“Here is your country – do not let anyone take it or its glory
away from you. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skim your country of
its beauty, its riches or its romance. The world and the future and your very
children shall judge you accordingly as you deal with this sacred trust.”
~~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.
After the 1789 Constitutional Convention finished its
work, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government had been established
by the newly signed document. Franklin’s famous response was: “a republic if
you can keep it.”
Fast forward a couple of hundred years and another
landmark juncture of the creation of the American nation is reached. Passage of
two federal laws: the Federal Land Management Policy Act and the National
Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act completes the core legal structure for the
great national public estate of lands and waters. And what has been established
by these documents – a Great American landscape treasury if you can keep it.
‘Keeping it’ is the conservation challenge of the 21st
Century. For our shared estate of national lands and waters holds immense
monetary value and ambitious people spare no effort to legalize the robbing of
it.
Are public guardians asleep in their watchtowers?
From the first pilgrim’s footstep onward we newly minted
Americans have used the land for sustenance, industry and prosperity. The WAY
in which we use our natural resources, however, has often been nothing more
than a robbery of future generations for the satisfaction of the present.
Theodore Roosevelt called this “skinning the land.” He rallied a strong political movement over
the 25-year period from 1887 to 1912 to break the robber baron trusts and
preserve a large federal estate from spoilage.
The concept of ‘conservation’ was born from this
Gilded Age movement: the using of resources in such a way as to preserve their
value across generations – ‘wise use.’ Please note that use of resources is organic
to the conservation idea. But the outcomes of the way in which we use land and
water have been the sticking point in every resource political battle since. Always
the question: what does the future nation of American people get to keep out of
each withdrawal from our national resource account?
Two polar land ethics have evolved among Americans consistent
with our Western dualistic worldview. One is the age-old “get-all-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can”
ethic of the industrial Skinners. For them any incremental cost paid to
preserving resources for the future is just an expense item and an unwelcome
reduction of profit.
Against this contra-ethic stands a land ethic of
community permanence best described by Aldo Leopold: "A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the
land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his
fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."
Advocates of both ethics will use natural resources to
support our civilization. But one ignores the future while the other plans for
it.
As I have written
before, the creation and
preservation of our Great American Commons is the sole national edifice that
distinguishes Americans from all other nations on Earth. Theodore Roosevelt and
Aldo Leopold were not speaking of an inconsequential national problem.
Past generations of American hunter conservationist
were energetic even ferocious in their defense of keeping newly created
national forests, wildlife refuges and monuments in public hands. Unfortunately our contemporary American generation
appears to be about as protective of their public assets as a drunken sailor is
of his wallet.
I have finally come to the sad conclusion that most
hunters and anglers simply don’t deserve their public estate inheritance. They
would be justly served if our national forests and BLM prairie lands are sold
off, and locked up for the exclusive enjoyment of a gang of super-rich land
masters. An elemental truth applies: “you don’t deserve it if you will not
fight for it.”
We’ve kept our republic for 224 years but the metaphorical
King seems to be creeping back while the citizenry keeps their nose pressed
against a digital fantasy screen.
If the outdoorspeople of today were worthy of their
ancestors they would be outraged at the current political moves by so-called
conservative politicians to turn federal lands over to states where the
property can be privatized. Does anybody vote such politicians out of office
anymore? Instead, we hear barely a
whimper of protest. Do today’s heirs of the Republic think they can sleep
through their slice of history without being convicted for their dereliction?
We Americans make a big deal of being ‘free.’ But what
does freedom mean if you have no open spaces in which to roam and exercise
actual power of being free?
Private ownership of land is a basic cultural norm of
our American way of life. But only a tiny fraction of Americans can own, or
ever hope to own, any substantial amount of rural land. Public land is all the
land we will ever own – ever – for all the remaining millions of us.
Of course 95 percent of the American people don’t know
such a thing as public land exists. They have some sense of a national
ownership of national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite but even there
they are vague on the details. The recent Cliven Bundy affair in Nevada
produced enough mainstream press coverage to plant a small seed in the public
mind; but don’t count on that to bear any political fruit.
So here we have a nation of people who don’t know they
are shareholders in a public estate. And then we have a generation of hunters
and anglers who are either oblivious to the real threat of loss, or incredulous
that the threat is real, or too cowardly to confront the aggressors. What could
go wrong?
The Great American Land Robbery now in progress shows
itself with several faces – here is a short list: {caveat: everything you are
about to read is perfectly legal – or will be by the time it takes place.}
State – Federal Land Grab
-- The Republican National Committee recently passed a resolution endorsing proposals
to turn federal public lands over to Western states. Utah already has passed a
state law for such an action and other red-state legislatures have bills in
progress. State ownership will be nothing but a pass-thru account to a massive
sell-off on a scale not seen since the Oklahoma Land Rush.
No More Public Land Choke Collar – Bills in state legislatures, i.e. Montana, to ban state fish and
wildlife agencies from acquiring new lands for wildlife management and public hunting
-- much better that such lands be owned by zillionaires who are the only buyers
who can afford current inflated land prices.
Antiquity Act Attacks –
A new bill in Congress would greatly diminish power of the President to
designate new monuments, etc. This Act was one of Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite
tools for upgrading the public estate.
Land Skinner Bills – A
new batch of recent state and congressional bills would dictate increased
logging and drilling on public lands regardless of environmental and economic
harm.
Unequal Land Exchanges –
back room political deals to force federal resource agencies into land
exchanges that give billionaire landowners power to acquire vast land empires
while trading away public hunting and recreation opportunities.
Dirty-is-Better Politics
– Attacks on EPA, Clean Water Act and any other law or regulation intended to
protect air, water and land from industrial pollution.
Human-Caused Climate Change
– It’s real, and our generation at this time is the last chance for humanity to
avoid the worst of coming disasters. What is valid for the planet as a whole is
exponentially more instructive for keeping wild habitats fit for use by large
game and a variety of wildlife.
Self-Government is hard to do. Human nature naturally
seeks the comfortable and avoids the difficult. Being a citizen of a Republic,
therefore, is the worst thing that can happen to the typical human – with the
exception of not being a citizen of a Republic.
Hunters and anglers should consider the alternatives before deciding the
Great American Commons is not worth fighting to keep.
This column is not intended as an alarm call, not even
a warning. I’m really just pointing out that our grandchildren and their descendants
will despise us if we are the prodigal generation that squanders their Great American
Commons birthright.
Whatever!
