With government spying on American citizens, deafening rhetoric blaming immigrants for every ill, talk of attacking Iran and the country facing $8.3 trillion in debt, sometimes it’s best to close your eyes, cover your ears, pinch your nose and take a mental break from the gloom emanating from Washington, D.C. Other times, the decisions made there hit close to home, like an earthquake under Longs Peak that rattled you from your reverie.
I’m talking about one of the worst ideas put forth by the Bush administration. If you haven’t heard about it, you need to, because it’s all about Coloradans and what we will lose forever unless wisdom and long-term vision can prevail.
The White House is proposing to sell 300,000 acres of land nationwide that includes parts of Colorado’s White River, Arapaho-Roosevelt and Rio Grande national forests and Pawnee and Comanche national grasslands. The land would go to the highest bidder under the plan, part of Bush’s 2007 budget proposal, to raise approximately $800 million for a rural schools program that subsidizes heavily rural states.
Relinquishing public land, an irreversible decision, to deal with a short-term budget situation, is just plain foolhardy. These are our precious national forests and grasslands, set aside by forward-thinking leaders decades ago explicitly to prevent their exploitation.
Ever cruise the western United States? If so, you’ve experienced the staggering distinction between protected and developed land. One moment you’re running the mind-numbing gauntlet of gas stations, pastel-colored motels and billboards for reptile farms and water slides. Then, with the blink of an eye, as you pass that familiar green or brown sign placed by the park service, you depart the dominion of Domino’s and Dairy Queen and enter God’s country. The cacophony of commercialism is replaced by deep evergreen forests or undulating oceans of prairie grass.
We would deny these treasures to American generations eternal, simply because one administration, among the dozens to come and go, can’t balance a checkbook? It’s just plain nuts.
Fortunately, wisdom is finding its voice. “It’s like selling your homestead to pay your credit cards,” Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told The Denver Post. “It’s like ripping the paneling off the walls and burning the furniture to heat the house,” said Sloan Shoemaker of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop in the Glenwood Post-Independent. To me, it’s as backward and goofy as bloodletting to treat illness, or like cutting off a limb to lose weight.
But it’s the spin that astounds me. This idea is being touted as a means to support rural schools because it sounds – i.e. spins – like a potentially worthwhile trade-off: Hey, let’s give up a little land to help these struggling heartland schools. That’s a shell game. For those practicing fiscal responsibility, any federal dollars can conceivably support any federal initiative.
Imagine the public’s reaction if the spin were replaced by budget realities: Selling 300,000 acres of our national treasure will pay for approximately 20 hours of interest on our national debt, or four days of ongoing U.S. operations in Iraq, or 0.05 percent (that’s 0.0005) of Bush’s tax cut, which provides to the richest 1 percent of Americans an average benefit of $342,000 per taxpayer, while the rest of us will save an average of $350 per year.
Bush’s friends can afford to fly great distances to visit and experience protected lands wherever they might remain, in Alaska or perhaps Canada’s Yukon Territory. But for the rest of us here in Colorado, we need something nearby.
Let’s join Sens. Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar, who have come together from opposing sides of the aisle to reject this shortsighted, boneheaded idea.
