Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How much land do the feds own in your state?

He already does; D-J, P-R, license fees, etc.

Those not paying ANY share damned sure need to start paying up.

I used to be involved with P&R projects here in AZ. The state uses it for multiple reasons... shooting ranges, buying property for the state. I've worked on catchment projects which get the most press but really is the most difficult to enact. The federal permitting process the state must go through, finding volunteers as there are requirements for a certain percentage, environmental impact studies. It takes years to start work on the ground It's much easier if the rancher makes a water source. He can't running 0 to 20% of the cattle they used to.

Kent

Hunting license fees go to the state.

The reduction of logging and grazing has mirrored the increases in fire prevention funds needed.

Kent

Just get the Fed reps from the Western states to stop blocking the inclusion of fires as natural disasters that allow for the reallocation of Fed disaster funds to agency budgets and the fire costs that are gutting the FS and BLM maintenance budgets go away.

And the tax money the greenies get by filing lawsuit after lawsuit for logging, mining, ranching, etc., that the USFS, BLM and Interior Dept. has to pay is off the charts.

It's a pure racket.

Needs to stop.

Yep; there are some major issues with the use of that litigation. There are times when it is warranted, but as it is now the Center for Biological Diversity and similar orgs use it as a weapon and a funding stream.

That's why those groups have entire staffs of lawyers.

In many cases, the head person in those organizations is a lawyer.

Go figure...

Having staffs of attorneys or an attorney in charge isn't necessarily a bad thing. Doing nothing but bringing litigation as a funding mechanism is.

There has to be answer on the ground, changing responsibility of funding doesn't address the issue that most forest are overgrown and a dry spell from being a gigantic inferno.

Here in AZ we've had two fires over 1 million acres combined in some of the best ponderosa pine forests in the world, this since 2000. Not counting many other fires. We lost 19 of our finest men in a fire 3 years ago.

Cattle grazing and logging reduces the fuel of these mega fires.

There is a balance of how much of each to allow, private sector/FS to profit vs how much harms the ecology... we are way passed the scales on the negative side of the ledger, just to appease socialists.

Kent

Insect kill. If the Sawtooth Nat Recreation Area in Idaho ever gets a bad lightning storm, the dead trees will an incredible inferno. We had one there several years ago that was pretty bad and there's a lot more trees and deadfall to burn.

We have that to, drought causes the trees to be weak and susceptible to beetles, add years of deadfall and overgrowth... inferno.

Kent

Yeah, excessive bark beetles are a by product of not managing the forest properly.

Hard to manage it properly when tree huggers shut down logging and grazing.

The sad part is, the tree huggers would rather see it, and everything that lives in it burn to ashes before allowing grazing or logging.

Liberal logic.

The funding structure undercuts the ability of the FS and BLM to manage the lands and access properly; all those budgets go to fighting fires.

Agreed as well on the need to have the resource managed better. There are a metric schit ton of competing interests that need to be considered, but right now only the preservationists are winning and that's wrong.

Same here, this season I hunted muleys in Oregon, pronghorn in Wy, birds in SD, then elk back in Oregon. All on public land other than a half day in SD.

Camped on it and hunted big game, birds, pd's, and coyotes for almost a month with no restrictions on access other than road closures to control vehicle traffic. We'll finish out the season hunting chukar, quail, huns and ducks on blm land.

Free, other than hunting license fees.

That's just hunting season, we use public lands a lot through the rest of the year too. My wife and I moved across the country for it.

It costs me a few tax dollars to maintain public lands, the access it gets me is priceless.

How to manage it will always be contentious, but let's not even think about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

You have to keep in mind what the enviros really want. Their end game is to remove all people from a corridor that includes the Rocky Mtns and much of the great plains. That vast area would become a wildlife sanctuary. All the people would be crowded into a few mega cities. The people would pretty much live in squalor since much of our food producing land would be feeding wildlife.
Obviously that'll never happen but everything they do is aimed in that direction. They'll push it as far as they can.

Exactly this, and then we will just have to just take their word for it that these beautiful places exist.