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Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: Why public lands should stay public and protected
Thanks to a recent blizzard of executive orders and late-night congressional maneuvers, the nation's public lands have become the latest target in the giant sucking vortex of current American politics. The current administration is proposing that we the people sign away our invaluable citizen estate, ostensibly to 'create jobs, fuel prosperity, and significantly reduce our reliance on foreign nations.' Before we do, it's important to calculate the true cost of this massive land grab. The federal government manages natural resources on the 'public lands' across the nation as a kind of 'commons' on behalf of all Americans. So regardless of where you live, you are part-owner of 640 million acres — roughly 28% of the country — protected as public lands. The vast majority of these holdings (about 95%) are managed by the 'Big Four' agencies: the Bureau of Land Management (245 million acres), the U.S. Forest Service (193 million acres), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (95 million acres), and the National Park Service (85 million acres). The evolution of this vast, shared domain commenced in the wake of the American Revolution, when the new nation's territorial appetite proved insatiable. After just 70 years, the continental outline of the United States looked as it does today. For this ever-ambitious republic, the key to extending American sovereignty from sea to shining sea was control over the land itself. Read more: Contributor: Will Native tribes secure Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument? To transfer public lands into private hands efficiently, Congress passed a series of laws: the Homestead Act, the General Mining Act, the Desert Land Act and the Timber and Stone Act, for example. While these efforts unleashed a white tide of settlement on federal and unprotected Native lands, privatization also wreaked ecological havoc. Historian Vernon Parrington called this giveaway 'the Great Barbecue.' 'Congress had rich gifts to bestow,' he argued, 'in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be.' After the Civil War, the federal government continued to promote Western settlement and resource extraction with little oversight or regulation. But the commodification of the nation's beavers, bison, whales, old-growth forests, salmon, elk, grizzlies, wolves and agricultural lands to supply an insatiable global market finally prompted a former Interior Department secretary to lament that Americans were 'a spendthrift people recklessly wasting [their] heritage' and saddled with 'a government careless of the future.' Read more: Trump downsized national monuments. Biden restored them. Project 2025 calls for reductions again Federal management of the public lands thus came about as a consequence of the relentless pursuit of wealth that devastated so many ancient American ecosystems. As early scientist George Perkins Marsh argued, 'Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.' By 1900, the myth of inexhaustibly gave way to the reality of diminished forests, waterways and wildlife populations. Unfettered capitalism, it turned out, caused real environmental harm. At this critical juncture, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the nation's 26th president. An early and avid advocate for protecting wild places and wildlife, Roosevelt embraced the Progressive idea that the federal government was the best steward of the nation's natural resources and the best guardian against their rampant capitalist exploitation. His setting aside of America's public lands adhered to the philosophy of 'the greatest good of the greatest number.' Read more: Confusion clouds the fate of two new California monuments To manage the growing federal wildlife reserve system, Roosevelt consolidated several agencies into the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905, which merged into the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940. Also in 1905, Roosevelt transferred the country's forest reserves into the newly minted Forest Service. Altogether, during his tenure in the White House, Roosevelt set aside nearly 230 million acres as national parks and monuments, bird and game preserves, and national forests. As the public's lands. 'We are not building this country of ours for a day,' he avowed. 'It is to last through the ages.' By 1916, the nation's growing national parks system — aka 'America's best idea' — got its own management agency, the National Park Service, to control poaching and vandalism. And in 1934, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, as homesteaders busted out, the federal government began to sunset the program by withdrawing land from the public domain and consolidating it, in 1946, under the Bureau of Land Management. The truth is that private resource users had proved poor stewards of the nation's grazing lands, forests, rivers and open spaces. The price for their economic success was, too often, ecological ruin. And because wilderness, parks, monuments, preserves, habitats, estuaries and ecosystems exist within a political system that enshrines private property and landholder rights, environmental protection needed both law and land to succeed. The public's lands had to be managed for the people. All the people. Read more: Treasured California dairies to close. Point Reyes locals say it's conservation gone mad One concept essential to understanding our public lands is this: Designations are not created from federally seized private lands. When a president establishes a national monument or Congress classifies an area as wilderness, these actions only change management practices on already existing federal lands. This is perhaps the most common misconception and one that erroneously fuels opposition. Each public lands designation carries with it unique management protocols. Understanding how restrictive the regulations are (or