Lost in all of the fear and loathing of the Republican National Convention this past week, the GOP national committee approved a new platform that throws a bone to the types who cheered on last year’s armed takeover of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon.

“Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation … requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to the states,” the platform states, reflecting a long-held conservative animosity toward land managers and federal regulations that protect national parks, national forests and lands made available for grazing, mining and energy exploration.

The intent, dating to the failed “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s, is to chase the gol’-danged feds off of public lands and “return” them to local control, doing away with pesky environmental regulations that simply stymie business.

At its most radical manifestation, we see things like the standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, where family patriarch Cliven Bundy has refused to pay the modest grazing fees charged by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and in the inane siege of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by two of Bundy’s sons and a dozen sympathizers.

That the Republican Party has now made these sentiments an official plank in the platform should be disturbing to anyone who appreciates special places like Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, and the Malheur, a little-known, lightly visited bird sanctuary near Burns, Ore.

(Additionally, the GOP approved a stance that would gut the Endangered Species Act, specifically lamenting that that the potential listing of the sage grouse as endangered would “threaten to devastate farmers, ranchers and oil and gas production.” They called for any species protections to be done “in consideration of the impact on the development of lands and natural resources,” demonstrating a failure to understand the purpose of the law and that whole “web of life” thing taught in high-school biology.)

Make no mistake: This is an attack on the American West, an attempt to take valuable land and invaluable landscapes away from all of us and turn it over to the states, which may do with them as they please. Many, undoubtedly, won’t want to pay for the upkeep and staffing in perpetuity; some will seek to dispose of the property, piece by piece, in sales to private interests.

What the ranchers behind the movement fail to realize is that the states won’t be selling the land to them; it’ll be the deep pockets of the oil and gas industry and Big Agriculture who will be able to influence state lawmakers and pay what they propose is top dollar for the land. Then, they’ll prohibit access.

The GOP also wants to curb the president’s use of the Antiquities Act, which has been used to designate sensitive lands for federal protection for more than a century. It would require Congress and the state to approve any future additions of land parcels, meaning that a well-funded polluter with sufficient lobbying influence can ensure that pristine lands will never be protected.

In Colorado, where the federal government controls almost 24 million acres, or more than 35 percent of the total land, the effects of these policies would be to reduce opportunities, perhaps drastically, for hunters and anglers and ATV riders – typically a core GOP constituency – in favor of developers and gas exploration.

This is not an unintended consequence; this is what they want. This is the national party’s platform.

Without any recognition of irony, the Republicans suggested that the environment is in better shape than a few decades ago, despite consistent Republican efforts to undermine those efforts.

“Our air and waterways are much healthier than they were a few decades ago,” the platform states. “As a nation, we have drastically reduced pollution, mainstreamed recycling, educated the public and avoided ecological degradation.”

All of that is true. Their role in promoting those gains is not.

Steve Lipsher (slipsher@comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.

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