‘Wild Lands 2.0′: Defeated Salazar Policy Resurrected in Back-Door BLM Move
Western lawmakers are crying foul over new Interior Department guidelines that resurrect the controversial Wild Lands policy that was killed by Congress in April 2011.
Bureau of Land Management manuals uncovered by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) include language nearly identical to the draft proposal put forth by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in December 2010. The “Wild Lands” policy was intended to identify and manage wilderness areas while circumventing the normal — and transparent — congressional process.
Pulling manuals from the BLM site on July 31, the lawmakers compared the policies and found the new language to be even “harsher” than Wild Lands in the “carte blanche authority” granted to the agency.
“In some circumstances conditions relating to wilderness characteristics may have changed over time, and an area that was once determined to lack wilderness characteristic many now possess them,” states one section of the BLM text. Both manuals include a provision that gives BLM the authority to identify any “roadless island of the public lands” as possessing wilderness characteristics, even under 5,000 acres in defiance of the Wilderness Act.
Bishop said that the new land management practices essentially create de-facto wilderness areas and would unfairly stack the deck against multiple-use management.
“This is clearly an effort to establish ‘Wild Lands 2.0’ and abandons all previous commitments Secretary Salazar made to me and many other western members to work openly and collaboratively on new land management practices,” Bishop said. “Excerpts within these handbooks clearly depict a thinly veiled effort on behalf of this administration to further limit access to our nation’s public lands.“
“Once again, the Obama administration shows its ‘Washington knows best’ mentality,” Hatch said. “Even though these proposals have already been overwhelmingly rejected, the administration is attempting to administratively put these policies in place. This proposal will give Washington bureaucrats more control over the lands in Utah and across the West.“
The Senate Western Caucus reacted angrily to the revelation, with 18 members of the caucus including Bishop and Hatch firing off a letter to Salazar about the backdoor policy move.
“You have stated on more than one occasion that it is important that both you and the Department work with Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” wrote the lawmakers, led by caucus chairman Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “This sentiment was reaffirmed when you met with many of us following the fallout of the Wildlands Secretarial Order. The Department’s recent actions greatly undermine both your commitment to working with us, your duty to follow both the letter and spirit of the Congressional mandate to withhold funding for the Wildlands policy, and the Obama Administration’s commitment towards being the ‘most transparent’ in history.”
They asked Salazar to pull the BLM manuals out of use immediately and move forward with a public process to craft new directives.
“To that end, we request a briefing with you to discuss when Manuals 6310 and 6320 were posted on the internet, the extent to which Manuals 6300-1 and 6300-2 were used in crafting Manuals 6310 and 6320, and the Department’s plan to withdraw and reissue new manuals in an open and transparent process,” the letter states.
The caucus members stressed that the fact that the manuals were developed and released with no public notice raised “deep skepticism for the motives behind the underlying directives” — particularly considering how unpopular the original Wild Lands proposal was.
No one is afraid of congress any more. What are they gonna do? Write another sternly worded letter? Have a press conference? Hold committee hearings? With hold funding? (Ya, like that will stop Obama, you betcha.)
He’ll just print more, that’s the problem. The President is literally Out Of Control.
Any wonder why I refer to this administration as a fascist regime? They completely ignore our democratic institutions.
“Rule through other means”
BTW There are areas of Detroit I would call Wilderness Areas.
I agree with both of you up there, you are not wrong, and I hate being “that guy’, but the growth of the executive branch started under Reagan, grew under Bush and Clinton and exploded under W. If you want to wrestle your freedom from the government, you have to being willing to wrestle it from the party you support too. I hope the vigilance does of groups like PJM and all the bloggers out there does not stop just because Romney is in the white house. This sort of thing goes on it is pernicious and it is far more dangerous than most anything else out there.
There is a problem though I think democrats abuse it far worse than republicans but with that said, I think it falls to a certain feature of human nature. One is perhaps the desire to “do something good” and thus a mini-bureaucracy is created in that vein. I’m being generous here by stating that premise.
