Utah to Federal Government: “Give Us Back Our Land”
This oughtta be interesting. If you like the red states’ lawsuit against Obama’s Affordable Care Act, you’ll love the state of Utah suing the federal government to get their land back. Who knows, it might even start a chain reaction of red states suing to get “their” land back.
Utah Governor Gary Herbert has signed a bill which demands that the federal government return Utah’s federally-owned public lands back to the state. That’s about thirty million acres. This land will have to be returned to Utah by 2015 Or Else.
In 1896, Utah surrendered these lands to the federal government in return for being admitted as a state. Now stop right there — I know what you’re thinking and the answer is NO. Utah will NOT secede from the union in return for getting its land back.
Damn it.
The governor has been warned that he has no legal grounds to stand on, but he insists this is “a fight worth having.” He said:
“The Bureau of Land Management has more control over our state than the governor.”
Who needs a bunch of sissy national parks and wildlife preserves when that land could be used for something productive? There are minerals to mine, golf courses to build; there’s oil to be drilled, natural gas to be fracked, trees to be cut down. That land is just sitting there, doing nothing, and we want to USE it for something.
As somebody commented at the end of the linked article, this land used to belong to the Indians; maybe Utah should give it back to them.
Labels: return federal land to Utah, Utah Governor Gary Herbert, Utah public lands
posted by Tom Harper @ 12:32 PM
7 Comments:
Maybe Utah will secede If the US does not give them back the land.
Jerry Critter, you said it. One can only hope.
The Mormons, giving land back to Lamanites?
Har. That made me smile.
Among other things, they're probably still mad about Bill Clinton's creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (which is almost 2 million acres). He used his authority under the Antiquities Act to create it, and people were furious about it at the time because there is a large coal deposit in it that is now not accessible. Most red states hate any kind of environmental protections, and Clinton's creation of the monument 1996 was probably like the crowning glory. My guess is they have probably been thinking of making some kind of claim or suit since then, and they have probably been studying it and think they actually have a case.
Personally, I think use of natural resources is important. But I think there are right and wrong ways to do it. Fracking isn't the way to get oil out of the ground; if we have to drill for oil, drill for it on all that land the government owns that has oil that isn't being accessed here in the lower 48... no need to drill in Alaska. Clear-cutting is not the way to manage forests; selective cutting and careful management is. And strip-mining and taking the tops off of mountains is not the way to get coal.
In Utah's case, I wouldn't trust them to use their natural resources without destroying much of what makes their state so great; it's not the people, but it's the natural beauty. Societies driven by religious "values" tend to not be good stewards, and good stewardship is what we need.
If Utah wanted to secede, I wouldn't really care. (Same with the Deep South too, for that matter! LOL!)
I loved the last line of your piece.
Jerry: One can hope.
SM: Keep your fingers crossed.
JR: Interesting; I had to Google the term Lamanite. The Lamanites vs. the Nephites. We spent the night at a motel in Nephi, Utah a few years ago. Now I know how the town got its name.
Snave: You're right, there are ways to extract natural resources, and ways not to do it. And the landowners and company owners think any kind of restraint or sustainability just "socialist bureaucrats," "a government takeover."
The red and blue states -- even when they weren't called that -- have hated each other for 150 years. It would be fine with me if we went our separate ways.
J: I loved it too. It was from a comment at the end of the linked article.
Good retort to some obviously crazy far-right attitudes expressed by that crazy gobernor!
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