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“PUBLIC LANDS IN THE UNITED STATES AND RELATED TOPICS” mentioning the Department of Interior was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1004-H1009 on March 20, 2001.
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PUBLIC LANDS IN THE UNITED STATES AND RELATED TOPICS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. McINNIS. Mr. Speaker, for our little nightside chat this evening, there are a couple of topics that I would like to discuss with my colleagues, primarily involving public lands in the United States. As many of my colleagues know, and many may not be aware of, quite frankly, there is a distinct difference between the urban areas of the United States and the rural areas of the United States and even more of a distinct difference between the eastern United States and the western United States. Now, granted, the United States is one country, and we have a lot in common, but the reason that we have a lot in common is because we have the respect where we do not have things in common to understand that we work as a team. So this evening I want to go through some discussion on public lands.
I think the best way to begin this is to talk about a wonderful book that I have just almost finished reading. I would recommend it to my colleagues. As I should disclose, I do not know the author, I have never met the author, I do not have any interest in the book, other than it is fascinating. It is the book on the transcontinental railroad. The author is Stephen Ambrose, and it talks about the major accomplishment that was necessary in this country for the entire country to come together to build a transcontinental railroad, the armies that were necessary to put this thing together. I think really just reading a little of the first part, just a couple of paragraphs, because I do not like to read during my Special Order speeches, my nightside chat; but I thought here it would probably be appropriate, so that we can get a taste, a little idea of the flavor of what was necessary to build the transcontinental railroad in the United States.
In our own minds, we need to kind of put ourselves back 150 years and think of the United States, a new country, relatively speaking, out into the frontier, a frontier that most of the population of this country had never even set foot on, a frontier which had never been really surveyed in any kind of detail. In fact, the surveying techniques back then were still pretty rough as compared to today's GPS system.
So as I say that, keep this in mind. We need to put our mindsets for a moment back 150 years, back to about 140 years, 1858, put our minds there for a moment and listen to this: ``Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California was the greatest achievement of the American people in the 19th century.'' Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, that was the big accomplishment of the 19th century. ``Not until the completion of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century was it ever rivaled as an engineering feat. The railroad took brains, it took muscles and sweat in quantities and scope never before put into a single project. It could not have been done without a representative democratic system.''
Let me repeat that. It could not have been done without a representative, democratic political system. It could not have been done without skilled and ambitious engineers, most of whom had learned their craft in American colleges and honed it into war. It could not have been done without bosses and foremen who learned how to organize and lead men as officers in the Civil War; without free labor, without hard working laborers who had learned how to take orders in the war; without those who came over to America in the thousands and thousands and thousands from China seeking a fortune; without laborers, many speaking different languages and coming to America from every inhabited continent in the world.
{time} 2030
Mr. Speaker, it could not have been done without the trees and without the iron available in America; without the capitalist willing to take high risks for great profit; without men willing to challenge all at every level in order to win all; without men to challenge all at every level to win all. Most of all, it could not have been done without teamwork. Nothing like it in the world. And that is the title of the book, Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose.
Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad, the investors who risked their businesses and money, the enlightened politicians. By the way, the standout of the enlightened politicians, the political mover of the transcontinental railroad in the United States was Abraham Lincoln.
When my colleagues go out and talk to your constituents and say name the two major accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln, from a political viewpoint, obviously, most everybody I know could answer the first, the abolishment of slavery and the victory in the Civil War. But not very many people out there understand the role, the significant role, of which the transcontinental railroad could not have been built without Abraham Lincoln. In fact, even the measurement of how far the rails are apart was put in place by Abraham Lincoln.
The Union had won the Civil War, and slavery had been abolished, but it was Abraham Lincoln who was an early and constituent champion of railroads. Unfortunately, as we all know, Abraham Lincoln would not live to see this great achievement. Even the scheme of how to have it built, to have the government finance and to have the government put two private companies on two opposite ends of our great country in competition to build that railroad, and their destination was to the final mile of track to be laid which, of course, they met in Utah.
It was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand. Can you imagine the surveying back then to go out into the mountain of the Sierras or to go into the plains of Nebraska and trying to figure out a direct route which would support a railroad, the likes of which the world had never seen? The manpower took tens of thousands of men and women, but tens of thousands of people to be able to go out there and lay that track, just the organization of those thousands and thousands of working people.
If we had not had the Civil War, we probably would not have had the organization in place, because the amount and number of people that we took out there and the logistics that were necessary to put this thing together had been earlier put together through the Civil War. So there was a benefit coming out of the Civil War. In addition to that, people knew how to take orders. People knew how to be foremen.
The Chinese labor, which played a major role, they wanted to come over here. They returned to their homeland, China, as rich people.
It is amazing, as I said earlier, that this was the last building project to be done mostly by hand, excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels to the mountains; and, as the book says, those tunnels, they would have to hand bore a hole into the rock, and they would use thousands and thousands of kegs of powder to blow the rock apart.
Many times the explosion would just come back out, and they would have to start again. On a good day, according to the book, on a good day these hard-working people would be able to dig into that granite and maybe move 6 inches a day.
At the height of the construction of this railroad, those companies were laying rail for the first transcontinental railroad at the pace a man could walk. Imagine laying rail at the pace a man could walk. Imagine the accomplishment of this country, of the political system that would allow this kind of massive project to be put together, of the engineer, of the support, of the young power, the young people that went out there because, as my colleagues know, this was back-breaking work.