However, as I saw in major chain-of-command structures, including the military, some leaders love the idea of being in-charge while avoiding blame. A bureaucracy is the perfect cover. However, in the military, it is bloody hard to avoid getting the finger pointed at the very top of the pile.
But in the case of democrats especially, they can blame the underling and throw them under the bus while keeping “squeeky clean”. Note, Obama’s having all these distracting policy problems while Nepolitano, Holder, etc have to answer for, basically, something he wants done HIS way. Not that the policy wonks aren’t complicit.
But bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy and more and more people have less and less responsibility overall…through compartmentalization. Everyone here has experienced this if they have ever had a problem with their insurance company or the DMV. “That’s not my department, I’ll have to get authorization to do that.”, etc. Thus, the person you want to aim your anger at is not the one who made your life miserable. THAT person is lurking somewhere in an office, shielded by several layers of cubicle monkeys, order-takers and mid-level swimmers. To get to the prick that created the problem, you have to wait, go through channels or never hear from them at all because they’re “just too busy”.
It’s a very old and common phenomenon. It’s also a convenient way to avoid having the finger of blame pointed at any one particular person. “Well, sir, don’t blame me, I just put the entries in the computer…it’s not my job to decide if it’s authorized or not”, and so on.
If you’ve ever gotten a collection call looking for a neighbor who moved away…and the collection agency starts searching by calling all the homes with a similar address (an unbelievably STUPID line of logic) and you call them to tell them to stop it, they are instructed by their dweeby little supervisors to not let you get a word in edge-wise. Trying to explain to these idiots that “I’m not them” yields a barrage of questions and then they have the nerve to SCOLD you about YOUR “attitude”.
But that’s just an example of bureaucracy run amok. Inside GovCo. it is little different. From dealing with the VA to the DMV and everything in-between they are categorically un-helpful. The reason? “They don’t PAY me enough to care.” I heard one of them say. The sad truth being that they hire people who can sit there for eight hours a day, not complain and do the busywork that doesn’t really requite any thinking but still needs a human to fill things out and differentiate where the paper needs to go..so far no computer has been able to do that. Although calling a help line and getting the FAQ-chick..the recording of the computer that “interacts” with you to direct your call to the right wormhole. More often than not, people get frustrated with it and hang up…double bonus for the bureaucracy. You get to suffer and they don’t have to answer your question.
Yet why does government bureaucracy grow? Entropy.
I agree with you 100%. It the same thing as the dysfunction in the Senate. It escalated every session until now only the majority party can get bills on the calendar, and the minority party filibusters every one of those.
PS I’m holding Obama accountable because I voted for him. In fact it is the primary reason I am voting for Romney. I never voted for Bush.
In accordance with the Constitution, the House alone could defund the BLM and EPA and neither the Senate nor the President could do much about it. Of course, that would require a majority of House Republicans to actually have spines…oh well. Instead, of course, the House passed another continuing resolution which actively supports these anti-American agencies and their lawless regulations. If you are conservative and voted for any of the Republicans who vote to continue to fund these agencies, shame on you!
The EPA and Corps of Engineers has been pulling this for years. The definition of “wetlands” has been expanded far out of proportion to include even land where standing water accumulates after rainfall. Obviously it is an incredibly loose definition that allows these two agencies the power to control these lands as wetlands, runoffs or even navigable waterways. Congress has not reined in these excesses for over a decade. Why should the BLM be concerned?
What Congress should do is fire the upper echelons of all of these agencies, pare down their regulations and put very strict limits on them in future.
Harry Reid is about to really take Romney down.
Soon now Obama will be way up in the polls Just as soon as honest as the day is long Harry Reid publicly reveals that his multiple sources have told him that Romney won’t release his older tax returns because in those he was using the SSN of a dead guy from Connecticut.and in an older return, paid some taxes on a scholarship he got as a foreign student, and that there are some very questionable items in some of those older Romney returns dealing with shady looking real estate deals in Chicago and Nevada.
It’s all over folks.
Very sad, try to stay on topic.
You do know that only your own true believers would believe what you are spouting. Your propaganda is really rather pathetic.
Feralcat’s post was a total send-up of Obama and Reid. They did the things in the post, not Romney.
