Some of the history of how the BLM changed focus from management to conservation.
Wednesday, 16 April 2014 19:30 Bundy Ranch Family vs. Big Gov., Big Green, Big Media Written by William F. Jasper
“Hoofed locusts.” That’s how Sierra Cub founder John Muir saw domestic sheep and cattle. It is a term later adopted by Earth First! anarchist and “EcoWarrior” Edward Abbey and other radical enviro-actvists.
Muir, Abbey, and their ilk harbor equal (or, perhaps, greater) contempt for the farmers and ranchers who inflict the “hoofed locusts” on Mother Earth. The “locust” farmers/ranchers, like the “destructive” critters they produce, must be eradicated (humanely, of course), say the activists. That is why Cliven Bundy (shown) and his family’s ranch in Clark County, Nevada, are now in the headlines.
In the 1980s, a broad coalition of the major enviro-actvist groups targeted cattle ranching for extinction. Specifically, they initiated a multi-pronged, long-term plan to evict livestock from the vast “public lands” of the Western states. They planned to drive out all the ranchers by 1993, thus their slogan at the time: “Cattle Free by ’93.”
Some of that plan was detailed at a “Public Interest Law Conference” held March 7-10, 1991 at the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, Oregon.
A key presenter at the conference was Roy Elicker, counsel for the National Wildlife Federation. Central to Elicker’s message was the point that ranchers could be driven off range, the “public lands," by simply driving them out of business with costly fees and regulations.
“In other words,” he told the conferees, “if you start making them pay their true cost of what they're doing, they're going to fold up. They can't — if they got to go out and move that cow around six times, by the time they're done, they've lost their shirt.”
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Of course, this is the same strategy that was publicly announced by then-Senator Barack Obama, as he campaigned for the White House in 2008, when he assured his “green” backers that he would escalate the “war on coal.” Candidate Obama promised:
So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
Obama’s Region Six EPA Administrator Al Armendariz carried this philosophy to its logical conclusion, advocating that EPA officials use their “authority” with brutal efficiency. Armendariz said that his philosophy of enforcement “was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
According to Armendariz, you find folks who are not in compliance with the EPA’s constantly changing, draconian edicts, and “you hit them as hard as you can, make examples of them. There’s a deterrent there.”
The problem for Armendariz was that his comments were videotaped and went viral on the Internet, forcing him to tender a hasty resignation, in order to spare his boss political blowback. (To see a YouTube video of his remarks, click here.)
So it goes against all of the natural resource industries that are essential to sustaining a large, modern, industrialized society: farming, ranching, mining, logging, energy, fishing — all of these are under concerted, coordinated attack.