Nations public lands may soon be up for sale [View All]

[montana500]

www.wilderness-sportsman.com

""This land is your land. This land is my land."

There are a few common, uniting elements in our national life—the mortar binding our considerable diversities. Among the most important are: our currency—the dollar; our language—English; and our mutual ownership of the natural resource—public land. Those binding components have, perhaps more than any others, given meaning to the word united in the term United States and made whole the phrase “E Pluribus Unum.” We must neither underestimate nor misunderstand the essentialness of these simple common bonds in our American society with all its dissonance, racial, ethnic and economic conflicts.

That each of us individually have a claim to ownership of the publicly-held national land base is of intrinsic importance to our being Americans—genuine stakeholders in our magnificent landscape. To tinker with that bond is to gamble with our unique national unity.

On our behalf, the United States Congress has reserved the authority to determine the fate of the national landscape. For more than a century and virtually without exception, the Congress has carefully guarded the public’s land base. Very occasionally, following exhaustive review and lengthy public hearings, small land swaps have occurred between the public and a private party. The result was usually the enlargement, not diminishment, of the overall public land base. "