About 4000 square miles in our county and I'd bet 3/4 of it is Federal (BLM or FS primarily with some NP), State, and or Reservation land. A lot of that land is juniper sagebrush scrubland. Conifer forests in the higher elevations.
the feds would rather pay a subsidy for schools and taxes to local counties rather than harvesting timber.
no tellin' how much good turning the federal land over to the private sector.
but they have their supporters. the rich for one, and the hunters for two.
there are others. but plenty of support to begin divesting land too.
Gus, that's somewhat of a misconception. There's a very large contingent of FS and BLM folks who would love to manage the land with higher rates of logging but they are effectively prevented from doing so by lawsuits. Even in areas that are burned there are particular groups that are opposed to all logging and nearly every time a timber harvest plan is proposed it gets litigated.
In the eyes of this hunter(and many of my friends) I can see NO good reason to turn the local Federal lands over to private, or even State interests. It's not like back east where a fella could buy 160 acres of raw land and have game on it. Our deer tend to wander a bit more than whitetails and even with food plots, water, etc there, it's no guarantee that deer would stick around. A person would have to be able to afford square miles to even have a chance to get quail to stick around, much less deer, antelope, etc. And most folks here I know that hunt, DO NOT want to pay trespass fees to a timber company that does have the money to purchase large tracts of land from a .gov agency.
All this land is "We the People's" land. Come on out and enjoy it. For Free!
Geno
