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Friday, February 17th, 2012

Santorum In Idaho: Sell Off Public Lands To The Private Sector

Author:     JESSICA GOAD
Source:     Think Progress
Publication Date:     Feb 16, 2012 at 10:22 am
 Link: Santorum In Idaho: Sell Off Public Lands To The Private Sector
Stephan:   Almost no one except a few of the conservation organizations seem to be paying much attention, but there is a growing trend in the Theocratic Right to sell off public lands. Not only Santorum but Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney have made similar proposals. Just to be clear these public lands are the national parks and forests. There has been pressure from the corporatists for years to open up the forests to mining and timbering. It made a lot of progress in the administration of Bush the Younger. But now it is morphing into a argument that there ought not to be public lands. Having been a hiker, backpacker, rock climber, canoeist throughout America's extraordinary public lands for virtually my entire life I take particular exception to these plans. This is the parallel universe of the Right and, if a Rightist were to win the Presidency, we might see the end of the extraordinary vision of John Muir that became a reality thanks to Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

Speaking at a campaign stop in Idaho Tuesday night, Rick Santorum continued the Republican presidential contenders’ recent pattern of calling for the selling off of public lands. According to the Idaho Statesmen, Santorum told Idahoans that:

But there’s a lot of land out there that is land that can and should be managed by stewards who care about that land. I believe the land is there to serve man, not man there to serve the land. If we turn that, obviously, BLM, they just don’t – look, we’re not going to have the resources to manage this land correctly. The federal government doesn’t care about it, they don’t care about this land. They don’t live here, they don’t care about it, we don’t care about it in Washington. It’s just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector. And we can make money doing it, we can make money doing it by selling it. So I believe that this is critically important.

Santorum failed to note that public lands-even those that aren’t national parks-are […]

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