are not) provides insight into their role and function. Most prioritize multiple use — the greatest good for the greatest number — and even the most limiting, such as wilderness or national park policies, still allow for camping, hunting, fishing and, in some limited cases, grazing and even mining. The Trump administration's desire to sell off public lands and reduce national monuments echo an earlier Sagebrush Rebellion ideology: If the federal government relinquishes its control over the public domain, state and local economies will flourish. According to such logic, states lose revenue because they can neither tax nor sell these acres. More significantly, divesting the federal government of its public lands would remove protections against exploitation. Think 'drill, baby, drill.' And 'mine everywhere.' Read more: Love stories, rock slides, 50 pounds of dirty frankfurters. Yosemite post office, now 100, has seen it all Here in the 21st century, we cannot cling to unregulated 19th century economies without risking the ecological destruction that accompanies them. Scientists have coined the term "Anthropocene" to describe the time period, roughly since the Industrial Revolution, when human activities have increasingly defined the physical environments of the Earth. Even now, at the vanguard of climate change on a planet whipsawed by increasingly violent and destructive environmental crises, public lands hold the extraordinary promise of modeling a sustainable future for the nation and the world. The quintessential Western writer Wallace Stegner calls humans 'the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history.' But he also marveled at our capacity 'to save what [we] might destroy.' Our parks, monuments, seashores, battlefields, forests, preserves and open ranges are not partisan. They are fundamentally American. For Stegner, for all of us, the public lands — our lands — are truly the nation's 'geography of hope.' Sara Dant, author of 'Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West," is an award-winning historian and professor emeritus at Utah's Weber State University. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Why public lands should stay public and protected
Thanks to a recent blizzard of executive orders and late-night congressional maneuvers, the nation's public lands have become the latest target in the giant sucking vortex of current American politics. The current administration is proposing that we the people sign away our invaluable citizen estate, ostensibly to 'create jobs, fuel prosperity, and significantly reduce our reliance on foreign nations.' Before we do, it's important to calculate the true cost of this massive land grab. The federal government manages natural resources on the 'public lands' across the nation as a kind of 'commons' on behalf of all Americans. So regardless of where you live, you are part-owner of 640 million acres — roughly 28% of the country — protected as public lands. The vast majority of these holdings (about 95%) are managed by the 'Big Four' agencies: the Bureau of Land Management (245 million acres), the U.S. Forest Service (193 million acres), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (95 million acres), and the National Park Service (85 million acres). The evolution of this vast, shared domain commenced in the wake of the American Revolution, when the new nation's territorial appetite proved insatiable. After just 70 years, the continental outline of the United States looked as it does today. For this ever-ambitious republic, the key to extending American sovereignty from sea to shining sea was control over the land itself. To transfer public lands into private hands efficiently, Congress passed a series of laws: the Homestead Act, the General Mining Act, the Desert Land Act and the Timber and Stone Act, for example. While these efforts unleashed a white tide of settlement on federal and unprotected Native lands, privatization also wreaked ecological havoc. Historian Vernon Parrington called this giveaway 'the Great Barbecue.' 'Congress had rich gifts to bestow,' he argued, 'in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be.' After the Civil War, the federal government continued to promote Western settlement and resource extraction with little oversight or regulation. But the commodification of the nation's beavers, bison, whales, old-growth forests, salmon, elk, grizzlies, wolves and agricultural lands to supply an insatiable global market finally prompted a former Interior Department secretary to lament that Americans were 'a spendthrift people recklessly wasting [their] heritage' and saddled with 'a government careless of the future.' Federal management of the public lands thus came about as a consequence of the relentless pursuit of wealth that devastated so many ancient American ecosystems. As early scientist George Perkins Marsh argued, 'Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.' By 1900, the myth of inexhaustibly gave way to the reality of diminished forests, waterways and wildlife populations. Unfettered capitalism, it turned out, caused real environmental harm. At this critical juncture, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the nation's 26th president. An early and avid advocate for protecting wild places and wildlife, Roosevelt embraced the Progressive idea that the federal government was the best steward of the nation's natural resources and the best guardian against their rampant capitalist exploitation. His setting aside of America's public lands adhered to the philosophy of 'the greatest good of the greatest number.' To manage the growing federal wildlife reserve system, Roosevelt consolidated several agencies into the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905, which merged into the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940. Also in 1905, Roosevelt transferred the country's forest reserves into the newly minted Forest Service. Altogether, during his tenure in the White House, Roosevelt set aside nearly 230 million acres as national parks and monuments, bird and game preserves, and national forests. As the public's lands. 