|
By PAT WILLIAMS
Senior fellow and regional policy associate
O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
"This land is your
land. This land is my land."
Those words from the 1956 American anthem by the troubadour songwriter
Woody Guthrie give voice to our pride of individual ownership in the public
estate.
There are a few common, uniting elements in our national life—the
mortar binding our considerable diversities. Among the most important
are: our currency—the dollar; our language—English; and our
mutual ownership of the natural resource—public land. Those binding
components have, perhaps more than any others, given meaning to the word
united in the term United States and made whole the phrase “E Pluribus
Unum.” We must neither underestimate nor misunderstand the essentialness
of these simple common bonds in our American society with all its dissonance,
racial, ethnic and economic conflicts.
That each of us individually have a claim to ownership of the publicly-held
national land base is of intrinsic importance to our being Americans—genuine
stakeholders in our magnificent landscape. To tinker with that bond is
to gamble with our unique national unity.
On our behalf, the United States Congress has reserved the
authority to determine the fate of the national landscape. For more than
a century and virtually without exception, the Congress has carefully
guarded the public’s land base. Very occasionally, following exhaustive
review and lengthy public hearings, small land swaps have occurred between
the public and a private party. The result was usually the enlargement,
not diminishment, of the overall public land base.
One notable exception was found in the Congress’s willingness to
allow “patents,” perhaps more correctly called “giveaways”
of the public’s land to mining companies. Examples abound of those
rip-offs, encouraged by the outdated 1872 Mining Act. One of the most
notorious occurred only eleven years ago when a company was allowed to
“patent,” that is purchase, 1,000 acres of the public’s
land for only $5,000. That property contained $10 billion in gold. The
Congress finally closed and locked that barn door; something many of us
had tried time and again to accomplish.
The U.S. Congress has now returned from a two-week Thanksgiving
Day break. Among their first business is consideration of the coming year’s
budget that recently passed the House by the narrowest of margins—only
a one-vote difference. As folks now know, tucked away deep in that bill
is an unrelated provision encouraging sales of the public’s land.
For the first time in America’s history, the Congress is encouraging
the sale of public lands, not only for mining, but general development
as well.
The outcome of this matter is especially important to those of us in
the West where most of this public land lies. Out this way, the land is
not an abstraction. It is real; we hunt, hike, camp, fish, ride and work
on it. Our land and the living things on it provide our way of life and
give this region its unique and important qualities.
We westerners don’t want our land put up for grabs
and we resent this midnight, slam-dunk attempt to change the federal law
to encourage the sale of our birthright. It is estimated by the proposal’s
prime advocate, Congressman Richard Pombo, a Republican from California,
that perhaps 360,000 acres of our land will be put on the auction block.
Others looking at the language of the proposal disagree and tell us that
350 million acres of the public’s land is jeopardized.
The states of the middle and northern Rockies—particularly Colorado,
Nevada, Wyoming and Montana—have a legacy of hard rock mining; old
and new claims dot our mountains and thus millions of public acres are
open to the dictates of the legislation. Near Lake Tahoe more than 40,000
acres could be put on the auction block. In Montana millions of acres,
much of it prime habitat, spawning and calving ground, hunting and fishing
access, could be jeopardized. The administration’s Bureau of Land
Management has estimate that as much as 20 million acres under their stewardship,
most of it here in the West, could be sold off—and every one of
those acres belongs to you.
From the Tahoe to the Yaak, Death Valley to Yellowstone, this land is
your land and it may soon be for sale.
Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative
from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching
at The University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at
the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.
|