LIBERTY MATTERS NEWS SERVICE

JUNE 12, 2000

CARA Postponed One Week

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee markup for CARA has been postponed until June 21st. Apparently, the deal between Frank Murkowski, Chairman of the Senate committee and Jeff Bingaman, the Ranking Member is still being negotiated. Bingaman introduced S. 2181, the Conservation and Stewardship Act as an alternative to H.R. 701 and S. 25. If a deal is struck, Murkowski and a handful of Republicans will roll the strong conservative members on the committee with the Democrats that Bingaman will deliver. Their hope is to get more of what the president and Al Gore want so the administration and Democrats can claim victory for presidential politics. Playing politics with people’s land and lives is a crime. Let each member on the committee know what you think between now and June 21st. Call 1-800-241-7109 or 1-202-224-3121.

Federal Takeover, the Real Crisis

Tell your Senator when you call about CARA that the real crisis in this country is the federal takeover of our private land. According to a new report by Holly Lippke Fretwell at PERC, since 1960 the four federal land agencies – Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service – have added 33.6 million acres to their domain, an area nearly the size of Florida. Today, these agencies control more than 612 million acres, over one-fourth of the land mass of the United States. That averages 840,000 acres acquired each year for the past 40 years. And that’s without CARA! Imagine what the government will do with billions of dollars to spend for acquisition. Conservation is not accomplished by casting the net of federal ownership even wider. We need to reform federal agencies, not provide more money for acquisition. To order a copy of the PERC report: "Public Lands, Federal Estate: is Bigger Better?" call (406) 587-9591.

Uneasy Riders

House Republicans held their ground to approve an Interior Department spending bill that is $1.7 billion less than Clinton had demanded. Major expenditures included $1.4 billion for the Park Service (marshmallows, perhaps?), $1.3 billion for the Bureau of Land Management, $345 million for National Wildlife Refuges. They also added two riders that irritated the Democrats. One would prevent Interior from moving forward with a new ecosystem management plan for the Columbia River Basin and the other would delete funds for any national monuments declared since 1999. The president has promised a veto.

Gore and Bush on the Environment

Al Gore promises an "environmental decade" if he is elected president, and Governor Bush acknowledges private land management is a positive conservation measure. In a recent campaign speech, Gore announced he would keep ordinary citizens from enjoying the national forests by expanding the road ban to include the Tongass National Forest and prohibit logging. He would also push for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. In contrast, George W. Bush promised to enlist the help of landowners to pursue conservation measures, citing the Private Lands Enhancement Program and the Texas Landowner Incentive Program as examples of successful state and private partnership to preserve land and wildlife.

Rainforest Sting

Last month, pop stars Sting, Elton John, Billy Joel, Tom Jones, and Ricky Martin turned out for the 10th annual Save the Rainforest concert at Carnegie Hall. Sting insists the Amazon Rainforest is being destroyed at a horrifying rate. William Shatner recently narrated a National Geographic video saying the "rainforest is being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute." "If the rainforest in Amazonia was being destroyed at the rate critics say, it would have all vanished ages ago," said Philip Stott, a top eco-scientist who has studied the rainforest for 30 years. Patrick Moore, another scientist and co-founder of Greenpeace said: "[T]hey are quite simply wrong. We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact."