National Park Service has new land-grabbing tool

Washington Examiner ^ | 12/29/11 | Ron Arnold

[markomalley]

Big Green has an unlikely new sales pitch to convince Congress to fund ever-expanding land grabs by the National Park Service -- save wildlife migration. A map overlay showing all the U.S. wildlife migration paths would blot out nearly half the nation -- a very clever diagram for empire-building bureaucrats. The obscure but well-heeled Wildlife Conservation Society (2010 assets $764 million) unveiled the idea last week in "Spectacular Migrations in the Western U.S.," a 45-page report on the purportedly urgent need for a widespread network of wildlife migration corridors to avert countless extinctions.

The WCS is a consortium of zoos ("urban wildlife parks") and global conservation programs that uses science, according to its mission statement, to "change attitudes towards nature." Its Spectacular Migrations report looks suspiciously like the expansion agenda of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the NPS's boss.

There's a good reason: WCS staff recently conducted a migration workshop for the NPS, which produced a new framework for conserving migrations in or near national parks.

The Hewlett Foundation has already funded demonstration corridors using the NPS framework in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico.

National parks can legally swallow up federal lands as well as private property. You can find national parks that contain wilderness, recreation areas, historic sites, scenic highways and many more, all within one big boundary.

"Connectivity corridors" such as migration paths are the perfect instrument for drawing lines between a number of protected areas, then drawing a single boundary line around the whole group -- Big Park.

Property owners and avid hunters are already taking to the email grapevine with alarms over the WCS report. The NPS management culture is notoriously hostile to both groups, which are ready to gird for battle.

The New York Times reported on Spectacular Migrations in lockstep with its debut, rhapsodizing over the dazzling beauty of a hummingbird "which weighs about as much as a penny, braves high winds and bad weather" to migrate from Canada to Mexico and back each year.

One of the report's authors, Keith Aune, a Montana-based WCS scientist, evoked the bison to make the point, "Long-distance migrations as a whole are rapidly disappearing," But there is no mention that his employer promotes programs that could cost property owners their land and hunters their access.

Aune said of spreading the migration gospel, "We have to have something the public can grasp. Spectacular migrations have great storytelling power." The story of dispossession and exclusion would be just as easy to grasp, but not as dreamy as a tiny bird that migrates 4,000 miles each year. His whole focus for the Times readership was how to frame the debate to be a more compelling sales pitch.

Although Spectacular Migrations covers only the West, the idea would be perfectly at home on the eastern seaboard. Its related concept -- land bundling -- is already at work in West Virginia.

A local green group is campaigning to create a High Allegheny National Park by bundling pieces of a national forest, two wilderness areas, several civil war sites, portions of a national scenic byway and a substantial amount of private property - Big Park. Migration corridors would easily fit in.

The High Allegheny idea gained traction when Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WVa, asked the NPS to perform a reconnaissance survey and report back to him on its feasibility.

Instantly, the West Virginia Outdoors News took him to task for spearheading "a potential threat to thousands of acres of hunting land and hundreds of miles of fishing streams."

Manchin responded last week that as an avid hunter himself he would never support anything that might impair the hunting and fishing tradition in West Virginia.

Emphasizing the economic benefits of national park tourism, he promised he would block any High Allegheny park bill without "ironclad protections" for hunting and fishing.

Outdoorsmen were not impressed. They've seen too many places put off limits. And it's still possible that wildlife migration corridors will creep into the High Allegheny proposal.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

Here’s a map of federal ownership by state
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/map-owns_the_west.jpg

[cripplecreek]

My little town of 150 people has no need of a public sewer system but that doesn’t stop them from trying to force one on us.

The village of Grass lake to the north of us spent big bucks 10 or 15 years ago for a new sewer system and treatment plant in anticipation of growth that never came. Today they’re broke and growing a debt so naturally they want to push the sewer lines into our township and corral another 2000 taxpayers into paying for their folly.

At the state level we have a push to eliminate these pesky townships all together. That way an entire county can vote to take what they want.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

” Oops! I totally forgot about the “world heritage sites” that fall under Agenda 21. Once designated, under the guidelines, fall under UN oversight. Most folks think “how wonderful” that places like the everglades are placed in to this program. Biding their time to take over control if needed. WTF is wrong with us?????????”

The parks can join the world heritage sites and the biosphere reserve programs without an OK from congress. It is up to the individual park management. That’s what they did here at the Redwood National Park.

[cripplecreek]

Yeah I remember seeing a map of the entire great lakes basin being proposed as part of a world heritage park. That’s an area larger than Texas almost totally depopulated aside from a few of the larger cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago etc.

[cripplecreek]

World Heritage Center interactive map.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/254

[Carry_Okie]

Your prison walls are now under construction.

I have been doing native plant habitat restoration for twenty years. Our property contains the most purely native restored grasslands (including small forbs), possibly in all of North America. Where once there were but 60 plant species there are now 357, on a piece of land that has suffered from exotic introductions since August 1791 with continuous animal traffic, agriculture, and abandonment thereafter. No, I'm not kidding. I am in the process of preparing an article for a technical journal on that very topic. What the greenies could not do, they are now realizing we have done.

