ENOUGH OF THE RHETORIC BY THE GREEN ENVIRONMENTALISTS;
IT’S TIME FOR TRUE BLUE CONSERVATION
On one of the walls in the New York Natural History Museum
is a partial quote from 1910 by President Theodore Roosevelt, which in its full
form states that
“[c]onservation means
development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of
this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do
not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful means, the
generations that come after us.”
U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich,
from our beautiful state of New Mexico, does not understand and does not agree
with that quote. That is obvious from
his rhetoric filled op-ed and his rhetoric fueled attack on my campaign to be
New Mexico’s State Land Commissioner.
Senator Heinrich’s drop into rhetoric attacks is misplaced, and the
result is an attempt to fear monger people into believing that those of us that
want to engage in real, on the ground conservation and local management of
public lands are trying to steal them away from the public. Nothing could be further from the truth.
True blue conservation is not
done by those sitting at desks in Santa Fe or in Washington, D.C. It is not done by government bureaucrats in
federal agencies making one size fits all decisions based upon environmental
rhetoric. No, true blue conservation is
done by the people that live on the land.
It is done by ranchers, loggers, hunters, farmers, fisherman, etc. It is done by people that make their living
actively caring for the land. True blue
conservationists like President Theodore Roosevelt know that when you use the
land in a responsible manner, it thrives and will be there tomorrow to provide
for us. They know it will be there for
generations to come.
In contrast, the green movement,
or environmentalism, is based upon the premise that the only way protect the
environment is to exclude people from the lands. That movement represents the single greatest
threat to the preservation of our western landscapes, the wildlife and the
people whose customs and culture depend on healthy landscapes. A great example is the environmental push to
end logging by abusing the Endangered Species Act under the guise of protecting
the Mexican Spotted Owl. 20+ years ago
environmentalists like or including Senator Heinrich pushed to end logging
under the guise of saving the Spotted Owl, but it turns out that logging wasn’t
the greatest threat to the continued existence of the owl. The federal government now admits that the greatest
threat to the owl is catastrophic wildfire, the kind of catastrophic wildfire
that is created when you don’t actively manage the forest with cutting and
thinning or prescribed fire. The
greatest threat to the continued existence of the endangered spotted owl is
environmentalism that has caused our forests to be overgrown and has devastated
rural communities.
That is what the debate is about
in the West. It is not a land grab. It is a discussion about the idea that
instead of managing public lands based upon environmental rhetoric from D.C. we
actually engage in local and state management of public lands based upon a
knowledge of those living on the land and more closely tied to the issues. The destruction of our forests and the
Mexican Spotted Owl is no shock to those communities that have existed on the
land for hundreds of years; they saw it coming, and they told the federal
government that this is what would happen.
True blue conservation would have averted this disaster, the kind of
true blue conservation that can only come from those that live on the ground
with a close connection to their local and state governments.
This debate is not about taking
the land away from the public; rather, it is about caring for the land through
active conservation for the benefit of the public. This debate is about realizing that the green
religion that Senator Heinrich believes in is destroying our public lands and
understanding that we need real, on the ground, locally driven conservation so
that future generations of Americans and our wildlife can actually enjoy
healthy western landscapes instead of devastated moonscapes after catastrophic
wildfires.
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