Formerly most attempts to privatize public land have pretty much restricted themselves to trying to steal Bureau of Land Management or National Forest land from the American people. Pointedly privatizers always proclaim they’ve no intentions on Parks or Monuments.
No More. Now there is an effort to create a private national park in Montana called The American Prairie Reserve, assisted by some people with an ominous back story.
I first saw an article in www.nytimes.com/… I read a little and clicked onward. Later I ran across a very recomended comment.
Mr. Geddes (the writer of the NYT article) is a former employee of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC ) and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), both right-wing, all-government-is-bad think tanks. These ideologues want to privatize all of America's resources, including our public lands and parks. Ironically, many of these PERC and FREE individuals work for the state while railing against it.
I dug deeper into the FAQs, Mission Statement, took a look at the map, and didn’t like what I was seeing.
Dressed up with inspiring photos of yurts and pretty words about conservation is an attempt to use existing public lands to make a private park. Eastern Montana is a checkerboard of private and BLM lands, in this case bordered on the south by the Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge. As you can see they’ve tied up a lot of cattle leases by purchasing the attached private ranches, if they keep buying they can completely control access to all those public BLM lands as well as the Wildlife Refuge north of the Missouri.
I’m a public lands fanatic and I don’t like it. I belong to a conservation organisation whose primary purpose is to purchase habitat and give it to the United States of America.
There are many benefits to giving land to our government beyond securing habitat. Public lands can be used by everyone. It is the concept of jointly owned public lands in America that helps to shore up the basic idea of equality of opportunity that is the foundation of our North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
We in America have done ok at conserving most all of our large charismatic animals. People forget that a very few years ago most animals were on the verge of extinction. Whitetail deer, elk, bison, pronghorn, grizzly bear, cougar, wolves, eagles, all existed at vastly depleted and shrinking numbers. Now we have big fights over where we are going to put all the excess animals and in some cases how we are even going to control booming populations. I don’t think we need help from the private sector thank you very much.
Sorry for the rant, privatization of public lands will bring it out of me every time.
Below a very short humorous video for a little lightening up.