if you haven’t already watched this, you need to

it’s really a political video and belongs in the environmental issues area.

feel free to move it :)

Thanks for posting this, great film! Yes, everyone and anyone who cares about public lands should watch it. No surprises really, just makes you hate the destroyers even more.

I live in Nevada, a state that is mostly BLM land. Believe me, we’ve been fighting these privatization of public lands wars for decades. I belong to Friends of Nevada Wilderness and we are now fighting off the US Air Force who want 1/3 of our Desert Wildlife Refuge FOR A BOMBING RANGE! As if they didn’t already have a huge range north of Las Vegas.

About 5 years go it even got down to armed “militia” standing off Federal Marshalls – and getting the Marshalls to retreat to avoid a shootout! But the FBI later arrested the armed people and they paid the price for their insolence. There are som very right wing folks here in Nevada – a bit to the right of Louis XIV.

Eric,

Is the problem privatization of public land, or is it bombing ranges? If the land weren’t “public” (meaning, owned by the government), the Air Force couldn’t use it as a bombing range.

One idea to protect the wildlife and lands would be for environmental groups to buy the land. They could raise funds just as they do now, through charitable contributions. But instead of those funds being spent, in part, on lobbyists, they could directly protect tracts of land.

The land owners could then forbid mineral or lumber extraction, or, if they feel it’s better, allow responsible harvesting which could fund further conservation efforts.

Sounds like a reasonable idea. So why isn’t this done more? Because it’s not allowed.

Yep. I ran into the same issues when I suggested that we could crowd-fund a bid on the grazing rights in some of the wilderness areas in California. Those rights are NOT up for big to anyone. They are only available to those who actively ranch cattle, and have used the range in the past.

Ironically, none of those cattle outfits even suggest that this arrangement is profitable. They lose money every year. But they keep bidding and putting their cattle on the range so as not to lose the right to do it in the future. Meanwhile, the cattle clearly degrade the wilderness areas.

It all seems very much as if everyone is driving the car by looking in the rear view mirror…

The Nature Conservancy is an environmental group that buys land and sets it aside in perpetuity.

One idea to protect the wildlife and lands would be for environmental groups to buy the land

Buying land and protecting it is 100% legal.

The article you linked to is about trying to buy the rights to extract natural resources that the public already owns/feds regulate and then breaking the contract and not extracting the resources.

If you find land that is actually available for sale, then buy it, then oil is found under it, no one can make you extract, even the feds.

If the public owns land with oil and you sign a contract with the feds to extract said oil and then you don’t; well then you lose the contract for breaking the terms.

The American Prairie Reserve is buying private land in Montana with the intention of preserving it as we speak.

Doing things like buying hunting tags or logging rights with the intention to not manage the resource is outright undermining public natural resource management efforts and should be treated like fraud.

If the problem with grazing is over use, stream destruction etc, then the solution should be regulations on use limits and leaving it like you found it etc; not selling the rights to a non-grazer.

The Patagonia film chose to show grazing and hunting in a positive light…

Putting all natural resources up to the highest bidder, without the feds having any veto right on who gets it or how its used, is pretty much the privatization the Patagonia movie argues against; Not some clever compromise.

The only explanation that article provided as to how the free market would protect natural resources was ‘environmentalists are rich.’ Be careful what you wish for.

CRAP! The d@mn BLM under Trump is chain dragging (between huge bulldozers) huge areas of central and northern Nevada sagebrush to “make fire breaks”. But REALLY the BLM has been ordered to do this for better grazing lands – to hell with the sage grouse habitat. What’s another endangered species compared to new political donors?

Jim,

The Air Force wants to take the largest National Wildlife Refuge in the US and use 1/3 of it for bombing and strafing. “Hey, it’s fer ‘defense’ purposes. What are ya, un-patriotic?”

Here in NE Washington there are large amounts of public land and few people. Some of the poorest zip codes in the state. Taxes on logging, mining and ranching activities provide a large part of budgets for schools, healthcare and such. Property taxes fund much of the rest of the state, but public lands don’t provide those taxes. Privately rich (relatively) persons buying up grazing rights, water rights, timber sale rights, mining claims and then not using them would further drive the local economy into the hole.

Things that seem to be working are Forest collaboratives between environmentalists and other more extractive users, and increases in recreational uses.