Well... add this piece to the list. A highlight:
| Even though Mr. LeFevre and other ranchers along the Escalante willingly sold their grazing permits, local and state politicians are fighting to put cows back on those lands. They say their communities and the ranching way of life will be destroyed if grazing lands are allowed to revert to nature, and they've found sympathetic ears in the Bush administration.
The Interior Department has decided that environmentalists can no longer simply buy grazing permits and retire them. Under its reading of the law - not wholly shared by predecessors in the Clinton administration - land currently being used by ranchers has already been determined to be "chiefly valuable for grazing" and can be opened to herds at any time if the B.L.M.'s "land use planning process" deems it necessary. But why should a federal bureaucrat decide what's "chiefly valuable" about a piece of land? Mr. Hedden and Mr. LeFevre have discovered a "land use planning process" of their own: see who will pay the most for it. If an environmentalist offers enough to induce a rancher to sell, that's the best indication the land is more valuable for hiking than for grazing. You'd expect Republicans to welcome this use of the market to resolve an environmental dispute, with a voluntary, mutually beneficial transaction instead of a political or legal fight leaving winners and losers. It's a classic case of the free-market environmentalism that Gale Norton espoused before becoming interior secretary and overseer of the B.L.M. lands. The new policy may make short-term political sense for the Bush administration by pleasing its Republican allies in Utah and lobbyists for the ranching industry. But it's not good for individual ranchers, and it ensures more bitter range wars in the future. If environmentalists can't spend their money on land, they'll just spend it on lawyers. |
Short version? The Bush administration is siding against a free-market solution that benefits both individual ranchers and environmentalists in favor of... big business! Small government conservatism? Not Bush! But here's something he's missed. He might have changed the party, but he hasn't changed the people. And out West, small government will always be the first order of business.
I'll say it again... this is a HUGE opportunity for environmentalists, and on a bigger scale, for progressives and Democrats. When it comes, it will as always come from the West. And we're due. 2008 cannot come fast enough!
UPDATE: One additional point. This isn't the first time Escalante has been the subject of a bitter political fight. It was Clinton who fought for successfully protection of the area as a National Monument, and at the time, local ranchers and business interests predicted doom and gloom for the local economy. Interestingly enough, they weren't just wrong. They were spectacularly wrong. As people throughout the West are rapidly discovering, protection of the land often makes more economic sense than extraction. Not that this administration is paying any attention to that fact, of course.
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