It's not governors' land to decide

Exactamente!
 
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of bonnie phillips
Sent: July 19, 2004 9:12 AM
To: HFC Forests List; NFPA
Subject: [NFPA] Op Ed Piece by Pat Williams on RA


It's not governors' land to decide

By PAT WILLIAMS
Senior fellow and regional policy associate
O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West

I don't want Judy Martz making critical decisions about my land. I don't
want any governor, not Idaho's Kempthorne, New Mexico's Richardson or
any of the others deciding the fate of land I own.

The Bush administration has authored a proposal that will, for the first
time in American history, empower individual governors with the
authority to formally propose roading and development into our wildest
publicly owned lands.

You and I own 60 million acres of pristine roadless lands, with 97
percent of it here in 12 western states. They comprise the headwaters of
our great national river systems, our calving grounds and wildlife
corridors. They are our fishing holes and hunting grounds. They have
become our cash registers, as well as our scenic wonderlands. And make
no mistake, we westerners do not want these lands roaded, blasted or
drilled.

For four years the Bush Administration has made no secret of its support
for building roads into our remaining wild places. Some have proposed
that more than half of these wild lands should be roaded. Most of our
forests are already webbed with roads, which, stretched end-to-end,
would reach from the earth, past the moon, continuing into space an
additional 200,000 miles. 

Outside our congressionally designated wilderness areas, our forests
have 1.5 miles of roads per square mile of land. We taxpayers paid as
much as $100,000 for each mile of those roads, and we are now shackled
with an $8 billion backlog to maintain them.

Governors are not responsible for picking up that tab, we are. It's
federal taxpayers, not state dollars, that pay for these Forest Service
logging roads, and it is terrible policy to empower any governor with
authority over a matter for which they have no responsibility.

People throughout the West and the nation have expressed our desire time
and again to keep our wild lands roadless. From 1996 through 1999, 1.6
million people commented at 600 meetings in the most extensive public
process ever. More than 90 percent supported keeping our roadless lands
wild. 

In Montana alone, 17,429 people participated in 34 public meetings.
Those Montanans and, according to polls, people throughout America and
the West overwhelmingly oppose building new roads into the wild country.

Should people at the local level have a say in the way our public lands
are managed? Of course we should. And we do. For 40 years, through
hearings, meetings, local environmental reviews, assessments and
evaluations, locals have made our desires known. 

That process, however, has become incredibly time-consuming for our
federal employees, and confusing and burdensome for everyone involved,
and it doesn't genuinely tap local land-management expertise. 

We need a better way to ensure a process of decision-making that will
help all of us recapture a confident sense of shared values. What we
reject is any process that provides podiums for election-year political
posturing, furthers division among us, creates even more litigation, and
almost certainly assures that roads and development will be punched into
what is left of our green and flourishing national estate. 

  _____  

Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana.
After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching at The
University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at the
Center for the Rocky Mountain West.

_______________________________________________
heads mailing list
[email protected]
http://ballistichelmet.org/mailman/listinfo/heads/
http://ballistichelmet.org/donate/