The article indicates blocking mining *outside* Yellowstone. From the article, its not clear who owns these lands outside Yellowstone. If the Feds own them, that’s one thing. If the lands are privately owned, that’s another thing, and use of one’s private property should not be infringed without due compensation.
The EPA is now wanting to or is controlling private land that has “water” running through it...Even if it is a dry stream bed...They are saying what the land can and can’t be used for...
Eliminate the EPA....
Absolutely!! Most are privately held lands...you will have to do a little research to see where or if there might be a problem....hope not.
The feds do not OWN these lands...they are managed by either the Bureau of Land Management, or the US Forest Service.
Both entities should be eliminated and these lands should be managed by the states.
There is a fundamental asymmetry to federal land ownership that seriously distorts our politics. The western states have huge federal land holdings. The federal presence is very minor in most of the eastern states. If it were up to me, I would privatize a lot of BLM and Forest Service land in the west and use the proceeds to expand national park assets in the east. I would not touch the crown jewels, but a large part of the federal estate in the west has traditionally been leased to farmers, ranchers, and timber and mining companies. From time to time, the feds get imperial and decide to force the locals off land they have worked for generations. That's where a lot of the bad blood comes from.
Meanwhile, the east is crowded and would benefit from significant park expansion. Again, if it were me, I'd start with riverfronts, floodplains, and historic sites and build out from there. There's no magic "percentage of federal ownership" figure, but I find it crazy that we're paving Civil War battlefields, with bitter fights to save a few acres here and there, while the Forest Service and Park Service in the west are adding buffer zones to protect buffer zones that protect parks in states that may already be over 50 percent federally owned.