Posted on 06/01/2011 3:56:22 PM PDT by jazusamo
WASHINGTON — The Utah men who were the first in the nation to swing a legal sledgehammer to controversial wildlands policy No. 3310 are celebrating its demise, saying it's gratifying to see how the right kind of pressure can effect such a reversal.
"It's tremendous. It's the best news I have heard for a long time," said Uintah County Commissioner Mike McKee. "We are very pleased."
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday directed the Bureau of Land Management to abstain from designating any "wildlands" on public lands under its purview. Instead, he said the federal agency will work with Congress and other groups to come up with potential candidates for wilderness.
The reversal of Order No. 3310 comes after months of controversy and litigation.
Uintah County and the Utah Association of Counties were the first in the nation to challenge Salazar's order after it was first announced in December.
"It's a great day to live in a country where we have separation of powers, where Congress can undo a bad policy through the power of the purse," said Mark Ward, attorney and senior policy analyst with the Utah Association of Counties.
"That's what they did by taking away the funding option," Ward said of congressional passage of the 2011 Continuing Budget Resolution. The resolution prohibits any funds for enforcement of the order.
Environmentalists bemoaned Salazar's shift, saying it is a disappointment and an abandonment of the BLM's obligation to protect wilderness.
"This apparent capitulation to opponents of wilderness protection is deeply disturbing," said William H Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society. "We hope the secretary will reassert his previous leadership in recognizing the Interior Department’s responsibly to protect our most sensitive landscapes for future generations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at deseretnews.com ...
Ping!
What great news to come home too!
Thanks for the ping, Jaz!
Now I have to catch up on all this hilarious Weiner stuff. I missed all that too. Thankfully, ha ha!
Yep :-)
This will take the designation of wilderness areas out of the hands of enviro nazis both inside and outside of the BLM.
LOL! If you try to read all the articles on Weiner you’ll be up all night.
LOL!
Good but the communists will be back
You’re right, they won’t give up but it’s a set back for them.
YES....be on the lookout for ICLEI (Agenda 21 at the local level).....find out how many cities/counties in your state have already signed up with them....it’s the UN Agenda being forced from the bottom up on Americans....often without their knowledge.
This is great news! We have thousands of acres of BLM land around here that have begun designating as wildlands where no motor vehicles are allowed to go by blocking 100 year old dirt roads with boulders. Most of it is high desert not forest land.
I knew you’d appreciate this.
Eastern OR is much the same. Thousands upon thousands of acres of high desert administered by BLM and they’ve been pecking away for years to close some of it to entry for any kind of vehicle.
If lands are to be closed to entry it shouldn’t be at the whim of BLM or USFS employees and enviro nazis, it should be from an act of Congress.
Maybe some reactionary judge somewhere will sentence them to read and cypher the definition of “public” a couple of thousand times.......
For decades families with “grazing claims” to BLM land did much to improve it. Suddenly their decades of work/investment are being trashed by the enviro-nazis. I’ve seen it first-hand.
Many years’ back I was following a wagon trail along BLM land on the upper rim of the Piance Basin in a pickup only to be “intercepted” by a massive, knobby-tired Jeep Cherokee replete with multiple antennae, plastered with Sierra Club stickers, cutting offroad across the sage, spitting dust, stones and ground cover. The occupants proceeded to upbraid me for destroying a “delicate semi-desert environment” ! Yep ! When it don’t snow on the Piance things get dry...But when it does things get green in a hell of a hurry, too......>PS
Well said and true. Many say grazing stock on public lands is welfare to ranchers, nothing could be further from the truth.
Sierra Club members and other enviro-nazis seem to think they have the right on public lands to dictate to others what they can and can't do, most are obnoxious hypocrites.
The “enviro-nazi’s” agenda is blatently simple. They want to kill off most of the world’s population, (not including themselves - “The Elite” ) in order to preserve “gaia”. First step is to collapse everyone’s standard of living and independence from government. Controlling access to public lands is merely one step in that pogrom. >PS
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