continued....



Unfortunately, Rep. Stearns isn't the only prominent politician who thinks of the conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt as just so much surplus property. Some of the current candidates for leader of the free world have also mused about putting America's national heritage on the chopping block, and the House of Representatives has actually passed or considered favorably a series of radical bills in this Congress that amount to an all-out war on the concept of holding public lands in trust for future generations.

Republican presidential candidates have also recently been confused about the tangible and intangible values of our national parks and public lands. Mitt Romney told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he doesn’t know “what the purpose is” of public lands, Rick Santorum told Idahoans that public lands should go “back to the hands” of the private sector , and Ron Paul advocated for public lands to be turned over to the states.

Most recently, the National Parks Group accused the Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties completely removed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, of having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting “national parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at ever-increasing risk.” As Nicholas Kristof wrote in August, “[O]ld bridges have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and signs are missing.” According to the National Forest Service, Kristof reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the country’s 158,000 miles of trails meet internal standards. The Sierra Club told Salon that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of maintenance. Half of this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges, whose disrepair poses serious public safety threats. The amount allocated in the 2012 budget? $2.2 billion.

For Congress, though, it’s not enough just to defund our parks so they slowly fall into total, unusable ruin. In this country, it’s also important that we “Drill, baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log, baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.” All of these efforts create serious threats to our parks. In September 2012, the National Park Service identified forty-two park units where non-federal oil and gas drilling is or could be happening in the future. At the time, twelve had active oil and gas operations. Yet for plenty of politicians, this is still not enough. In the 2011 primaries, Michele Bachmann proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the country’s most endangered ecosystems. Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that includes turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well. And GOP thought leader Grover Norquist says to hell with all of it, let’s just turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private sector.