Huckabee: “Wacko Environmentalists, Who Get Out Of Their Concrete Towers One Weekend A Month And Go Look At A Tree, Believe They Know More About The Care Of The Land Than Farmers. They Want To Tell Us What Deodorant We Can Use And What Kind Of Gas To Put In Our Car.” (Thomas B. Edsall, “Huckabee Pits God Against Greens,” The Washington Post, 3/27/98)
“For decades, Republicans have been pounded by charges that the GOP is anti-environment. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee may have found the ideal counter-punch: Accuse environmentalists of being anti-God.
The Bush administration
today released documents announcing its intention to remove protections for
more than six million acres of roadless areas in the national forests of
Idaho. Idaho’s roadless backcountry areas are some of the nation’s last
intact national forests and this proposal would open the door to their
development by corporate special interests.
They say environmentalists are using the wolf as a terrorist tactic to force ranchers off public lands they have controlled for decades through grazing leases. “We’re not saying kill the wolf. We’re saying remove the wolf,” says Catron County manager Bill Aymar. “It’s not going to end well if they don’t remove the wolf.”
The Bush administration did a deft job of damage control this week in sparing its spotted owl recovery plan from a chorus of critics calling for scrapping it.
Instead, a team of independent scientists will review it. Their assessment may well determine whether the plan survives and opens the door for increased logging in habitat for the northern spotted owl.
MONTROSE — The country’s forests play critical roles, absorbing carbon and hosting natural resources such as water, but they will likely shrink as the human population increases, according to an update of a USDA Forest Service report officials say can aid in local forest management plans.
The chief threat at that time was the New World Mine, proposed just outside Yellowstone near Cooke City. In 1996, the federal government bought out the interest of Crown Butte Mines, essentially eliminating the chance that the mine would reopen.
The Missouri Wilderness Coalition has proposed asking Congress to designate 50,000 acres, mostly within the Mark Twain National Forest, as protected wilderness. A wilderness area allows the land to remain unspoiled by development and preserved for future generations.
The Boise, Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project said the Forest Service failed to consider the effects of livestock grazing in adopting the plan for the 1.1 million acre forest.