEPA and a whole bunch of other things. Lands have things on them-things that have lot's of laws saying what happens to them and how they are used-including minerals and oil and gas. It did not take long before the ranchers joined with the environmental and other groups to protect their grazing leases. The new land buyers soon realized their dreams that it could not be done and had to settle for those lands that had been identified as up for disposal. We wasted lot of time and effort on this thing, but maybe that was already the idea. The lists mentioned in the article have these same restrictions.
Anyway, I just don't know how (I hope) a law written by a part of congress will get through all of congress and all the law suits by all sorts of people, states and groups, to the point that our public land is sold or given the the highest bidder or the result of some political payback. It does sound though that some of the pols have learned about the law and how to defeat them., As I writing this we also need to remember that there is a real war being waged against those public land employees and managers right now and unlike 20 or 30 or so years ago when we knew the law and pols did not; times have changed and many people took early outs like I did 10 years ago-and many of those positions and the knowledge that with them have not been replaced or organic knowledge passed on to the the new folks.
So, unlike the old days, we may have to take up the slack and watch the pols and their allies and write as some of you are all ready doing because as much as I hope not, this could happen (our present political situation points that out and needs no more comment-no matter on which side of the political world you are on). Our public lands could be impacted and not in a good way. We need to keep saying and remembering that these are our public lands and we could lose them if we are not careful. Again the laws are there and we need need to keep backing up the fed land managers (when they deserve it, and remind that they manage public land for all of us, not just some of us, when they don't) and keep reminding the pols that we are here and are watching them! Enough said! Got political again --sorry!
Smoke
