By Daniel Greenfield May 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
The
Bureau of Land Management was formed out of the General Land Office,
which sold and distributed public land to settlers, and the Grazing
Service, which settled the range wars on the side of the farmers. Its
mission under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) is “the
management of the public lands and their various resource values so
that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the
present and future needs of the American people”.
Unfortunately BLM became a bastion of environmentalists opposed to any kind of development and, under Biden, even outright eco-terrorists, like Tracy Stone-Manning, his BLM director.
Tracy Stone-Manning had been the spokeswoman for
the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst and had sent a threatening letter to
the Forest Service warning that the terrorists had rigged a forest with
traps and concluding with, “You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt.”
Instead
of going to jail, Biden nominated the eco-terrorist to head BLM and
Senate Democrats, including Senator Manchin, voted to confirm her into
office. Instead of managing national resources for the benefit of the
American people, Biden’s BLM has waged a corrupt and dishonest campaign
to seize total control of them and prevent them from being utilized.
After Biden and BLM were forced by the court to offer oil and gas leases, they did it with a poison pill
by offering poor and played out sites, hiking royalties, and reducing
available areas, before pulling the auction due to “lack of interest”.
While BLM was sabotaging oil and gas drilling, American workers were
being economically devastated by sky-high gas prices.
BLM is now
trying for something much more ambitious. The federal agency, which is
not a legislative body, is proposing to dramatically modify the Federal
Register to redefine conservation, or non-use of the land, as a “primary
purpose” and then offer “conservation leases” to leftists to lock up
the land and prevent if from being used for grazing or drilling.
The
Bureau of Land Management’s leadership is proposing to unilaterally
transform its functioning from managing exploitable resources on behalf
of the public to banning exploitation of those resources while
potentially turning over as much as 10% of the nation’s land to
leftists.
BLM’s “conservation leases” would allow
environmentalist groups and others to seize public lands and potentially
place them off limits under the guise of “restoring public lands”.
These conservation leases would be offered to
“individuals, businesses, non-governmental organizations”. Most of them
would go to leftist non-governmental organizations or NGOs.
With
“conservation leases” running for as long as a decade, Biden’s BLM
would be able to lock up key development sites to prevent future
Republican administrations from opening them up to drilling and mining.
And Biden would be able to claim plausible deniability for restricting
drilling and mining by claiming that the lands are currently undergoing
“restoration” or “mitigation”.
BLM controls 1 in 10 acres, 30% of
the country’s minerals, and much of its oil and gas. The new
“conservation leases” could be used to cripple America’s energy
independence for a decade while keeping energy prices high. Furthermore,
Communist China, which already has ties to environmentalist groups in
this country, could use them as trojan horses to cripple mining,
especially of rare earth metals, to keep us dependent on Beijing for our
technology.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which was quick to cheer the proposed “conservation leases”, has been accused of extensive ties to the People’s Republic of China.
BLM’s
package of proposals would ‘Californicate’ land management across the
country leading to the same measures that crushed farmers, ranchers,
energy extraction and mining, created droughts and forest fires, while
abandoning productive land to cartels for illegal drug cultivation in
what was once a prosperous state for people outside San Francisco and
Los Angeles, and industries other than Hollywood and Big Tech.
A
proposed land health assessment would apply California-style “watershed
function, ecological processes, water quality, and wildlife habitat”
analysis to provide countless reasons to block any land use.
BLM
also proposes to redefine conservation from passive to active measures
for “maintaining resilient, functioning ecosystems by protecting or
restoring natural habitats and ecological functions.” This would provide
a steady flow of taxpayer money to leftist organizations and provide an
open-ended excuse for locking up lands until some ideal standard had
been met.
While conservation leases could run for a decade, “mitigation leases” are open-ended and run
“for
a term commensurate with the impact it is mitigating”. If you redefine
mitigation, as BLM is proposing to do, then these become endless leases
that are renewed every 5 years in perpetuity.
The Biden BLM move
would not only increase oil and gas prices while furthering our
dependence on foreign oil, it would also raise meat prices and help kill
ranching.
American ranchers are dependent on public lands for
grazing cattle. After a difficult few years in which ranchers have gone
bankrupt and culled herds leading to even higher meat prices, the BLM
and its eco-terrorist boss have aggressively gone after anyone who isn’t
eating soy.
Former EarthFirst eco-terrorist Tracy Stone-Manning
demanded the power to unilaterally change existing grazing permits to
compensate for the environmentalist hoax known popularly as ‘global
warming’. Under these proposals, BLM would constantly “evaluate” the
land for global warming impacts and potentially pull grazing permits if
its environmentalist fanatics objected.
This would make it
impossible for ranchers to run a business without ever knowing if a BLM
eco-bureaucrat might cut off their grazing rights any time that she
pleases. And the availability and price of meat in supermarkets would
soon reflect that grim reality.
Once the grazing land is defined
as not being “resilient” in the face of global warming, BLM would snatch
it away and hand it over as a “conservation lease” or a “mitigation
lease” to environmentalists determined to end grazing, the ownership of
animals and eating meat.
When meat prices rise and supply drops,
Biden will blame ranchers and meatpackers for “profiteering” rather than
admitting that this was the desired outcome of his own policies.
With
over 50 million acres of grazing land at risk, BLM has the ability to
crush meat production in the United States, much as it can kill oil, gas
and mining in this country. As a pleasing side effect, it will also
kill any number of conservative businesses while feeding money to the
Left.
Western conservatives have called for abolishing the Bureau
of Land Management before while urban conservatives have ignored issues
like grazing rights or oil and gas leases because meat seemed to come
from a supermarket and gas from a pump. But these seeming abstractions
have changed life for most of the country for the worse as part of a
larger environmental plot.
Beef prices are expected to increase
another 15% this year after a year of increases that raised retail meat
prices anywhere from 20% to 60% for consumers. Egg prices have put the
basic commodity off the breakfast tables of millions of Americans. And
gas prices have been rising again. BLM’s latest proposals are meant to
not only keep the pain going even into future Republican
administrations, but to change American living habits and expectations
permanently by systemically ending access to oil, gas and meat for much
of the country.
Turning over as much as 10% of America’s land to
the Left will end the middle class standard of living. California is a
test case, and unless BLM is abolished, America will become California.
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