Posted on 12/30/2011 5:22:06 AM PST by 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.
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.
The territory was created about 1804 ~ by the FOUNDERS ~ and United States land patents authorized to pay Revolutionary War soldiers were purchased from those soldiers and their heirs, consolidated into large tracts, and approved for sale by the Confederation Congress ~ and that practice continued on through Statehood. The last public lands (owned by the United States and the State of Indiana) in Indiana were located in the Limberlost region (a massive wetland South of Fort Wayne).
They were surveyed and sold in the early 1900s, nearly a century later!
The clauses I just cited for you secured the United States ownership of its own lands (which for all you knew might have already been pledged to somebody else, e.g. a Revolutionary War vet) and also the ownership of state lands.
Several other colonial mansions are preserved, even a Frank Loyd Wright usonian house. Then there's Bull Run Park (which protects the flanks of the Manassas Battlefield).
Arlington National Cemetery is in northern Virginia, as are Fort Belvoir and Fort Myer, the Pentagon, National Airport's main concourse building, ............
Your argument leads off into a state being created and all other land titles being extinguished. I'm sorry ~ that just doesn't happen. Not now. Not then. Not ever if we can help it.
I'll see your Steinwehr Avenue and raise you Deseret Ranch (275,000 acres of the best land management you'll probably never see).
Your apparent preference of stewardship is forcing others to pay for your idea of it at gunpoint. And of course, you'll make sure that said "stewardship" is in fact effective, won't you? If you really understood the disastrous consequences of such "management" in the National Parks (and not the National Geographic agitprop) you wouldn't be so flippant. I have numerous examples of it in the West, but I'm pinging GladesGuru to tell you how that works in Florida.
The very existence of greed like yours is why there is no economic value in historic or environmental management. I suggest a little light reading.
A lot of the state land around here was property that was foreclosed on during the depression according to the old timers. Lots of old house and barn foundations all over the place out there.
There are even a few abandoned roads out there. The old timers say they just closed them 30 or 40 years back and they became overgrown. I only knew about them because I found a few old road signs standing out in the middle of nowhere.
"Land, see 'Snatch'"
Which is a complete violation of the Equal Footing Doctrine.
How is a State equally sovereign if 90% of ITS land belongs to the national government? They are forced to police it and deal with its liabilities without compensation.
Your contention is also adverse to the very principal of a United STATES in FEDERATION. Gad what an obsessive self-interest you express!
The acceptance of federal lands as a condition of admission is an illegal contract entered into under duress. The elements of contracts that are illegal are void.
Your argument leads off into a state being created and all other land titles being extinguished. I'm sorry ~ that just doesn't happen. Not now. Not then. Not ever if we can help it.
First of all, this claim of consequence is patently and historically false, which is why so many States admitted after the Constitution was ratified and before the Civil War have very little in the way of "Federal Lands."
And just whom would be this royal "we" besides your usual load of statist crap.
The Treaty is the Supreme Law of the Land, Contracts are Sacred, states are erected WITHIN some territory, or even another state, land titles are always secured in the United States because we are not some Ottoman satrapy out in the Gobi, etc.
The "doctrine" you argue about is of lesser consequence than treaties, land titles, and property rights of individuals already there.
On the other hand, that means you get Senators and Representatives on an equal basis with other states. NOBODY ever said Rhode Island should also have as much land as Texas!
Stake your claims, find the gold and silver, do something, and BUY IT FROM THE GUB'MNT.
Some of it is still for sale.
As far as Eastern States not having been affected by a federal government landgrab, Virginia lost a good 90% of its claims to the federal government ~ that's not as good as the deal Alaska got!
Then there's poor Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia ~ with SEA TO SEA CLAIMS!
You are sitting on parts of their claims that were simply TAKEN FROM THEM without another thought and handed over to your state.
muawiyah can’t help it. It also beleives in the Rossi “cold fusion” scam and defends it to the hilt.
The simple fact about Natural Parklands is that most will be in the West, because that is where the open land is. Yellowstone is three times the size of Rhode Island--the scales in the East are just different.
We should be discriminating too in our alarm about "master plans." Yellowstone had a master plan approved in 1972, to remove all auto traffic, replace roads with "people movers," and the like. None of that ever happened.
>> “Yellowstone had a master plan approved in 1972, to remove all auto traffic, replace roads with “people movers,” and the like. None of that ever happened.” <<
.
It will.
For Yosemite, they plan to block out all cars, and there is no plan for parking at the entrance either.
From what I understood of that era was that some lands were homestead claims that reverted to the State and that I can understand.
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