Crosstalk: How much land should feds own?

As a boy and young man drawn irresistibly to the wild places of the state, I focused primarily on the blessing.

An old U.S. Forest Service map of Mount Hood National Forest was my earliest guide: I found it just recently and smiled at the notes and routes.

Gibson Prairie is circled, as are routes up the Molalla and Clackamas rivers. There is a blue pen line over the mountain and out to Dufur, then north to The Dalles.

It's a little surprising how far a kid on a street bike can go.

For me the federal lands were a source of wilderness, fish and wildlife, woodcraft and dispersal camping.

All of which was described on my old map as “recreation.” Recreation, however, was just one of three activities for which the national forest was managed: Grazing and wood products completed the usage triangle described on the map.

There was a photograph illustrating each use: A log truck, a cowboy herding cattle, a tent in a campground.

In my exploration I never met a cowboy, but I did meet many of the cows and log trucks.

Adult employment with the Forest Service, in logging or mining or even as a wilderness guide were for a time part of my future dreams.

Today, recreation and environmental protection is seen by many as the primary, if not the only, acceptable use for our national forest.

Jobs in the forest are few and far between, mostly in the realm of wildfire fighting.

Like those who oppose the establishment of federal land ownership in the 1930s and since, I'm not pleased with the shift.

The gradual exclusion of human activity from the forest landscape is disturbing: Wild spaces today are unkempt and ravaged by fire and disease even as management plans – for forests and wolves, for example – are hung up in court and languish on the governors desk.

Those who see the federal lands solely in terms of how they enrich the lives of the visitor —which they clearly do — are forgetting the “multiple use” aspect originally envisioned.

No one understands the forest as intimately as a man or a woman who truly works in that environment.

Even an environmental scientist, gathering data and testing hypotheses is limited in their perceptions of the forest.

Studies and practice alike have shown that grazing — managed correctly with an eye to its environmental benefits — can help create a more diverse landscape for the birds and animals that draw us to these spaces in the first place.

Gibson Prairie, for example, is no longer a prairie today because of the lack of grazing.

And while we are still recovering from the over harvest of recent decades, the harvest of timber can also be a valuable tool in rebuilding the health and diversity of our public lands.

So while I support the “public ownership” of our forest lands, and even the sage lands under Bureau of Land Management control, we need to listen very carefully to those living adjacent to those lands and treat them — despite their small numbers — as equal partners in the management of those lands.

by RaeLynn Ricarte

I think the founding fathers would be horrified to visit the United States today and see the vast amount of land in public ownership, something they rightfully feared would lead to “mischief,” meaning oppression.

The federal government currently owns at least 47 percent of the land mass in 11 Western states. Oregon is 52 percent under federal ownership and the number climbs to 64 percent in Idaho, 66 percent in Utah and more than 85 percent in Nevada.

Meanwhile, east of the Mississippi, the federal government owns 5 percent or less of properties.

How did that inequality with its severe economic ramifications occur?

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that all new states would come into the Union on equal footing with the 13 original states.

When Ohio was admitted in 1903, Congress varied that policy to require that non-granted public lands be held by the federal government until they were sold to pay off the national debt.

That allowed eastern states to eventually acquire all but a very small percent of the land within their borders.

Congress then decided to depart even more from the U.S. Constitution by eliminating the sale or disposal of federal lands as western territory was acquired from Mexico.

By the time Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959, the people were only allowed to occupy about 4 percent of the state.

Different policies enacted between 1872 and present day have allowed the federal government to lock up lands for national forests, national parks, national monuments, coal and oil reserves, lands leased for profit to ranchers and properties where very little human activity can occur, known as “wilderness areas.”

This situation has created economic distress for rural areas, which have lost thousands upon thousands of jobs in natural resource-based industries.

And that is exactly what the founders wanted to avoid when they established clear limits in the Constitution about federal ownership of property.

In addition to holding title to the District of Columbia as the government seat, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17 authorized the government to purchase properties from willing states for “the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards and other needful buildings.”

In addition, the founders decreed that “just compensation” was to be paid when land was taken out of private ownership for the public good.

The founders worried about the possibility of states being “enslaved” by a federal government that owned large swaths of land.

For that reason, the Constitution says that federal purchases are to be made by “the consent of the Legislature of the State.”

Somewhere along the way, it obviously quit mattering to Congress whether states concurred with their land grab.

To add insult to injury, federal agencies don’t even manage the lands they own. Catastrophic wildfires have become the norm in bug-infested, diseased and overstocked forests.

Utah and other states are rightfully demanding control over land now held by the federal government. That is the only way to restore rural economies so families can prosper.