Lawmaker Says States With Public Lands Are At The ‘Back Of The Bus’
BY NICOLE GENTILE - GUEST CONTRIBUTOR MAR 7, 2016 1:02 PM
... Ivory’s quote refers to the federal ownership of national parks, forests, and other public lands throughout the West — a system that he opposes, saying instead that the states should control the land within their borders. His metaphor implies that he and others who want to get rid of America’s national parks and public lands are like Rosa Parks, the civil rights leader whose act of civil disobedience to protest segregation sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal moment in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Ken Ivory, however, is not a civil rights leader. Instead, he’s the director of an organization funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch that aims to dispose of America’s national forests, monuments, and other public lands. Ivory is also the former head of the American Lands Council, an organization that, under his leadership, was the subject of ethics complaints as it lobbied politicians to transfer U.S. public lands to state and private control.
Ivory’s comments are not only offensive to the memory of real American civil rights leaders, but they mischaracterize the value of parks, national forests, and other public lands in western states. Seventy-two percent of western voters believe that national public lands help the economy, and a recent study from Headwaters Economics found that western counties with higher amounts of protected public lands have higher incomes and better job growth.
Ivory has made similar comments before. At the end of 2014, Ivory compared himself to Mahatma Gandhi in a (now-deleted) tweet, equating Gandhi’s lifelong activism for human rights through nonviolent protest with his own quest to turn over control of public lands to the states ...
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/03/07/3757253/ken-ivory-land-seizure-comments/
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