US Forest Service and National Park Service to fire thousands of workers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Out of control fire seasons due to poorly managed vastly understaffed land is a catastrophe.
What a catastrophic self own, America.
They'll make a deal with the private prisons to pay the owners for supplying workforce when needed. Unemployment benefits will be tied to a commitment to "volunteer" for emergencies.
My opinion is that probably strong and organized civil resistance is probably the only good venue now. Be it churches, clubs, unions or whatever. But not individuals in their homes.
You have good ideas. Bolster them with the power of love, my friend. It's our entire purpose, and love requires fighting injustice and cruelty.
As to what to do? Connect with the Source and let It guide you.
"There's God's side and the other side." --Katt Williams
This reminds me of one of my favorite things:
> Now I am enjoying the last rays of the sun again, marveling at the incredible beauty of everything that has not been created by man. The red dahlias at the white garden gate, the tall serious fir trees and the trembling golden birches with their now shining trunks in front of all the green and rust-colored foliage, the golden sun that enhances the luminous colorfulness of every single thing instead of, like the glowing summer sun, smothering everything that still wants to move next to it. Everything is so astonishingly beautiful that I do not yet know what kind of feeling my speechless heart should develop for it, for it is not yet mature enough for pure joy; it is amazed and content with delighted astonishment.
> Isn't it puzzling enough, and if you don't know the reason for it, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the terrible things that happen. Something great and unknown has intruded into my sheer joy in everything beautiful, namely a sense of its Creator, whom the innocent created creatures praise with their beauty.
> Therefore, only man can actually be ugly because he has the free will to separate himself from this song of praise. And now one could often think that he is capable of roaring over this song with the thunder of cannons and cursing and blasphemy. But I realized last spring that he can't, and I will try to side with the victors.
-- Sophie Scholl in a letter to her friend Lisa Remppis, October 1942
Of course just boiling it down to "love" is prone to misunderstandings, and bringing up "God" is like whipping out a hand grenade on HN. People with different perspectives read these words differently, and of course we get triggered by the religious fascists it makes us think of; but what can you do. Yet also:
> But I have learned that a hard spirit without a soft heart heart must be just as unfruitful as a soft heart without a hard spirit. I believe the sentence comes from Maritain: "Il faut avoir l’esprit dur et le coeur tendre". A word that is not experienced by the soul is a dead word, and a feeling that is not the womb of a thought is in vain.
-- Sophie Scholl, January 1942
> but what can you do?
Our love must be fierce in defense of the innocent. We must love God with all our being; only then can we more perfectly bring Its love down to this paradise in the face of all the terrible people around here.
God bless you, and may peace be with you. I am at your service.
But what is also needed is more and younger people running within the party and for office to create more pressure for bolder messaging and more decisive actions.
The D party had the problem of being perceived as the status-quo party, and that perception IMO is not wrong if you look who is in positions of power within the party. So if the Dems want voters to drop Trump in the next election they need to undergo a massive transformation, especially age-wise (maybe with the sole exception of Bernie Sanders who aleays was popular with people from both sides).
In short: You gave the crackheads the keys to your apartment and they are tearing the copper out of the drywall as you idly stand by and decided nothing can be done.
I was always amazed at how much of the US is national parks, what a treasure for you guys over the pond I thought. My home country also has large swaths of untouched land but my content is way overcrowded.
I feel sorry.
Seems to be pretty much nothing these days.
We ought to share our land with our youth to homestead, in this housing crisis. I had to build on truly terrible desert shithole land due to insane land prices (and even burnt out trailers were 150k+ so building a shack on vacant land was my only option), much worse than much of public land, I'd prefer others not have to suffer that.
I do sympathize, but this is just so incredibly short-sighted. And allowing politicians to enrich themselves (and their already rich developer/landlord buddies who caused the housing crisis) by selling us back what we already own is no fix at all. We really shouldn't set the precedent of letting politicians buy votes from us by temporarily alleviating the problems that they themselves have caused.
The east coast is already a concrete nightmare of conurbation and paved suburbs from Boston to Miami. If you live your whole life in Europe, at least there are proper villages, but it's pretty hard to get more than a few miles away from other people, even in the Alps. If you can get to the Amazon or the Sinai or the Kashmir, then you can enjoy some peace and quiet at the risk of running into soldiers/militants/narcos. In the neighborhood of Everest/Annapurna, roads and cell towers are on the rise. Or you can freeze your tits off in the great frozen north, or file detailed travel plans with China and struggle to arrange for transport to remote areas. The combination of accessible/inaccessible in the American west plus the relative stability is unique, it is a refuge, and this kind of thing is disappearing from the world.
We'll be much poorer if we give it up, certainly the future will be bleaker, even if some people feel like they are getting a sweet deal on the acreage.
Anyway, we all know that desert shacks will eventually want water and power, which is only going to be available if we slightly expand existing cities/townships. This is not great, because actually curbing relentless profiteering is ultimately a better fix than starting a new wave of it, but it's also not terrible. The bait-and-switch here is that removing protections on public lands is ultimately for companies that are interested in exploitative extraction, not for renters. If public lands are going to be used in that way, then at the very least it should be part of a way to fund basic-income or something. This is the way it works in Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund), and whether or not it's effective is a matter for debate, but at least it actually feels like trying to take a step in the right direction.
