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Really nice article, thanks Wayne.<br>
<br>
Dave<br>
<br>
<br>
On 03/09/2012 06:46 AM, Art Deco wrote:
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<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
moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/national-parks/"
rel="tag">national parks</a>, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/public-land/"
rel="tag">public land</a>, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/republicans/"
rel="tag">republicans</a>, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/romney/"
rel="tag">romney</a>, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/santorum/"
rel="tag">santorum</a>, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
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>
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-- <br>
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com"
target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>
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