Does this land need "liberating" from the federal government? Photo of the Umpqua National Forest from the U.S. Forest Service.
Apparently they do, according to Oregonians in Action. The property rights group says it will lobby the next Legislature to pass a law giving Oregon the power to condemn and seize federally owned land in the state.
That includes 15 National Forests and Monuments, a National Park, and millions of acres of land managed by the BLM. About 55% of the state is federal land, according to OIA.
The group argues the state could do a better job of managing forests than the federal government. It complains of environmental rules that, “have gone too far”.
“The results have been predictable,” says OIA, “the failure to properly manage federal forestland has resulted in catastrophic wildfires, the loss of wildlife habitat, and the slow destruction of Oregon’s timber industry.”
While the group raises some legit issues, the intent here is to increase logging in Oregon forests and put more timber land into private ownership.
The proposed legislation is modeled after a law passed in Utah earlier this year. The sponsors of that legislation want to take over the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and open it up for coal mining.
Utah’s Attorney General and the Legislature’s legal counsel admit the law probably will be overturned by federal judges. The real purpose is to ignite a legal battle that could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where conservative justices might come up with a friendlier ruling.
For More Information:
Natural Resource Report: OIA plan: Use state to condemn and liberate Federal land
Salt Lake Tribune: Utah lawmakers propose using eminent domain to take federal land (Written before the law was passed.)
Deseret News: American Indians first to face land-grab controversy
I really hope this doesn’t come to pass. The best answer to Oregon forests in my humble opinion is to manage them for growth – ie, the growth of the trees. The world needs trees in the ground, not cut down. Want to fight global warming? Keep Oregon trees standing, and that means on private forestlands, too.
This proposal is, in a word, nuts. There are a couple of minor clauses in the U.S. Constitution that prevent this from ever becoming effective, even given the political leanings of the current U.S. Supreme Court (Art. IV, Sec. 3 which vests sole power in Congress to dispose of Property belonging to the United States, and Art. VI which declares that the U.S. Constitution and federal laws are the supreme law of the land notwithstanding any state law).
It would be a pointless waste of money for the legislature to spend even a minute of time on a proposal as senseless as this. Oregonians deserve to have their legislature consider legislative proposals that at least pass a threshold rationality test, which this one does not. “Because the Utah Legislature passed something similar” is, to put it mildly, not a reliable standard for whether a piece of legislation is not certifiably insane.