SOS Forests

Death By Wilderness: Mr.Tamper’s Latest Crime

A special Christmas gift was stuffed down America’s chimneys last week by none other than Mr. Tamper (Sec DOI Ken Salazar). Let us parse the announcement:

Update: Salazar, Abbey Restore Protections for America’s Wild Lands

Dept. Interior Press Release, December 23, 2010 [here]

Washington, D.C. - A secretarial order issued today by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar restores balance and clarity to the management of public lands by establishing common-sense policy for the protection of backcountry areas where Americans recreate, find solitude, and enjoy the wild.

Secretarial Order 3310 directs the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), based on the input of the public and local communities through its existing land management planning process, to designate appropriate areas with wilderness characteristics under its jurisdiction as “Wild Lands” and to manage them to protect their wilderness values.

Mr. Tamper issued a “Secretarial Order”. I invite you to read the U.S. Constitution [here] to see if you can discover where “Secretarial Orders” are listed. They aren’t. What Mr. Tamper did is wholly unconstitutional. He has relegated powers to himself that do not exist in our foundational legal document.

Mr. Tamper did not “restore balance and clarity”; in fact just the opposite. He has circumvented every law that deals with Federal land management and inflicted bias and confusion.

There is zero common sense to his usurpation and tyranny. The Secretarial Order is senseless and destructive, as we shall explain.

Mr. Tamper’s Order does not “protect” anything. Wilderness designation is a ticket to catastrophic destruction of every natural resource. Instead of stewardship, Mr. Tamper’s Order will lead directly to abandonment to holocaust.

Among the resources that will be destroyed is “recreation”. Recreation necessarily involves access and presence of people, particularly citizens, on the land. Wilderness designation bans access and presence.

For example, all citizen visits to the Sawtooth Wilderness have been proscribed because of wolverines. Wildlife pseudo-biologists have determined that the mere presence of a human being causes wolverines to curl up and die. The Boise, Payette, and Sawtooth National Forests are developing “Wildlife Conservation Strategies” [here] that will eliminate recreational use of their “Recreation Areas” and wildernesses because of the fragile sensitivities of wolverines.

Note that all three Forests have deliberately and with malice aforethought promulgated megafires over the last five years. The fires have eliminated all recreational use across thousands of square miles, but not affected the wolverines in the slightest (evidently). A crown fire ripping through 100,000 acres is no great burden to wolverines, but the presence of human being on that same tract of land is fatal to them.

That kind of lunacy is as far from common sense as Uranus. Nobody, not even the functionaries responsible for such lunacy, gives that tripe any credence. But that’s the official line. Pseudo-science is not just poor science, it is biased garbage motivated by the Luddite Left desire to eliminate all human use.

It is probably not worth noting that the wolverine is not endangered at all, because it doesn’t matter. Nor is the grizzly bear, but humans are banned from Rocky Mountain national forests because they might scare the poor, defenseless grizzly bears, too. For some reason human beings cause heart-stopping panic in wolverines and grizzly bears, according to the wildlife pseudo-biologists. That doesn’t seem to prevent wolverines and grizzly bears from raiding garbage cans next to homes, however. Don’t believe your lying eyes; government functionary pseudo-biologists know better.

Back to Mr. Tamper’s Order. He wishes to declare 245 million acres “wilderness” so Americans can “find solitude” there. When did “solitude” become an entitlement? Certainly if the Feds ban human beings from public lands, the few trespassing criminals who sneak in will enjoy a measure of solitude. When they are captured, tried, and convicted they may enjoy the solitude of solitary confinement in a Federal penitentiary, too. It’s win-win.

Another way to find solitude is to lock yourself in your bathroom, or paddle out to sea in a rowboat. You can do that yourself without the Government’s help, though.

Mr. Tamper is locking up 245 million acres for “wilderness values”, whatever they are. According to the Wilderness Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-577), wilderness is “an area where the earth and [its] community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain, An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which… generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”

But it’s a little too late for that. About 10,000 years too late, because that’s how long (at least) that human beings have been trammeling around this continent. Human beings have been inhabiting the 245 million acres that Mr. Tamper wants to lock up since Mr. Tamper’s ancestors crawled out of the sea onto dry land, and even longer because that egress happened fairly recently in Mr. Tamper’s case.

More from Mr. Tamper’s Order:

“Americans love the wild places where they hunt, fish, hike, and get away from it all, and they expect these lands to be protected wisely on their behalf,” said Salazar. “This policy ensures that the lands of the American public are protected for current and future generations to come.”

In fact Americans will be banned from BLM lands. They already have been in many areas. Ravenous non-endangered wolves dumped by Mr. Tamper’s Department onto Federal lands have decimated game herds. Fish like bull trout have been declared endangered and off-limits to fishing even though there are millions of bull trout in thousands of streams across the West.

You can’t “get away from it all”. That’s supercilious drivel. You definitely can’t escape Luddite numbskulls like Mr. Tamper, not on BLM lands where superciliousness reigns and you are banned by Secretarial Order from entering or being upon said lands.

Mr. Tamper’s Order protects nothing, as I said. It eliminates stewardship and invites catastrophic megafire disaster and degradation. “Protection” in this case is an oxymoron. More from the oxymoronic Mr. Tamper:

The BLM, which manages more land than any other federal agency, has not had any comprehensive national wilderness policy since 2003, when the wilderness management guidance in the agency’s handbook was revoked as part of a controversial out-of-court settlement between then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, the State of Utah, and other parties.

“The new Wild Lands policy affirms the BLM’s authorities under the law - and our responsibility to the American people - to protect the wilderness characteristics of the lands we oversee as part of our multiple use mission,” said BLM Director Bob Abbey.

In 2003 the Judiciary ordered the Executive Branch to revoke their “wilderness management guidance in the agency’s handbook”. Then Sec DOI Norton obeyed the court as she was bound to do by law.

Now Mr. Tamper and his Igor are violating that court order. The new policy does not affirm the law, it spits in the face of the law, and the Judiciary, and the US Constitution.

Note carefully the following from the DOI Press Release:

Because the “Wild Lands” designation can be made and later modified through a public administrative process, it differs from “Wilderness Areas,” which are designated by Congress and cannot be modified except by legislation…

Mr. Tamper and his Igor openly admit that the Secretarial Order is a means to circumvent Congress and the law. They have invented a new designation, “Wild Lands”, which is different (in their minds) from “Wilderness”. The stated purpose is to evade the existing Wilderness Act.

It’s not a crime if we call it something else. We are not robbing a bank, we are withdrawing non-personal-account funds. We are not committing arson on 245 million acres, we are prescribing natural fire. We are not violating the US Constitution, we are exercising policy discretion.

It is past time for the American people to exercise some discretion and shit-can Mr. Tamper and his Luddite Left minions. This land is your land, not theirs.