12/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Land Grabbers Reach for America’s
Public Land Treasures

The title of this essay could have been taken from the headlines of any decade for the past 140 years. It is, unfortunately, as contemporary as tomorrow.

Hunters are accustomed to confronting grabbers; usually its gun grabbers in our crosshairs. Once again, however, it’s our land they are after not our guns. Yet another new law in Congress is the latest in a 100-year string of efforts to seize our public lands and waters for private profit.

This latest law will have the effect of either blocking access to, or putting into private ownership, millions of acres of the National Forests and BLM public range lands that provide the primary hunting, angling and recreation opportunities for millions of Americans. The law proves, once again, Gifford Pinchot’s axiom that “as long as there are public lands there will be those trying to separate the public from the land.”

The new bill will make it possible for miners to stake claims and eventually buy at dirt-cheap prices pieces of our National Forests and BLM lands. The beneficiaries of this act will be a few large mining companies, most of which are foreign owned. Because this latest land grab frees miners from proving that viable minerals can be taken from the ‘claim,’ they will be free to sell their new “private property” to real estate speculators who will build subdivisions, resorts, and trophy ranchettes for billionaires.

This latest assault on public property actually is part of a long-term ongoing effort to take for big money interests the control over public resources that were reserved for the American people 100 years ago by Theodore Roosevelt.

I’m surprised they haven’t tried to pass a law to have Teddy’s face dynamited off the Mt. Rushmore National Monument.

TR’s generation of Americans put Teddy on the mountain beside Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln precisely because he saved from the same greedy resource grabbers active today the public space in which Americans could move about freely in the vast natural landscapes that defined our national identity.

American citizens like to call themselves a “free people.” In some ways we are, indeed, the most free people on Earth. Americans, however, are rigidly fenced in by our own property laws in the matter of where we are actually free to go without permission. With the exception of public lands and waters and the confined rights-of-way of public streets and highways, the American citizen can’t go anywhere beyond their own property boundary without somebody else’s permission.

A very small portion of Americans own enough land to enjoy a sense of freedom to roam within their own property boundaries. For all the rest of us, the public lands in forests, parks, and refuges are the only land we will ever own - and the only room in which we can be free to roam.

This is the reason we become so furious at the incessant, never-ending efforts of private interests to chisel away at the public domain.

Of course, while the privateer is whacking his chisel at the public estate, he never confesses that is what he is actually doing. No, he will make you weep with gratitude for his generosity with his sermons of good intentions for “economic development” and the “prosperous future of local communities.”

You can hardly hear the clanging sound of new gates and fences going up for the loud cacophony of promises that THIS public resource give-away will, finally, be the one that makes everybody in the neighborhood rich and successful forever.

This is the appropriate place to stop and say that industrial use of public land is not a bad thing by definition. Everybody uses resources to live.

The harm comes when the wrong standard of value is employed to measure the costs and benefits of the proposed extractive use.

The guiding national law in this case is 133 years old - The Hard Rock Mining Act of 1872.

In 1872, Americans saw no value in the vast landscape of the continent other than the products that could be extracted from it for human use. Gold and other minerals, along with timber and livestock, created wealth and jobs which translated into people living on the land and building homes and communities.

This 19th Century measure of value reflects a time when land was limitless and cheap, the population was sparse, and everybody had plenty of elbow room. Economic progress was simply a function of resource exploitation - end of discussion.

Times changed, however, and today a new measure of value is being applied to publicly owned resources by an American people who are 5 times more numerous than in 1872 and living more compressed lives in large urban societies.

This new yardstick can be labeled the “Quality of Life” standard of value. Simply put, it is the value we assign to our lands and waters for the quality they provide in public health, sense of freedom, natural aesthetics, and opportunity to recreate as well as the national pride in our “purple mountains majesty,” etc.

Nineteenth Century miners and lumbermen had only to compare the cost of extraction against the profit of the commodities produced to justify taking timber or minerals from the public domain. Today these industrialists also are challenged to prove that the value of the commodities exceed the Quality of Life value of the public estate as a natural landscape.

Fact is, the value of extractable commodities remaining on public lands today rarely exceeds the Quality Of Life value of the landscape that must be sacrificed to extract those commodities. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it’s rare because all the low hanging fruit has long since been picked.

The reasoning and cost justification for the current land grab is just as old and outdated as the 1872 law. Industrial privateers respond to changing times and the challenge of the new Quality of Life yardstick simply by pretending that it is really still 1872 in America, and there is no such thing as a new standard of value. Their arguments for privatizing the resource pretend that no economic value exists beyond the jobs and profit created by extracting commodities from the land.

Examining the economic data proves just the opposite. Across the interior western states of the Rocky Mountain Region local economies and local payrolls are strongest in those areas where the Quality Of Life standard of value is applied to public resources.

The 56 counties of Montana make a good case study. In those Montana Counties where large national forests preserve attractive and recreationally valuable landscapes the local economies are prospering. In those counties where commodity production dominate, the economy is uniformly stagnating or declining in population and prosperity.

You would think this stark, tangible contrast in economic reality would make a difference to western representatives in Congress. Apparently, actual economic reality is invisible to politicians who get large contributions from industrial special interests.

Although the general welfare of the people is greatly affected by this issue the story rarely makes it onto the front page of the newspaper. The ownership and management of public resources is the invisible elephant in a shrinking room.

For this reason, a special burden falls on the shoulders of the American hunter and angler to speak for conservation of public lands and waters because we are the large group of people who use the land more often and see its value first hand.

Debate about privatizing public land usually involves incomprehensible large numbers of acres. Hunters, however, know from bitter experience that one small 10-acre mining claim that blocks the only trail into thousands of acres of National Forest is all it takes to end public access and reduce the value of that National Forest to the people and the local economy.

This is not a hypothetical situation. Mountain climbers in Colorado last year found they no long have access to several of the state’s 14,000-ft peaks because owners of several small mining claims closed previously public trails that cross their claims.

Those who argue that mining companies will not claim public land in order to convert it to subdivisions and trophy ranchette obviously haven’t noticed the recent example set by large timber companies who are now getting into the subdivision business after logging off their private land holdings.

I will end at the beginning - with Theodore Roosevelt who created the national forest system and the wildlife refuge system we know today.

In a 1905 speech to the lumbermen attending the Second American Forest Congress TR said: “You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being will last out your own generation. No man, here or elsewhere, is entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the

advantage of our children and our children’s children.

“I ask with all the intensity that I am capable, that the men of the West will remember the sharp distinctions I have just drawn between the man who skins the land and the man who develops the country. I am going to work with, and only with, the man who develops the country. I am against the land skinner every time.”

Such is the measure of value set by TR; that’s why his face is on Mt Rushmore beside our greatest national heroes. If the American people fail to preserve the nation’s public resource treasury for the benefit of their children’s children I’m sure TR would want his face taken off the mountain.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com.

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