Mitt Romney Energy Plan - Common Land Is Limitless, Common Land Is Ours
from Charles P. Pierce at Esquire: www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-energy-proposal-12042297
ROCK HILL, S.C. — There's a place along the highway as you leave Virginia and enter North Carolina, where you come around a bend and out from around behind a mountain and, off to your left, there's a long, steep drop, and a valley that seems to spread out forever toward a dozen horizons you can't even see. There's a steep slope to your right, and almost nothing to your left but air and sprawling distant beauty. If you catch it at the right time of day, with the sun already dropped behind the mountains, but not yet set, and the mist spreading itself down across the valley ahead of the nightfall, it can make you wonder if, at some point, in your black van burning the fossil fuels, driving down the great highway system that President Ike and the increasingly, madly mobile country he led decided to turn into that country's circulatory system, replacing the rivers, you hadn't passed through a pass in the mountains and come out, like the children of Hamelin, in another world . . .
The other day, Willard Romney proposed his energy plan for the United States. I was driving through other mountains, these in Pennsylvania, when he did, so I missed the news as it happened. I have been catching up, little by little, but the one part that has stuck with me is Romney's proposal to hand federal lands over the states to do with what they will in their common illusion that everything in this country is limitless. There are practical political reasons not to do this. I know it's an article of faith among conservatives that government is best the "closer" it gets to the people, because it is allegedly more accountable to them. Therefore, state governments are better than the federal government. Following that logic, we inevitably find ourselves in the sovereign-citizens movement, where all power resides in the county sheriff.
Sometimes, I wonder if the people propounding this axiom ever actually lived in any of the states themselves. The abiding characteristics of state governments is that they tend to be more prone to ignorance and much more cheaply bought . . . Give most state legislatures the power to do so, and they will sell off your federal lands for pennies on the dollar and two seats in the owner's box at Cowboys games. The governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, and his legislature passed a bill that would allow the state to stick a probe up a lady's hoohah without her consent. Do you honestly believe he wouldn't stick a bunch of oil wells down in that valley because the people who financed his career told him to? I've long believed that the the resistance of many people to newer forms of energy is that you cannot see the wind. You cannot put solar power through a pipeline. They are impossible to commodify and sell because whoever thought of sunlight as a means of exchange.
But there is another, deeper, more American reason why Romney's notion, which arose from the fever swamps of the "Wise Use" movement out west — which itself has an interesting history as regards allying itself with people who have fascinating notions of governmental authority — is a frightfully dangerous one. The lands in question belong to us all. They belong not only to those of us lucky enough to be able to go out and see them, but they also belong to the kid in the ghetto who's never seen a mountain, or the kid in the Rez who's never looked upon the sea. These places are important for all of us because it is important for all of us simply to know they are there. Long ago, Joseph Wood Krutch, the great environmentalist of the Southwest, warned us all that, "If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either." The lands that Mitt Romney wants to hand over the the Bobby Jindals of the several states are our common property, whther we actually have walked their trails ourselves or not. They are the repository of our dreams, the places where we have stored the old idea of America before "internal improvements," and canals, and railroads, and, ultimately, Ike's highways, brought them all gradually closer to us. Maintaining federal lands because they belong to all of us is to acknowledge formally that the only thing thing that is truly limitless about this country and its people is its imagination. Which is how that valley seems to spread out forever through the mist that precedes the night.
read essay: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-energy-proposal-12042297