Bush is ready to sell off your hiking trail ?

[kentuck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/opinion/25sat3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

<snip>
It's rarely a good idea to sell off assets to pay normal operating expenses. It's an even worse idea when the assets are chunks of national forest. But that's exactly what the Bush administration wants to do.

<snip>
President Bush's 2007 budget proposes to raise the money by auctioning off about 300,000 acres of federal forest in 41 states, at an anticipated price of $800 million. The administration recently sent a bill to Congress that would give the Forest Service the authority to conduct the sales. The bill has many defects, especially a provision that would sharply limit the public's opportunity to comment on the sales, short of embarking on expensive litigation. But its most glaring defect is its underlying strategy of trading long-term assets for short-term gain.

Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, which would lose 9,828 acres, or nearly 1 percent of its national forest acreage, put the matter eloquently in a letter to Mark Rey, the under secretary of agriculture who helped concoct this scheme. The plan, he said, would blatantly contradict North Carolina's efforts to preserve open space for future generations by removing priceless resources "from public access for all time in order to provide temporary funding."

This page has objected on many occasions to the administration's efforts to roll back protections for the national forests, chiefly its decision to rescind President Bill Clinton's "roadless rule," which would have shielded nearly 60 million acres of national forest from further commercial intrusions. Though it involves much less acreage, the proposal to sell forest land reflects the same insensitivity to environmental values, not to mention misplaced budget priorities. In addition to the forest sale, the administration also proposes to sell a half-million acres managed by the Interior Department, not for any purposes related to stewardship of the public lands, but simply to reduce a national deficit already bloated by tax cuts.

[C_U_L8R]

1. Yeah but we get Graceland !!!

<pork-rind stuffed sarcasm>

[rodeodance]

2. Here is a petition to write to Nat. Forest Service

posted in Activist forum.

Sat Mar-25-06 06:27 AM
Original message
Deadline looming -Mar 30 - . National Forest Sell-off

Paul Richards (Candidate for Senate from Montana) has set up a page to protest the sale to private developers of more than a quarter of a million acres of public lands.

We only have until March 30 to get our comments into the National Forest Service.

After six years of undermining protections for public lands and forests, President Bush's FY 2007 budget proposes to sell more than a quarter of a million acres of public lands. This is another example of the Bush administration's loyalty to the logging, oil and gas industries. According to the New York Times, the Department of Interior's budget documents show that they plan to allow companies to pump about billion in oil and natural gas without paying royalties.


The Administration claims that selling forests managed by the U. S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is necessary to generate million to "offset" payments to rural schools. The permanent sale of these forestlands will only temporarily fund the program. This land sale proposal comes only a month after Congress, in the face of widespread, bi-partisan opposition, stripped Representative Pombo's scheme to sell millions of acres of national forests and parks for private development from the federal budget bill.

Please go to his "action" page and he'll forward your remarks to the Park Service and your own reps.

http://www.richards2006.us/petitions /

[rodeodance]

3. "Deadline looming -Mar 30 - . National Forest Sell-off"--from above

[acmejack]

4. If you can't afford your own forest you don't deserve to hike!

I completely buy into this feudal capitalistic bushit (not).

[rodeodance]

5. see post 2---Forest Service is having public input.