Daytona Beach News-Journal Online — Opinion
Endangered lands

From almost any public-minded perspective, President Bush’s plan to sell off up to 300,000 acres in the national forest system and 500,000 acres within the Bureau of Land Management is a mistake. From some vantage points, it looks like an outright scam.

Once this land falls into the hands of developers, it can never be reclaimed. And the Bush administration’s excuse — that it would use the money from the sale of forest land to temporarily fund a federal rural-school program — doesn’t hold water. …

That fiscal reality undercuts the administration’s position that the parcels proposed for sale amount to rag-ends, isolated and relatively useless to “meeting Forest Service needs,” as Forest Service head (and former timber-company lobbyist) Mark Rey describes the land. Even if that were true, a sale this huge sets a lamentable precedent. …

A more responsible approach would look at the many companies drilling oil, logging, herding cattle or making other profitable use of public land. In many cases, the levies those corporations pay are criminally low. Asking them to pay a fair share of their profits constitutes a far better solution than selling off chunks of the nation’s heritage.