According to a 2012 report by the Federal Research Service,
“The federal government owns roughly 635-640 million acres, 28% of the 2.27
billion acres of land in the United States, Bureau of Land Management,
Bundy, EPA, Pebble Mine
Four agencies administer 609 million
acres of this land:
· The Forest Service (USFS) in the
Department of Agriculture, and the National Park Service (NPS),
· Bureau of Land Management (BLM),
and
· Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS),
· Department of the Interior (DOI).
Most of these lands are in the West
and Alaska. In addition, the Department of Defense administers 19 million acres
in military bases, training ranges, and more. Numerous other agencies
administer the remaining federal acreage.”
I suspect it may come as a surprise to
many people that the federal government owns just over a quarter of the
nation’s landmass and, other than land set aside for military bases and naval
ports that may seem excessive. It is.
The drama that ensured when the Bureau of Land Management lay siege to the Nevada Bundy
ranch over unpaid grazing fees called into attention the fact that the BLM
oversees, according to a recent article in the National Review, “the largest
piece of leasable real estate in the American West—245 million acres, an area
bigger than the mid-Atlantic states and New England combined. The BLM is its landlord.”
In theory one can apply for a
license or lease “to make productive use of this land” noted Travis Kavulla in
his article, “Public-Land Colonialism.”
In practice “The National
Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires an excruciatingly complex process
before even mundane land-use decisions can be made.” It is a regulatory
nightmare for anyone who might want to create a mine to access coal or valuable
minerals or extract oil or natural gas.
The process is subject to government
policies, spoken or unspoken, to restrict access.
A current case involves actions by
the Environmental Protection Agency to stop the creation of the Pebble Mine
project in Alaska even before a permit is requested.
A May 12 Wall Street Journal
editorial noted that “The EPA’s inspector general’s office last week announced
it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a preemptive
veto of the Pebble Mine project, a job-rich proposal to develop America’s
largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska.”
The Obama administration has been
devoted to stopping all kinds of projects that might generate jobs and revenue
from projects like the Pebble Mine.
Its opposition to the building of
the Keystone XL pipeline is the best known example, but the EPA’s “war on coal”
has closed many mines in addition to coal-fired plants needed to provide
electricity.
The EPA is requesting jurisdiction
over all public and private streams in the nation and this has been called “the
largest land grab in the history of the world.”
So it is not just public lands that
are affected, but private lands as well.
In an article on World Net Daily,
Alana Cook pointed out that “The proposed rule tinkers with the definition of
‘navigable’ waters which was the central point of litigation in a battle
between the Supreme Court and the EPA regarding the Clean Water Act.”
The proposal would “allow the EPA in
conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Energy and
the Army (Corps of Engineers) to dictate on a never-before-seen scale
everything from grazing rights, food production, animal health and the use of
energy on private lands.”
This is, simply stated, Communism in
which the government owns all the land.
As Craig Rucker, Executive Director
of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) points out, “There is no
engine on Earth as powerful at creating prosperity and improving the condition
of both man and nature than free markets.
There can be no free market without
the right to property.”
He warns that “Property rights are
under siege.”
One of the BLM’s reasons cited for
its actions against the Bundy ranch involved “endangered animals” and Rucker
said, “Take away a person’s right to choose how to use their land and in effect
you’ve seized that land.”
The attack on private land ownership
is led by the United Nations Agenda 21.
The government’s control over public
lands and its grasp for control of the use of all private lands reflects the
Marxist agenda of the Obama administration. It is so manifest that, in
mid-April, officials from nine states got together in Salt Lake City to discuss ways
to retake control of poorly managed federal lands.
There are federal laws that have been
on the books a very long time that are intended to protect private property
from the actions we have seen by the BLM and the EPA.
One is the Federal Land Policy and
Management Act of 1976, so this issue has been around awhile, but what is
generally unknown is how vast federal control is.
In his National Review article,
Kavulla noted that “In Montana, one county that is a traditional center of
natural gas production has a whopping 53 percent of its subsurface minerals
controlled by the BLM.
Proposed resource management plans
(RPM) in Montana “more than quadruple the land off-limits to ‘surface
occupancy’ which makes oil and gas drilling virtually impossible.
Only about one million acres of a
ten million acre federal estate would be open to drilling activities under
standard leasing conditions.”
America is under attack from within
by federal government agencies that are striving to deny access to the greatest
energy reserves in the world and to control the lives of ranchers and farmers
whose work feed the rest of us.
It is time for the states to take
back their land from the federal government and to oversee its use for the
development of the economy, the security of the nation, and the protection of
private property, the keystone of capitalism.
Comments
State Legislatures can reclaim land seized by the federal
government by repealing the enabling legislation that authorized the federal
government to “administer” the land and passing strong state sovereignty
legislation.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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