'We are not building this country of ours for a day,' he avowed. 'It is to last through the ages.' By 1916, the nation's growing national parks system — aka 'America's best idea' — got its own management agency, the National Park Service, to control poaching and vandalism. And in 1934, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, as homesteaders busted out, the federal government began to sunset the program by withdrawing land from the public domain and consolidating it, in 1946, under the Bureau of Land Management. The truth is that private resource users had proved poor stewards of the nation's grazing lands, forests, rivers and open spaces. The price for their economic success was, too often, ecological ruin. And because wilderness, parks, monuments, preserves, habitats, estuaries and ecosystems exist within a political system that enshrines private property and landholder rights, environmental protection needed both law and land to succeed. The public's lands had to be managed for the people. All the people. One concept essential to understanding our public lands is this: Designations are not created from federally seized private lands. When a president establishes a national monument or Congress classifies an area as wilderness, these actions only change management practices on already existing federal lands. This is perhaps the most common misconception and one that erroneously fuels opposition. Each public lands designation carries with it unique management protocols. Understanding how restrictive the regulations are (or are not) provides insight into their role and function. Most prioritize multiple use — the greatest good for the greatest number — and even the most limiting, such as wilderness or national park policies, still allow for camping, hunting, fishing and, in some limited cases, grazing and even mining. The Trump administration's desire to sell off public lands and reduce national monuments echo an earlier Sagebrush Rebellion ideology: If the federal government relinquishes its control over the public domain, state and local economies will flourish. According to such logic, states lose revenue because they can neither tax nor sell these acres. More significantly, divesting the federal government of its public lands would remove protections against exploitation. Think 'drill, baby, drill.' And 'mine everywhere.' Here in the 21st century, we cannot cling to unregulated 19th century economies without risking the ecological destruction that accompanies them. Scientists have coined the term 'Anthropocene' to describe the time period, roughly since the Industrial Revolution, when human activities have increasingly defined the physical environments of the Earth. Even now, at the vanguard of climate change on a planet whipsawed by increasingly violent and destructive environmental crises, public lands hold the extraordinary promise of modeling a sustainable future for the nation and the world. The quintessential Western writer Wallace Stegner calls humans 'the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history.' But he also marveled at our capacity 'to save what [we] might destroy.' Our parks, monuments, seashores, battlefields, forests, preserves and open ranges are not partisan. They are fundamentally American. For Stegner, for all of us, the public lands — our lands — are truly the nation's 'geography of hope.' Sara Dant, author of 'Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West,' is an award-winning historian and professor emeritus at Utah's Weber State University.
Chicago Tribune
20-05-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act
Today is Tuesday, May 20, the 140th day of 2025. There are 225 days left in the year. Today in history: On May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which was intended to encourage settlements west of the Mississippi River by making federal land available for private ownership and farming. About 10% of the land area of the United States (270 million acres) would be privatized by 1934. Also on this date: In 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on his historic solo flight to France. In 1932, Amelia Earhart departed from Newfoundland in an attempt to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. (Because of weather and equipment problems, Earhart landed the following day in Northern Ireland instead of her intended destination, France.) In 1948, Chiang Kai-shek was elected as the first president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). In 1956, the United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. In 1961, a white mob attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the federal government to send in U.S. marshals to restore order. In 1969, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces captured Ap Bia Mountain, referred to as 'Hamburger Hill' by the Americans, following one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. In 1985, Radio Marti, operated by the U.S. government, began broadcasting. Cuba responded by attempting to jam its signal. In 2015, four of the world's biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup's banking unit Citicorp, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland — agreed to pay more than $5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to rigging the currency markets. Today's Birthdays: Japanese baseball star Sadaharu Oh is 85. Singer-actor Cher is 79. Actor-comedian Dave Thomas is 76. Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, is 74. Political commentator Ron Reagan is 67. Musician Jane Wiedlin (The Go-Go's) is 67. Actor Bronson Pinchot is 66. TV personality Ted Allen is 60. Actor Mindy Cohn is 59. Actor Timothy Olyphant is 57. Former racing driver Tony Stewart is 54. Rapper Busta Rhymes is 53. Actor Matt Czuchry is 48. Actor-singer Naturi Naughton is 41. Cyclist Chris Froome is 40. Country musician Jon Pardi is 40.