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck, but if our ancestors said what you're saying today we'd be in extremely dire straits and squashed into a tiny cluster of OG slivers of chartered land.
As you said, practically everything used to be public land, and yet we observe that a burned out meth trailer on .25 acres still costs a quarter million. So.. now you know exactly what happens if you decide to change nothing else and just privatize public lands. This fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe, who gets the dubious pleasure of paying a slightly less outrageous price and then shitting in a bucket for 20 years. Then that guy fucks over the next generation when they sell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford.
Why do we want to do more of that? What's the plan for growth when the future arrives and there's nothing else to steal from the public?
The omitted piece here is without discharging public lands .25 of marginal land on slivers of original chartered land would now likely be worth millions with nothing cheaper in sight. We noticed public discharge of lands had worked spectacularly well towards providing more land for homes and for cheaper prices. If we went by your criteria it would be a resounding 'sell it all' unquestionably.
>ell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford
Simple supply/demand dictated higher supply should lower prices all else equal
>his fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe
1 guy who improved the land, then dies/sells, this goes on and generations enjoy the compounding fruit of this.
And who says I want to change nothing else? The recipe I've found for success in a building a home for under 6 figures has many components
1) Use recently discharged or never developed former public land
2). No building codes or inspections, nor building plans or structural engineering. I took advantage of this to be able to DIY a home for $30k without having to deal with bureaucrats.
3) No licensing for trades. I saved lots by not dealing with unions or tradesmen gatekept by trades rackets.
4). Loose zoning
5). No public services. I built my own roads, with no tax funded road access, private septic, private water and utilities so that property taxes are near 0.
Using my recipe people can own homes+land for a couple years of typical full time middle age wages and pay practically no taxes on it
If you like to go outside, Texas is incredibly boring compared to Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, or even California. Everything is privately owned, so even though Texas is nearly entirely unpopulated land, there's nowhere to go.
Since it generates next to no revenue as a public park it doesn't take much cash by exploiters to curry interest. If it isn't doing anything profitable nor in the private hands of say some rancher that will chase off ne'er do wells it is in jeopardy to whoever has greatest access to corruption.
You mention as comparators Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and California – those are all what are called "Western public land states" – the federal government acquired most of them by armed conquest or purchase of Mexican territory, and hence is the original landowner for the majority of the state (the US recognised some pre-conquest/purchase land ownership, so some land titles go back to Mexican or Spanish land grants, but that's a minority of their area). Congress then organized those areas into territories, and then admitted them as states – but the federal government remained a major landowner post-statehood. And many of these states still have significant federal public lands to this day. (There are also the Eastern public land states, whose lands were acquired by the federal government either through being ceded by the 13 original states, or by such events as the Louisiana and Florida purchases.)
By contrast, other states are what are called "private land states", since the federal government was never a major landowner in them. This includes the original 13 colonies. It also includes Texas, because Texas declared independence from Mexico, and then after some years of independence, applied to enter the US as a state. Mexican public lands became public lands of the Republic of Texas, and their ownership was then inherited by the Texas state government (The Texas Lands Commissioner), not the federal government. All the federal lands in Texas have been acquired post-statehood, either by purchase or eminent domain. Similarly, although Hawaii has extensive public lands, they are mostly owned by the state not federal government, since the Kingdom of Hawaii's public lands passed to the State of Hawaii not the federal government, making it like Texas a private land state.
Private land states tend to have significantly less public land than public land states, but it varies – both Nebraska and Nevada are Western public land states, but over 80% of Nevada is public land, Nebraska is near the bottom of the list. I believe that's because the federal government decided to sell or grant most of the federal lands in Nebraska into private ownership, but decided to retain most federal lands in Nevada.
[0] https://www.summitpost.org/public-and-private-land-percentag...
How are they off for "peppercorn rents" as defacto public lands?
Here, Western Australia, an initially British colony, there are several major urban parks the were deeded to the city in exchange for a peppercorn rent subject to usage constraints.
These are in a murky area, many are currently listed as public owned, owned by the city (or specific city council), but have been "conditionally gazzetted" and might revert back to original owning families (after several intervening generations) should the land usage change (eg: building apartments on land conditionally gifted for public gardens).
Also, the term “private land state” is somewhat confusing (although officially correct), since private land states can still have extensive land holdings by state or local governments, and they can even have federal lands - it is just their federal lands were originally private land or non-federal public lands, unlike much of the federal lands in the public land states, which have been federal lands since the very beginning of US sovereignty over them
Also what if the machinery of this arm of government isn't (currently) optimizing the sum of risk-adjusted damage due to mudslides and fires? How do you propose we start over?
As much as I would like to suspect that "Edward Helmore" might have some background in Civil Engineering or statecraft more generally, it seems he's just a New York-based author who writes for a British publication, maybe he's not the best to defer for about the consequences of this area...? I mean, it's not joke, people lose homes in fires and mudslides, and it's not like Trump doesn't know this, but if the current regime isn't optimally preventing or responding to these, then your options are pretty much to just try again.