LOSING ACCESS TO OUR PUBLIC LANDS

When I was growing up, I had the opportunity to be a Girl Scout from the age of 8 to 18.

The most fun I had in scouting was on camping trips. Our scout leader taught us about camping in the woods, from building a fire and starting it without matches to pitching a tent, or making a soft place to sleep on pine needles and leaves under the stars.

We caught fish, cleaned and cooked them over a fire. We learned to mark trails so we wouldn’t get lost, and I’ll never forget my first “snipe hunt.”  I also remember waking up one morning with a tarantula in my sleeping bag. I guess it wanted to stay warm as well.

I have lived in a city from the age of 5 on. I loved being in the woods, and when I had kids, we took them camping as well. Enjoying nature’s bounty has given me as well as our children an appreciation for the great outdoors.

Terry and I moved to North Idaho more than 12 years ago, knowing we wanted to spend the rest of our lives in the mountains. We became avid snowmobile riders and enjoy taking to the trail on our all-terrain vehicle.

Fishing and boating are so relaxing up here and just walking through the woods and enjoying the wildlife is awesome.

Now, the lifestyle that we all enjoy in Boundary County will soon be taken away from us through legislation and via extreme environmentalists if we don’t stand up and be heard.  The U.S. Forest Service is presenting their Draft Supplemental Environment Impact Statement for final approval.

We, the public, only have until June 22 to submit our comments and opinions to the Forest Service. This plan encompasses 4,560 square miles of what the Forest Service considers Grizzly Bear habitat, which affects the Kootenai, Idaho Panhandle and Lolo national forests. The auspices of this draft are under the Endangered Species Act.

Man and animal have lived together for millennia, and both have not only survived but thrived.  Every time government gets involved with Mother Nature, things go wrong.

You don’t have to leave our region or think back too far, to remember the fiascoes revolving around Canadian Caribou, the lynx, and current problems because of the introduction of wolves as an endangered species to Idaho, and the list goes on.

It would be wonderful if the states took over the U.S. Forest Service and administered our public lands at the state level. 

In addition to the DSEIS report, there is legislation in Washington (H.R. 980, Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act) which, if passed, will take an additional 24 million acres in the northwest and designate it as wilderness.

This legislation will literally lock us out of the forests that are part of our lives, all in the name of protecting the ecosystem of the area. This proposed federal legislation is proposed by a Democratic senator from New York.

This legislation alone will destroy our quality of life as well as the economic viability of our community. We need to stand together to protect our freedom to use public lands which were endowed to us as citizens of this country.

If our public lands are listed as wilderness, our children and grandchildren will not have the opportunity to snowmobile, ride an ATV or horse, camp, hunt, fish, or even gather huckleberries in our national forests, all under the guise of protecting the environment, knowing that the extreme environmentalist agenda is to shut us out completely.

They do not understand the premise of compromise and common sense. Those of us that use the forest are conservationists at heart. We know that to do otherwise would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

It is the goal of the extreme environmentalists to promote their own agendas and self interests to the detriment of all of us and our way of life. As P.J. O’Rourke said, “People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.” 

To make comments to the USFS, I have the contact information at  http://donnacapurso.blogspot.com.

To comment on HR 980, go to https://writerep.house.gov.