SOS Forests

The Wild Ride of Mr. Abbey

Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped - always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my! — Mr.Toad in The Wind in the Willows

Christmas last Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director “Wild” Bob Abbey stood next to his pal Secretary of the Interior “Mr. Tamper” Ken Salazar as he announced to the Nation [here] that the BLM would henceforth declare their own wilderness areas and if Congress didn’t like it they could go sit on a tack.

“O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!” said Wild Bob as he stepped into his shiny new motorcar and struck out on his wild adventure into the wilderness of bureaucratic zeal and excess.

It was not the first time that Wild Bob had thrown caution to the wind. A year ago Congress remonstrated Wild Bob for secret memos and documents spawned by the BLM that proposed declaring tens of millions of acres as “National Monuments” without Congressional approval, indeed without even telling Congress what he and Mr. Tamper were up to [here, here, here, here, here].

E-mails: Interior officials involved in national monument ‘brainstorming’

By JOHN S. ADAMS, Great Falls Tribune, July 6, 2010 [here]

…When news broke that Interior officials were considering recommending up to 13 million acres of federal land for national monument designation, Western GOP lawmakers went on the offensive.

“This naked abuse of power is not only a misuse of the Antiquities Act, but an egregious affront to the will of Montanans,” Montana Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg said in a statement shortly after the memo was leaked.

Interior Department officials were quick to dismiss the leaked document as nothing more than a product of internal brainstorming sessions. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar assured a Senate panel that talk of new monument designations was “false rumors.”

However, a Tribune review of internal Interior Department e-mails found that if that was the case, the rumors started at the top levels of Interior Department agencies.

According to the Tribune’s review, high-ranking officials at the BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service have been working for nearly a year on a series of “vision documents” outlining Salazar’s “Treasured Landscapes” public land conservation initiative. …

Mr. Tamper himself has abused the law numerous times. His first official act was to illegally discard the Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) and the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan (NSORP) [here], plans that had been crafted by thousands of collaborators in open public processes that had taken years to accomplish. Then Dodgy Ken was caught tampering with science documents again, this time regarding offshore oil drilling [here].

Despite prior remonstrance by judges, Congressmen, and pundits, Wild Bob and Mr. Tamper were undeterred from taking their wild ride, as evidenced by their Christmas bombshell “order” declaring the 245 million-acre BLM empire as de facto “wilderness”. But Congress is no weak sister, especially now after last Fall’s stunning rebuke by voters to the superlib Democrats. The New Guard are loaded for bear, and Wild Bob was caught with his paw in the honey jar.

The rebukes against neo-wilderness began almost immediately [here]. We shredded the BLM over new “magic wilderness” areas for their crass pseudoscience and a-historical revisionism [here, here, here]. Then western governors took up the pitchforks and firebrands and chased Wild Bob through the public square [here, here, here, here].

Then things got ugly.

Congress got involved, without much urging [here, here]. That finally got Wild Bob’s attention. You see, Congress (specifically the now Republican-controlled House of Representatives) writes the budget for the BLM. And Congress is feeling parsimonious these days, and looking for cut-backs, and Wild Bob’s BLM is in their crosshairs.

“Here’s the thing, Wild Bob,” Congress figuratively said to Wild Bob, “if you’re going to go off half-cocked on wild rides, in defiance of Congress, we will snip your purse strings and scissor your credit cards. Then you will run out of gas and have to walk home, you moron.”

In a five hour hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee the week before last, Wild Bob squirmed and whimpered like a spanked puppy [here].

‘Wild Lands’ Policy Would Allow Limited Development, BLM Chief Says

By PHIL TAYLOR of Greenwire, NY Times, March 2, 2011 [here]

“Wild lands” could accommodate rangeland improvements, wildlife-habitat enhancements or mountain biking as long as those activities don’t impair wilderness characteristics, BLM Director Bob Abbey said.

“As long as it’s not impacting the wilderness characteristics out there and wild lands, then that can continue,” Abbey told Greenwire after a nearly five-hour hearing on the wilderness policy before the House Natural Resources Committee. …

But mountain biking is not the issue, you moron, said Congress to Wild Bob, and your new budget is going to reflect our real concerns [here]. Wild Bob fired back, threatening to “furlough” the BLM if he didn’t get all the $billions his wild heart desires [here].

That extortionist threat did not impress. So yesterday Wild Bob and Mr. Tamper got all jiggy with alleged revenue generation by the BLM [here].

BLM touts its revenue generation for nation

By Laura Lundquist, Magic Valley (ID) Times-News, March 16, 2011 [here]

After several months of criticism over new policies, the way it rounds up wild horses and other issues, officials with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management took time Tuesday to lay out the agency’s economic contributions.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and BLM Director Bob Abbey also emphasized efforts to encourage energy production on federal land, both for traditional uses and more modern, renewable sources.

In Idaho, the BLM’s effects include almost 5,000 direct jobs and more than 2,000 jobs related to BLM activities. Almost four-fifths of the direct jobs are related to recreation, which brought in more than 6 million visitors and more than $300 million in 2010.

Grazing contributed more than $35 million and timber added more than $18 million.

“The BLM is one of the nation’s top revenue generating agencies,” Abbey said. “We return $4 in revenue for every $1 that has been appropriated in Congress. All together, the BLM generates $112 billion in economic benefits.” …

And Mr Tamper and Wild Bob promised to “boost permit approvals for oil and gas drilling on public lands” [here].

BLM to hike drilling OKs by nearly half

By Mark Jaffe, Denver Post, 03/16/2011 [here]

The federal Bureau of Land Management will boost permit approvals for oil and gas drilling on public lands 44 percent in 2011, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday.

Salazar said the bureau, one of the agencies he oversees, is set to approve about 7,200 permits in 2011, compared with 5,000 in 2010.

“We are leaning into the production side onshore,” Salazar said at a media roundtable in Oklahoma City.

The bureau is set to hold 33 oil and gas lease sales this year and a similar number in 2012, said Bob Abbey, the BLM director.

The next lease sale in Colorado is scheduled for May 12, with 11 parcels in Garfield County and one in Rio Blanco totaling 7,045 acres being offered.

“It is encouraging to hear they are addressing permitting (issues),” said Kathleen Sgamma, director of government affairs for the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group.

“But that is only part of the process. Project approvals are at a standstill,” Sgamma said.

Promises, promises. From the guy who shut down offshore drilling and Wild Bob, who is busy shutting down grazing on BLM lands, unless the animals doing the damage are “wild” horses [here]. Frank DuBois of The Westerner (a true American hero and champion) noted, “There used to be a Mustang Ranch in Nevada, but that was a horse of a different color. But, come to think of it, that was kind of a sanctuary too.”

Reference to moral turpitude, veiled or otherwise, hits the mark vis a vis Wild Bob.

The wild ride of Wild Bob careens ever onward. He will persist in unilateral declarations of magic wilderness, Obamonuments, and free-fire holocaust zones in his efforts to dehumanize the West. The policy of Obama Administration is to drive humanity off the land with whatever means are at their disposal. The Obama Administration hates the human race, and is proud of that hatred, and will wave the flag of extermination until they are booted from office.

Ten thousands years of human residency and stewardship of North American landscapes notwithstanding.

“I see you don’t understand, and I must explain it to you. Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city — a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.”

“But what has become of them all?” asked the Mole.

“Who can tell?” said the Badger. “People come — they stay for a while, they flourish, they build — and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”

Note: Special thanks to Frank DuBois of The Westerner [here] for archiving the blow-by-blow accounts, and to Kenneth Grahame for weaving his timeless precautionary tale.