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<div class="ad"> </div></div><div id="opinionator"><div align="left"><span class="timestamp published" title="2012-03-08T20:30:21+00:00">March 8, 2012, <span>8:30 pm</span></span><h3 class="entry-title">The Trees Are All Right</h3>
<address class="byline author vcard">By <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/" class="url fn" title="See all posts by TIMOTHY EGAN">TIMOTHY EGAN</a></address><div class="entry-content"><div class="inlineModule">
<div class="entry categoryDescriptionModule"><p class="summary"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/">Timothy Egan</a> on American politics and life, as seen from the West.</p></div><div class="entry entryTagsModule">
<h4>Tags:</h4><p class="meta tags"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/national-parks/" rel="tag">national parks</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/public-land/" rel="tag">public land</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/republicans/" rel="tag">republicans</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/romney/" rel="tag">romney</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/santorum/" rel="tag">santorum</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/trees/" rel="tag">trees</a></p>
</div></div><p>In
most of the American West, the trees are not the right height, which
may frighten Mitt Romney, and some of them are so old as to challenge
the biblical view of creation that Rick Santorum wants taught in
schools.</p><p>The tallest trees in the world, the coast redwoods of
northern California, grow to 378 feet — more than half the size of
Seattle’s Space Needle. The oldest trees in the world, bristlecone
pines that cling to hard ground in Nevada’s Great Basin, can live for up
to 5,000 years.</p><p>The saguaro cactus, with its droopy,
anthropomorphic limbs, is the signature tree of the Southwest, though
some say it is not technically a tree. And the western red cedar,
armored in bark that Indians made into waterproof clothing, is a symbol
of the Northwest.</p><p>This arbor tutorial is prompted by the
slack-jawed ignorance of the last Republicans standing in the
bad-idea-fest that is their party primary. Every week, it seems, the
conveyor belt of craziness serves up another archaic idea from the
people who want to represent a party that claims at least 40 percent of
the electorate.<br> <br> Romney, of course, famously said he liked the
trees of Michigan because they were “just the right height” — a bizarre
and harmless pander. But last month, in a campaign swing that was
overlooked by the national press, Romney told a gathering in Nevada that
he wasn’t much of a fan of the trees on public land — at least that
was the impression he left.</p><p>He said, “I don’t know what the
purpose is” of the great American public land legacy — a domain that
includes 190 million acres of national forests, 52 million acres of
national parks, and more than 500 million acres of open range, wildlife
refuges and other turf under management of the Interior Department.</p><p>Romney
has never been much of an outdoor guy, and strikes me as the kind of
person who would wear wingtips on a hike. Once, asked to give a sense of
his outdoor cred, Romney said, “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit
hunter — small varmints, if you will.”</p><p>Had he ever taken something
other than a BB gun beyond the bunny range, Romney would know that
American hunters consider themselves privileged to have so much unfenced
country that is theirs as a birthright of citizenship. A clueless rich
man, Romney can afford the private ranches of Texas, where
one-percenters chase exotic animals without breaking a sweat.</p><p>The
rest of us need our public land. The West is defined by new,
fast-growing cities surrounded by the mountains, mesas, forests,
sandstone spires and various shared settings. There is no other place in
the world where urban and wild coexist over such a huge area. If you
are poor, you can feel rich just minutes from the city, in your estate
that is a national forest. If you ski in the high Sierra, or raft a
runaway river in Utah, you are most likely doing it on land whose only
deed of title is held by all citizens.</p><p>“Unless there’s a valid,
legitimate and compelling public purpose, I don’t know why the
government owns so much of this land,” said Romney.</p><p>Using Romney’s
calculation — in which these lands can only be viewed as a commodity —
the public domain more than pays for itself. Federal lands in Nevada,
for example, provide about $1 billion in economic impact and support
13,311 jobs — and that doesn’t include the Forest Service. A poll by
Colorado College found that 93 percent of the state’s voters agree that
national parks, forests and wildlife areas “are an essential part of
Colorado’s economy.”</p><p>Not to be outdone, Rick Santorum has
channeled his inner robber baron while in the West. Speaking in Boise
last month, he promised to sell our land to the private sector. The last
time somebody seriously proposed that — James Watt, the secretary of
the interior under President Reagan — he got a bipartisan round of boos
from all corners of the West.</p><p>“The federal government doesn’t care
about this land,” Santorum said. “They don’t live here, they don’t
care about it. We don’t care about it in Washington. It’s flyover
country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”</p><p>It’s
clearly flyover country to Santorum. But try telling the many federal
forest and park rangers, the smokejumpers and fish biologists, the
backcountry avalanche experts and the game wardens, all of whom live in
Western towns — and keep the economy in those places humming — that
they “don’t live here.”</p><div class="w427">The New York TimesGifford Pinchot, first Chief of the United States Forest Service, in Pennsylvania in 1933.</div><p>Santorum
makes national forests sound like crack houses. Some of them, after
long neglect, do look a bit ratty. But the best are American cathedrals.
Santorum probably doesn’t know that a former governor of his home
state, Gifford Pinchot, was the founder of the modern Forest Service.
Pinchot was a rich man who spent his life advocating for places where
“the little man,” in his parlance, would be king.</p><p>We can thank a
hunter, a lover of nature and a man who was always thinking about the
kind of country his great-grandchildren would inherit — the
fire-breathing Republican Teddy Roosevelt — for most of the nation’s
public land. But today, no Republican would dare stand with T.R.</p><p>So
it goes in this retrograde campaign. Is there any long-held,
much-cherished American principle that Republicans and their media
outlets will not renounce? Is there any bad idea from the 19th century —
or earlier — they will not resurrect?</p><p>Romney has shown that he
knows the lyrics to “America the Beautiful.” Too bad he doesn’t know
anything about the land itself — a gift of better minds than his, one
that ensures that some things are equal in this democracy.</p></div></div></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>