Recommended Spending Cuts From Sequestration Will Devastate Wild Lands
According to The Wilderness Society, White House recommended budget cuts scheduled for 2013 will decimate America’s wild places and necessitate the closing of public places such as National Parks and Refuges.
The recommendations of cuts from the White House Office of Management and Budget, released last week, show deep cuts to the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and long-standing conservation programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
“Cuts from sequestration will devastate America’s wild lands if they come to pass,” said Alan Rowsome, director of conservation funding for The Wilderness Society. “These cuts potentially undo years of progress protecting and restoring American landscapes.”
Some examples of the cuts proposed by OMB are:
- National Park Service: $183 million
- Fish and Wildlife Service: $194 million
- Land and Water Conservation Fund: $26 million
“These cuts are bad for everyone – watersheds will be put at risk in our nation’s forests, parks will have fewer rangers and police, and endangered species will be left to fend for themselves,” said Rowsome. “The federal budget can’t be balanced on the backs of conservation programs.”
Cuts to conservation and outdoor programs could hamstring the growing outdoor recreation industry, which generates $646 billion for the US economy every year.
“The painful irony is that these cuts are supposed to help the economy, but without investing in these programs, we will lose a major economic engine that has withstood the recession,” said Rowsome. “Every dollar taken away from conservation hurts that economy.”
Photo Credit: Yosemite National Park, Rainer Marks/WikiCommons
Source: The Wilderness Society
johariwindow
September 20, 2012 at 5:17 pm
The global elitist goal to shut down the US economy includes converting huge areas of land into national preserves, then shutting down those lands from public access for recreation, or private ownership for farming, logging, mining. As the economy decays, the elites buy up what is left for pennies on the dollar. Its not about saving a few conservation dollars in the federal budget, its about control, and well connected politicians in both parties pander to crony interests. They expect to stay personally afloat as they create the depression, and consolidate for themselves.
Arnold Rutkis
September 21, 2012 at 1:04 pm
“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, 1916
Theodore Roosevelt