This is a battle that I have been fighting for just about 20 years in the Klamath River Basin. It is all about the use of force by government to reallocate wealth. Force - that is what regulation is. Using the spotted owl and the coho, the federal and State endangered species acts have destroyed our local economy to the point that we have 18% unemployment and 70% of our children living in poverty.
Once the second largest timber producing county in California, now all our lumber mills are closed. All we have left is two veneer mills. Our forests burn horrendously (250,000 acres in 2008) because the growth rate far exceeds anything allowed by environmentalists to be taken off the forest and the resultant ladder fuels carry fire into the crowns of the trees.
The legislature killed the mining industry for the sake of salmon this year. Now our Happy Camp food bank is out of food trying to feed the poor blokes who made a living mning. The local supermarket is down $40,000 in income from this time last year. Wonder if it will survive.
Farmers and ranchers (hay and cow/calf) are suffering poor prices for hay as the dairy industry downsizes. At the same time, through ESA and the Clean Water Act, salmon activists repeatedly hack away at any profits and threaten continued access to basic water for irrigation. (Local water rights are property - adjudicated and with many dating back to the 1850-70s.)
Government force (regulation) is a power that should be used only to secure general public health and safety from the threat of substantial injury by imposing prohibitions and mitigations in a reasonable manner. This is not that. It is wealth redistribution - taking from the villanized farmer and giving to the coastal and tribal economy. By regulating the use of natural resources to increase habitat, the acts turn any use into a “permitted activity” rather than the free use of one’s private property for economic purposes. By turning the use (farming) into an otherwise prohibited activity, it allows them to control where, when and how people farm. It also allows the government to impose “mitigations” at the owners expense to improve habitat - such as planting riparian trees.
Commercial fishing is the only commercial crop I know of where someone else pays for all the inputs in raising the crop and then you get to harvest and sell it and they get nothing.
We think that nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons, they aren’t. FOOD is. For one of the bright alert readers out there, check how much surplus food there is in the United States, and then determine how many days we can live on it. Beware my friends.