Speaking at a campaign stop in Idaho Tuesday night, Rick Santorum continued the Republican presidential contenders' recent pattern of calling for the selling off of public lands.
According to theIdaho Statesmen, Santorum told Idahoans that:
there's a lot of land out there that is land that can and should be managed by stewards who care about that land. I believe the land is there to serve man, not man there to serve the land. If we turn that, obviously, BLM, they just don't — look, we're not going to have the resources to manage this land correctly. The federal government doesn't care about it, they don't care about this land. They don't live here, they don't care about it, we don't care about it in Washington. It's just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector. And we can make money doing it, we can make money doing it by selling it. So I believe that this is critically important.
Santorum failed to note that public lands—even those that aren't national parks—are of incredible importance to Idaho.
Interior Department-managed lands alone (not including the 13 national forests in Idaho) provided more than $1 billion in economic impacts to the state in 2010. Activities on federal lands such as recreation, drilling, mining, and timber also stimulated over 11,000 jobs.
Some of Idaho's best places are on public lands, such as Craters of the Moon National Monument and the Nez Perce National Historical Trail. Even the Bald Mountain ski area in Sun Valley is on public lands. Forests, grasslands, and national monuments are of tremendous use to hunters, anglers, hikers, ranchers, gas companies, and many others who utilize these places that are managed for all of us to use and enjoy.
Santorum also told the Idaho Statesman that "the federal government doesn't care about" public lands. It is difficult to measure how much the federal government "cares" about a particular issue, but all one needs to do is talk with employees of the BLM, National Park Service, or the US Forest Service to find the people that "care" about public lands. As for President Obama, just Monday he released an $11.5 billion budget request for the Interior Department, up slightly from last year.
Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney told a Nevada newspaper that he doesn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands. And Ron Paul told a crowd in Nevada that he wants "as much federal land to be turned over to the state as possible."
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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney likes to sing about America the beautiful, but he mainly seems interested in mining it.
In an interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal last night, Mitt Romney expressed his ignorance of why the United States owns and manages approximately 80 percent of Nevada's land, most of it uninhabitable mountains and desert. In response to a question about whether he would sell public lands back to the state, Romney stated that that "I haven't studied it, what the purpose is of the land":
Public lands in Nevada – and other western states—actually provide an enormous economic boost and sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indeed, recent Interior Department statistics show that federally managed public lands in Nevada provided over $1 billion in economic impacts and supported 13,311 jobs in 2010 (and this statistic doesn't even include the economic impacts of Forest Service lands, managed by the Department of Agriculture). Recreation, energy and minerals, and grazing and timber all play a part in the economic effects that public lands provide to Nevada. Activities like skiing at Lake Tahoe, boating at Lake Mead, and hiking at Great Basin National Park all take place on public lands.
Even Romney himself once mentioned on the campaign trail that when on vacations with his family when he was young "we went from national park to national park. And they [my parents] were teaching me to fall in love with America."
He might want to have a better answer about the purpose and value of public lands before he arrives in Colorado tomorrow. A recent poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project found that 93 percent of Colorado voters agreed that "Our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of Colorado's economy."
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney likes to sing about America the beautiful, but he mainly seems interested in mining it.
In an interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal last night, Mitt Romney expressed his ignorance of why the United States owns and manages approximately 80 percent of Nevada's land, most of it uninhabitable mountains and desert. In response to a question about whether he would sell public lands back to the state, Romney stated that that "I haven't studied it, what the purpose is of the land":
I don't know the reason that the federal government owns such a large share of Nevada. And when I was in Utah at the Olympics there I heard a similar refrain there. What they were concerned about was that the government would step in and say, "We're taking this" — which by the way has extraordinary coal reserves — "and we're not going to let you develop these coal reserves." I mean, it drove the people nuts. Unless there's a valid, and legitimate, and compelling governmental purpose, I don't know why the government owns so much of this land.Romney's statement stands in stark contrast to the conservative tradition of knowing the value of protecting the lands that belong to all of us places for future generations. Teddy Roosevelt, the great Republican conservationist, once said, "Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation."
So I haven't studied it, what the purpose is of the land, so I don't want to say, "Oh, I'm about to hand it over." But where government ownership of land is designed to satisfy, let's say, the most extreme environmentalists, from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other resources for the benefit of the state, I would find that to be unacceptable.
Public lands in Nevada – and other western states—actually provide an enormous economic boost and sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indeed, recent Interior Department statistics show that federally managed public lands in Nevada provided over $1 billion in economic impacts and supported 13,311 jobs in 2010 (and this statistic doesn't even include the economic impacts of Forest Service lands, managed by the Department of Agriculture). Recreation, energy and minerals, and grazing and timber all play a part in the economic effects that public lands provide to Nevada. Activities like skiing at Lake Tahoe, boating at Lake Mead, and hiking at Great Basin National Park all take place on public lands.
Even Romney himself once mentioned on the campaign trail that when on vacations with his family when he was young "we went from national park to national park. And they [my parents] were teaching me to fall in love with America."
He might want to have a better answer about the purpose and value of public lands before he arrives in Colorado tomorrow. A recent poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project found that 93 percent of Colorado voters agreed that "Our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of Colorado's economy."
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