Oookay, it's obvious that you have very little experience with this stuff so let me drop some knowledge on ya' Mr. Sheltered Iowa.
It would be an incredible travesty if we opened up and sold/leased our our National Forests, Wilderness Areas, Wildlife Refuges, and BLM land.
We've been selling, leasing, and swapping N.F. and B.L.M. land for a century.
This Country was founded upon the North American model where this 'set-aside' land belongs to everybody.
Yes, and "everybody" includes corporations like it or not.
Any politician that suggests the economic benefits outweigh the environmental and social benefits is no friend to conservationists or hunters, and isn't getting my vote.
Several billion dollars a year of tax revenue out of Wyoming alone totally destroys your argument. Also, without our sweet coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, and trona the rest of the country would find life quite a bit more difficult and expensive. This is just one state, if you removed all extraction from BLM / Federal land you'd instantly crash the U.S. economy.
Land conservation is a much bigger threat to hunters, and republicans are very anti-hunting as it relates to this issue.
I just...owe...my brain. Perhaps you should set the political party affiliation aside and concentrate on the issue? There are lots of red states with active land leases where the hunting is fanastic. Wyoming is one and it has world class big game hunting.
No hunter should support the drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for this exact reason.
I agree with this, ANWR should be off limits but grouping ANWR with all federal land is stupidity on a mind boggling scale.
If we open it up, it will set a precedent making it easier to sell and lease up other federally protected lands.
Again, we already do and have been for a century! Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the issue before you go spouting off?
Go ask a hunter in Pennsylvania how fracking has led to the closing of their State lands.
PA has a problem because they're not used to it and the PA legislature has stupidly chosen to ignore how it's setup literally everywhere else in the country.
I'm really tired of hearing about fracking in PA. Seriously, folks act like it's something new and it's not. Out west we met and overcame these challenges a decade ago or more.
Chances are, if they hunted State land before, they don't anymore.
I've hunted State lands here in Wyoming for almost 20 years now regardless of the fracking. It's just not that big of a deal when they do it right. The problem is that PA is doing it wrong because they have their heads up their ass.
Those that suggest that we should turn control over to the States is also ignorant as hell.
Again, we've been doing it all along in states with a history of extraction. The ignorance here is thinking that PAs challenges are new, are the fault of the Republicans, that we haven't been leasing federal / state land all along, that hunting and extraction can't co-exist, that fracking is somehow new, and that all state / federal lands are equal.
How can you have so much to say while knowing almost nothing about these topics?