L2read
We live on the California/Nevada border. The Federal government is absolutely taking the public lands away from the public. They are very methodically restricting access to Forest Service lands and BLM lands that have been well used by hunters, OHV enthusiasts, cyclists and others. It is a travesty.
Years ago (late 80′s-early 90′s) I lived in western Colorado. While roaming around on BLM-administered (public) land I noticed a disturbing phenomenon. Jeep trails out in the hills began to turn up with traffic counting devices on them. These were jeep roads that were remnants of the uranium-prospecting boom back in the late 40′s and 50′s. Generally there was NO government money spent to keep them up but they WERE used by hunters and ranchers locally. Most of the time shortly after they showed up with these devices on them, we would find them ‘squeezed down’ to 48″ or less at choke points that were extremely difficult to circumvent (due to drop-offs, natural ditches or other natural phenomena). This was to prevent jeeps and other such passenger vehicles from using them easily. They would be left this way for a couple of years (or until the local outrage died down) then the choke points would be ‘squeezed down’ again until they were too narrow for four-wheelers to get through thus in effect making them ‘foot traffic or horseback only’ trails. For all practical purposes this made thousands and thousands of acres of public land into de-facto wilderness areas WITHOUT HAVING TO GO THROUGH CONGRESS OR PUBLIC HEARINGS. This was all within the authority given to the local BLM manageer in the Montrose, Colorado District as part of his job.
With a little digging, I discovered that the man in this job, in that district was a closet tree hugger who implemented this plan with that goal in mind. It was his sworn personal mission to make it make it impossible for anybody (ranchers, loggers, and anybody else who was making a living off of public lands LEGALLY)to make an honest living there. I heard him state this specifically as his goal in a public hearing that took place later.
This was twenty five years ago and as far as I know these lands are STILL non-motorized areas. A wilderness area without any input from those ‘bitter clingers’. Facism, ‘western style’!!!
(At one time I considered live trapping 25 or 30 breeding pairs of prairie dogs and turning them loose on his favorite golf course and in his yard as a kind of a ‘hillbilly payback’ but thought better of it.)
And towards the end of the article, we see yet another example of Obama and Co’s efforts to take the coal business down. We, as a nation, cannot survive four more years of the current agenda, lawlessness and shredding of the Constitution by both sides of the aisle.
Yeah, and you all know that DHS brands all of us who comment regularly on this site as “domestic terrorists.” So, if 0 wins, don’t be surprised if there is a knock on your door.
The environmental Marxist Left wont be happy until we are living in giant Habitrails sealed off from the outside world like the dystopian world in the film “Logan’s Run”.
Even they won’t be satisfied.
No, only a “Rainbow Six” scenario will satisfy their dreams of being the only sophonts on this planet.
And unfortunately, getting there would be a lot easier for them than getting to Logan’s Run.
clear ether
eon
Power. It’s all about power.
The root problem is Congress. They pass laws full of motherhood, and do good feelings, with thousands of pages authored by every Lobbyist on K street. It is gobbledegook, no human understands it. This is signed into law at a photo op for some constituency then sent to some department for implementation. The political appointees, who may have zero technical or management experience, direct thousands of drones, who only care about when’s lunch? The farmer in the sticks has no chance in any conflict with this organizational structure.
The solution is to replace Congressmen, even the ones you voted for, IF reality, and their past promises, do not align. Most cemeteries have a greater turn over than the US Congress. Has it resulted in nirvana for you? The next solution is to shrink the government until it functions. Cut the federal pay roll 50%, and more would be accomplished. This comes from federal employees who are just fed up with their department. These are good people, but their bosses are brain dead.
Mr. Salazar is not the problem. He is just a lawyer and politician. Our problem is that America does not have a survivable energy policy, environmental policy, or public land policy. If another politician criticizes him for egregious Manuals 6300-1 and 6300-2, fire them both. One should have written a clearer law, the other should have followed it.
I just stopped my truck along the road and took a mean piss.. did I break some BLM law? Oh Jesus I’m scared. Wait, I think my burrito is knocking at the back door. See you Mr. Salazar.
It’s the UN Agenda 21
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