Dear HCN,
In your article, “The
land is still public, but it’s no longer FREE,” you quote Randal
O’Toole, a forest economist, as saying, “… the government has
been managing land for ranchers and loggers, and collecting fees
from them (HCN, 10/13/97). The result … is that the agencies have
leaned toward the interests of industries. So why not manage for
hikers, boaters, motorists and climbers, and charge them, too?”
Apparently Mr. O’Toole is either very young or
has no sense of history. The rights to extract minerals and harvest
trees have been sold off to corporations for well over a hundred
years at a fraction of their cost and value. The U.S. taxpayer has
subsidized this wealth-transfer scheme, and we are left with
abandoned mining sites that pose real health hazards when dangerous
chemicals leach into water streams and aquifers, let alone
eyesores. Trees have been sold off for mere pennies of their market
value and prior to the “70s rarely replanted, and when they were,
they were and continue today to be planted primarily with a single
species, threatening the biodiversity of the natural
habitat.
To Congress, to those who think like Mr.
O’Toole, I say, let us charge extractive corporations the real
market value of those resources taken off public lands and
appropriate from those fees enough monies for the maintenance of
public-use facilities, trails, boating docks, bathrooms, etc. It is
an insult to keep coming back to the taxpayer trough to ask us to
pony up more money because our government agencies have mismanaged
what they were supposed to do in the first
place.
I assume that what Mr. O’Toole really
meant to say was that … the government has been mismanaging land
for ranchers and loggers … so why not mismanage for hikers,
boaters, motorists and climbers,
too?
John
Gerson
Santa Fe, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Let the exploiters pay.
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