Former Interior Secretary Babbitt calls GOP land proposal a ‘giveaway of our great outdoors’

[XemaSab]

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is blasting as “radical” a Republican proposal to open up more than 50 million acres of public lands to logging and other development.

Babbitt, who was Interior secretary for eight years under President Bill Clinton, said the GOP bill would virtually repeal the 1964 Wilderness Act and open an area the size of Wyoming to development.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., “is the most radical, overreaching attempt to dismantle the architecture of our public land laws that has been proposed in my lifetime,” Babbitt said Tuesday at a House hearing on the bill.

“Simply put, it trades protection of wildlife habitat, clean water and clean air for corporate profits. It is nothing more than a giveaway of our great outdoors,” Babbitt said.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-interior-secretary-babbitt-calls-gop-land-proposal-a-giveaway-of-our-great-outdoors/2011/07/26/gIQAEEX3ZI_story.html

[FirstLight]

1. hopefully

the looming financial issues will keep some of this at bay

did this get passed?
either way, they are bastards. :mad:

[handmade34]

2. just a few

of the awesome places that we own collectively... we must fight the Republicans... (places I have had the great fortune to visit recently)

[pscot]

3. This is being pushed hard by cattle and mining

interests and comes directly from the ALEC legislative agenda. As might be expected, the Koch brothers have their dirty fingerprints all over this landgrab.