Beginning of the End
Just a quick post before I get out of town for a Kentucky weekend ...
Here's a picture from last June taken from an overlook in Utah's Dixie National Forest. I post it as a sort of addendum to my recent political rants. A lot of people are going to have their choice of any number of issues to rant about over the next four years. Here's mine.
One of the effects I suggested we'd see of the coming Trump administration was a mass sell-off of public lands. This elicited more skepticism from people on both sides of the political aisle than any other of my predicted "Things to Watch Out For." Environmentalist types seem to think that certain protections for patches of land are set in stone and unchangeable. Several people on the right suggested that any such effort to get rid of federal land would lead to popular revolt, either from right-leaning outdoorsy types who use federal lands for hunting and such, or from the Congress that represents them. I tend to think the efforts will come mostly from that Congress, which is full of people who've been itching to have a new Land Rush that brings back Jeffersonian agrarianism, or something.
It seems that one day in, the Congress has already taken the first steps to prove me right. Here's a link. (People like to discount sources that disagree with their preconceived beliefs these days, so it you don't like Field & Stream, there are plenty of other places to find this. It probably won't be on Breitbart.)
Now, some might say, "Well, that's okay. They just want to give the land to the states. That's how it should be." To which I reply that it's been proven time and again that states have far less interest in preserving a piece of land than Washington. States look at land such as this piece of southeastern Utah and see dollar signs. "There's oil underneath those hills," they say. "Or gas. Or uranium. Or anything more valuable than some stupid hill. The grass, we can sell to ranchers. We can cover the hills with cattle at the same time we dig it all out beneath them. And don't worry if it makes a mess, because then we can call the feds to clean it up."
Utah's one of the states I see this most likely to play out, as they've been chafing over what they see as federal land grabs for decades. I'm also personally worried about a patch of land recently made a national monument in Maine. I wouldn't be surprised to see it all start in one of those two places.
The thing to be aware of is that no protection is inviolable. There's some question as to whether a president can rescind a national monument proclamation made by a previous president. An opinion written by the attorney general in 1938 suggests presidents don't have that authority, but an attorney general's opinion doesn't carry the weight of law. And Congress can rescind anything they want. They could remove a national park designation if they wanted to ... and if they get two terms of Trump without losing the Senate, then I expect that will be a second term push. (There are parks in Alaska and North Dakota, for instance, more than half of Congress would love to see erased.) In the meantime, I expect the focus to be mostly on national forests like this one in Utah and land in Western states currently managed by the BLM, along with a few high profile but undeveloped Park Service sites like Katahdin Woods.
Beginning of the End
Just a quick post before I get out of town for a Kentucky weekend ...
Here's a picture from last June taken from an overlook in Utah's Dixie National Forest. I post it as a sort of addendum to my recent political rants. A lot of people are going to have their choice of any number of issues to rant about over the next four years. Here's mine.
One of the effects I suggested we'd see of the coming Trump administration was a mass sell-off of public lands. This elicited more skepticism from people on both sides of the political aisle than any other of my predicted "Things to Watch Out For." Environmentalist types seem to think that certain protections for patches of land are set in stone and unchangeable. Several people on the right suggested that any such effort to get rid of federal land would lead to popular revolt, either from right-leaning outdoorsy types who use federal lands for hunting and such, or from the Congress that represents them. I tend to think the efforts will come mostly from that Congress, which is full of people who've been itching to have a new Land Rush that brings back Jeffersonian agrarianism, or something.
It seems that one day in, the Congress has already taken the first steps to prove me right. Here's a link. (People like to discount sources that disagree with their preconceived beliefs these days, so it you don't like Field & Stream, there are plenty of other places to find this. It probably won't be on Breitbart.)
Now, some might say, "Well, that's okay. They just want to give the land to the states. That's how it should be." To which I reply that it's been proven time and again that states have far less interest in preserving a piece of land than Washington. States look at land such as this piece of southeastern Utah and see dollar signs. "There's oil underneath those hills," they say. "Or gas. Or uranium. Or anything more valuable than some stupid hill. The grass, we can sell to ranchers. We can cover the hills with cattle at the same time we dig it all out beneath them. And don't worry if it makes a mess, because then we can call the feds to clean it up."
Utah's one of the states I see this most likely to play out, as they've been chafing over what they see as federal land grabs for decades. I'm also personally worried about a patch of land recently made a national monument in Maine. I wouldn't be surprised to see it all start in one of those two places.
The thing to be aware of is that no protection is inviolable. There's some question as to whether a president can rescind a national monument proclamation made by a previous president. An opinion written by the attorney general in 1938 suggests presidents don't have that authority, but an attorney general's opinion doesn't carry the weight of law. And Congress can rescind anything they want. They could remove a national park designation if they wanted to ... and if they get two terms of Trump without losing the Senate, then I expect that will be a second term push. (There are parks in Alaska and North Dakota, for instance, more than half of Congress would love to see erased.) In the meantime, I expect the focus to be mostly on national forests like this one in Utah and land in Western states currently managed by the BLM, along with a few high profile but undeveloped Park Service sites like Katahdin Woods.