You see, it's hard work. They think "Nature" is self-optimizing. It isn't. This was an anthropogenic landscape for thousands of years. They don't realize that "Nature" doesn't care what it becomes, even if it looks like Mars.

The Wildlands Project is, without a doubt, the most disastrous ecological management plan ever devised. This emphasis upon fauna without fixing the botanical basis for their survival will backfire. Exotic species will spread without constraint into ever more decadent niches with native plant seed long exhausted. One might as well try to build a new house on a rotting wooden foundation. The entire foundational biological relationship between soils and annual post-disturbance plants will then be gone. If you want extinctions, this is a great plan.

[sasquatch]

Morning. The grey wolf seems to have made it to Siskiyou County.

[Carry_Okie]

My guess is that it will take about 3-4 years for it to make it our way.

[Carry_Okie]

On that CD there are two picture books that are pertinent: Living Sheepishly and Death by Natural Causes.

[Gaffer]

The only ‘refuges’ we need to establish are a sufficient number of Gulags to inter these evil people.

[Carry_Okie]

The obvious solution is to privatize federal lands in the west and use the proceeds to expand park holdings in the east.

Federal management of National Parks has been little short of disastrous. Why would you want it?

Privatize all of it. You'd see a "park industry" in short order and it would be better maintained because they would have to compete for customers. There is really no need for a socialized land entertainment and wildlife management entreprise.

[Carry_Okie]

Big Green has an unlikely new sales pitch to convince Congress to fund ever-expanding land grabs by the National Park Service -- save wildlife migration.

Unlikely? This is a comment unworthy of Ron Arnold. I was in Salt Lake City at the Freedom21 Conference in 2001. Ron Arnold was there to hawk his book Undue Influence. Dr. Robert Coffman's Wildlands Project map was prominently displayed in the foyer complete with color coded "wildlife corridors."

I know he saw it.

In that I was there to hawk my book, Natural Process and he is a publisher, I talked with him for quite a while. At the time, he wasn't buying the Agenda21, calling it a "conspiracy theory." He knows better now but he's still offering crap like this. I guess he needs to know mo-better.

Forester, you might want to gander post 26 as it is a better condensation than my usual.

[muawiyah]

The townships still have a useful purpose. BTW, if you have 2000 potential sewer customers in your township did you ever do an ammonia check?

[muawiyah]

The map has some errors ~ National Forest lands seem to be missing from the computation.

[CodeToad]

Under what Constitutional clause does the federal government get to own State lands or any land outside of DC at all?

[Yulee]

So the government in the name of the people takes the lands as its own,limits the peoples' access to that land, and then eventually when the Greens gain enough influence, ban people from the land.

Sounds like another version of feudalism, except that the socialist intelligentsia will rule.

Socialism with its dictators (hereditary or not) has always sounded like the age old policy of might makes right. The exact thing our founding fathers wished to avoid.

[MrB]

Instead of “Big Green”, I use the term “Gang Green”.

More descriptive.

[muawiyah]

You can't be serious.

"Section. 3.

Clause 1:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

Clause 2:

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State."

What you have here is a problem in logic. As we all recall the various states that agreed to form the Confederation known as the United States of America agreed to ceed their "territorial claims" to the federal government. When the Constitution of 1790 was adopted, the federal government came into possession of a great deal of land ceeded by the states, or, in some cases, taken from England as previously unorganized territory.

The Constitution refers to this territory when it comes to forming new states. At the same time it does not prohibit the federal government from continuing to do what it had been doing ~ to wit, owning public lands.

The Founders themselves bought and sold public lands and knew the difference between unorganized territories and states. They started the system ~ before this Constitution was created ~ and continued it.

Jefferson had some critics who thought he'd overspent on the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. However, he had some inkling of the value ~ as well as where it was located.

Just looking at an old Spanish boundary stone that the DAR had mutilated by grinding it down and carving their inscription in it about the Santa Fe Trail. Pretty obviously this was a Spanish boundary stone erected between the Louisiana Territory AND Spanish Territory to the West ~ presumably before Napoleon conquered Spain and took the territory.

I thought it interesting that Spain had already marked the bounds. No doubt they had some ideas in mind themselves!

[CodeToad]

Territories are not States. Once a territory has become the land of a State where does the federal government get the right to take State lands?

A State is sovereign. It is not willy-nilly of the federal government to take and give as it pleases.

Nothing in the Constitution grants the right of the federal government to take State lands.

You obviously have a reading comprehension problem.

The federal govenrment has the right to administer territories but not States. Try looking up the word “prejudice”.

[sphinx]

You'd see a "park industry" in short order and it would be better maintained because they would have to compete for customers.

We'd have Steinwehr Avenue.

I live in DC. Northern Virginia's idea of historic preservation is a sign in a mall parking lot ... and that's only if someone else pays for the sign.