Liberty Matters News Service
June 17, 2002
The Clinton/Gore
era proposal to lock up vast areas of federal lands has raised its ugly
head again. Calling
themselves a “bipartisan” group, 172 members of Congress signed
legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee, D-WA and Sherwood Boehlert,
R-NY that would ban road building, logging and mining of 60 million
acres of the nation’s forests. Proponents
of the bill, H.R. 4865, the National Forest Roadless Area Conservation
Act, say the Bush administration is moving ahead with plans to dismantle
the roadless rule that was developed in secrecy during the Clinton
administration. Forty-five
conservative House members quickly moved to counter
the efforts of their
preservationist colleagues by signing a letter to President Bush urging
him to resist efforts to codify the illegally
created forest lock up.
The Federal District Court in Idaho has already placed an
injunction on the roadless rule, which Rep. Richard Pombo, R-CA labels a
“hastily developed and legally flawed Clinton-era rule [that]
doesn’t represent sound management decisions for our forests.”
House
Bill Would Enact Roadless Rule
California
Wild Heritage Act of 2000
Barbara
Boxer’s D-CA legislation to designate over 2 million acres of
California forests as “wilderness” to enhance chances for wildlife
“corridors,” is coming under increasing fire from several fronts.
The land presently does not allow grazing, mining or logging, but
by declaring it “parkland wilderness,’ it would become “forever
wild.” Thomas Sowell
criticized Mrs. Boxer for adding to California’s housing shortages by
placing more land off limits to development.
He says since the 1970’s housing prices have sky-rocked due to
severe land use restrictions that drove building costs out of sight.
He sites one example of a 1920’s-era, 1300 square foot, three
bedroom, one bath house offered for sale in Palo Alto, at a price of
$1,095,000. The artificial
scarcity of suitable housing sites can be directly attributed to actions
of politicians like Mrs. Boxer, who alternately complains about the lack
of affordable housing in California.
Governor Gray Davis supports Boxer’s legislation partly because
of a letter sent to him signed by a group of people claiming to be
“scientists” that supported the bill. As it turns out, the scientists were in fact federal and
state employees who had signed a “blank piece of paper,” according
to Director Grout of the U.S. Geological Service.
Art
of The Impossible
California
Coalition Controversy Grows
Environmentalists
Have No Sense
Proving
that they have little common sense, radical environmental activists
organized protests
in Washington D.C. and
Montana, charging that the administration’s energy and environmental
policies are designed to destroy the ecologic balance of the nature’s
forests. The group claims the administration is using the National
Fire Plan restoration funds to conduct post-fire salvage logging,
thinning, and other sound forest management practices, solely to benefit
commercial timber interests. They
also complain that the administration’s plan to turn management of
some federal lands over to local, state and corporate interests under
private profit driven trusts, would further undermine the health of the
forest ecosystems. Cynthia
McKinney D-GA has filed the National Forest Protection and Restoration
Act that would prohibit commercial logging on all federal lands.
“This administration’s callous disregard for these natural
treasures demonstrates precisely the need to permanently protect our
national forests from commercial logging,” she said.
Ms. McKinney recently made headlines when she accused President
Bush of prior knowledge of Sept. 11, and failing to act because of
political considerations.
Activists
Attack Industry FriendlyForest Policies
Federal
Land Use Planning
The
Community Character Act, S. 975, recently made its way out of the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee under the guidance of Vermont
Independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords. The
bill was sponsored by Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, R-RI to provide local and
state governments $25 million a year to revamp local land use plans in
an effort to control “sprawl” by restricting where and how people
can live. The $2 million
grant for the “Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook” was provided by
the U.S. Department of Urban Development. An analysis published by the Heritage Foundation details the
folly of such a policy. Environmentalists
and “artistic elites” have been advocating federal land use control
for years with the Sierra Club going so far as to recommend an
“efficient urban density” of 500 housing units to the acre, three
times greater than the highest-density tracts in Manhattan and more than
double the most dense ward in Mumbai (Bombay) India.
In spite of hysterical claims that the U.S. is running out of
open space, federal land surveys reveal that only 5.2 per cent of
America has been developed even after 400 years of unregulated growth.
Hud officials say their financial support of the “Growth
Guidebook” should not be interpreted as a federal endorsement of a
“smart growth” policy, in spite of S.975.
The Bush administration does not support the legislation,
according to testimony before the Senate Committee by David Sampson,
Commerce Department’s assistant secretary of economic development, and
proposed administrator of “smart growth” grants.
Mr. Sampson called S. 975 “a centralized approach to land use
planning and called for local plans that are “market based.”
Will
Sprawl Gobble Up