Boston Globe
20-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Today in History: May 20, Lincoln signs Homestead Act
Advertisement In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which was intended to encourage settlements west of the Mississippi River by making federal land available for private ownership and farming. About 10 percent of the land area of the United States (270 million acres, or 1.1 million square km) would be privatized by 1934. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, N.Y., aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on his historic solo flight to France. In 1932, Amelia Earhart departed from Newfoundland in an attempt to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. (Because of weather and equipment problems, Earhart landed the following day in Northern Ireland instead of her intended destination, France.) Advertisement In 1948, Chiang Kai-shek was elected as the first president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). In 1956, the United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. In 1961, a white mob attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Ala., prompting the federal government to send in US marshals to restore order. In 1969, US and South Vietnamese forces captured Ap Bia Mountain, referred to as 'Hamburger Hill' by the Americans, following one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. In 1985, Radio Marti, operated by the US government, began broadcasting. Cuba responded by attempting to jam its signal. In 1993, 'Cheers' aired its 275th and final episode. To celebrate one of the most popular shows in television history, the cast came to Boston. In 2015, four of the world's biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup's banking unit Citicorp, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland — agreed to pay more than $5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to rigging the currency markets.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Grant Cardone Proposes 'No Property Taxes For 65 And Over'—Says It Would Provide Relief To Social Security And Protect Seniors' Homes
Grant Cardone, an entrepreneur known for his outspoken views on money and real estate, recently pitched the idea of eliminating property taxes for people aged 65 and over. Cardone framed his proposal as a way to provide financial relief to a generation that may face increasing economic pressure as they Miss: Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — 'NO PROPERTY TAXES FOR 65 and OVER – this would give relief to strained social security and ensure the elderly can never have their homes taken away,' Cardone wrote on X. He compared the proposal to the Homestead Act of 1862, which he claims protected residences from creditors, though the act primarily focused on land distribution rather than asset protection. Cardone told GOBankingRates in 2024, "The money is going to run out. Social Security cannot support [retirees]. It's been a busted system my whole life," so he has been vocal about his concerns over the sustainability of Social Security. He predicted that the retirement age could soon rise to 73, arguing that people should be prepared to work longer if they want financial security. According to Cardone, the combination of rising life expectancies, inflation, and market volatility means retirees will need more resources to maintain their standard of living. Trending: Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary called Missing Ring his biggest mistake — Don't repeat history— The proposal sparked a wide range of reactions online. One commenter wrote under Cardone's post, 'How about just no property taxes? If you own the land, you shouldn't owe dues to the govt. If so, you don't really own it, you're just renting.' Another added, 'Yes 100%... once you retire and you have worked hard you should be able to just enjoy it.' He also emphasizes the importance of building financial independence outside of government programs, a consistent theme in his public messaging. Cardone believes that relying solely on Social Security is a risky strategy and advises younger generations to plan as if these benefits won't be available when they retire."If you're under 30 years old, you should think that the Social Security program will be broke by the time you get there," he said in a separate GOBankingRates interview, encouraging people to focus on building passive income streams through real estate. Cardone's proposal has sparked plenty of debate, but making it a reality could prove to be too difficult, if not impossible. Property taxes are usually handled at the state level, not by the federal government, which means this kind of sweeping change would face significant hurdles. Read Next:'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Grant Cardone Proposes 'No Property Taxes For 65 And Over'—Says It Would Provide Relief To Social Security And Protect Seniors' Homes originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