It is a part of the history of this country. And as I move on to what I want to talk about, public lands, the transcontinental railroad really was one of the most significant events in the history of this country. It changed everything.
For example, my colleagues may not know this, but we had no time zones before this railroad was put into place. Every community in the United States kept its own time. It is the railroads that put time zones in place in the United States.
It is the railroads that allowed one person to have more than one store because they could ship their products from one place to the other. It was the railroads that allowed the cattle and so on to be shipped across the country. It was the railroads that allowed many, many different things.
It changed the entire nature of the United States of America. It allowed America to expand across the lands it had purchased through, for example, Louisiana Purchase and the other purchases of which we had put together out in the West. You know, it is very interesting.
Again, before I set the book down, it is Stephen Ambrose, and the title of the book is Nothing Like It In The World. I encourage my colleagues to take a look at this. It is a fascinating book.
By the way, every history class in America ought to have some time devoted to the transcontinental railroad and what it did for America and how it moved us into the settlement of the West and the production and the manufacturing. Every business class, every college in America ought to be aware; and this book, frankly, does a good job of it. They ought to be reading this book to understand what a massive project it was.
Again, our minds are still back, colleagues, around the 1858s, 1860s. The Civil War was just getting over, and out here in this country we knew that the law back then was not that you simply had a title to a piece of land. A piece of paper saying you owned a piece of land did not mean a whole lot back then, especially in the frontier of the West. It did not mean a lot.
What meant a lot was possession. If you did not possess the land, and all of us have heard that saying that possession is 9/10 of the law. That is what it meant. That is where it came from. If you did not possess it, the chances of you being able to retain legal title on it were not very good.
This country, the population of this country was primarily on the East over here to my left on the map. Our population centers were right along the East. That is where we saw it. We had all of this land out here. By the way, as we begin to build the transcontinental railroad, then we came from both ends.
On this end, over on the California end, we had no steel production. We did not have rails and the timber and so on. We had to harvest the timbers as they came across for the ties. All of that had to come down and back around.
But back in those days what they wanted to do, what our government wanted to do, what the people of this country wanted to do was to settle the new frontier, to claim that land for that new country, the United States of America. And it is from that intent that the dynamics of much of the difference between the East and the West and public lands and government lands, it is from there that these differences were borne.
Let me give my colleagues an example. In the East, they have private property ownership; and if you take a look, I have some very interesting statistics that I think will help us get the picture of concentrations of people. Today take a look. We know we just had the Census come out to give you a concentration of people. This is total, 78 percent of the people in America lives in the East Coast. The remaining 22 percent that we have in our country is West, this area. But of that 22 percent, half of them live in the State of California.
In comparison, this area of the country is pretty sparsely populated. When my colleagues take a look at the difference in ownership, and this is a critical factor, and I will explain how we got there, but this is a critical factor, when my colleagues from the East wonder why we in the West stand up and talk about public lands and we stand up and talk about the need to use these public lands, you have to understand that in the East your ownership is dominated.
The ownership of land in the eastern United States, as pointed out here, is dominated by private ownership. In the East, it is almost all private property. In the West, ownership is dominated by government ownership; and this map that I have to my left demonstrates that. The color on the map, whether it is the light green or the dark green or the red, the colors on that map indicate or show, demonstrate land that is owned by the government.
The white parts of the country is private ownership, private land ownership. Take a look at this in the West.
Now, the district that I represent is the 3rd Congressional District of Colorado. I would like to point it out here. That district goes right along the edge, and it goes from Wyoming to the State of New Mexico.
My district, most of my colleagues have been in my district. If my colleagues have ever skied in Colorado, if my colleagues have ever vacationed in the mountains, the odds are you were in my district here in the 3rd Congressional District. That district is larger than the entire State of Florida, but my colleagues can see it is on my eastern boundary.
On my eastern boundary, where the difference between public land ownership to the West and private ownership to the East meet, they meet right on my district line. They meet on the line as it goes out further to the north and further to the south.
How is it? How in the history of our country did we come up where primarily you have private ownership in the East and you have primarily government ownership in the West? It is the very factor that is talked about in this book. It is the very factor of talking about settling the West. Go West, young man. Go West. That was the theory, because our population was so populated in the East as it is today.
The government decided to give some kind of incentive for people to leave the safety of the cities in the East where commerce was healthy, where there was sophistication, so-called, we put that in quotes, where there was movement and populations and lots of thriving economy. You had to be able to give some kind of incentive to get people to leave the populations of the East and head West to possess the land.
The transcontinental railroad was just a part of that. But even before that, again we are in that 1858 to 1865 time period, in 1862, the Homestead Law was enacted by Congress. Most of my colleagues have heard about the Homestead Law.
An interesting note for my colleagues, the reason the Homestead Law was not enacted before 1862 was that the southern States knew that any settlement in the West or any new States in the West would be free States. They would oppose slavery. So it took until 1862 when the southern States had left the Union. It took until 1862 to pass the Homestead Act because, prior to 1862, the southern States defeated the Homestead Act.
What is the Homestead Act? The Act enacted in 1862 provided that either head of a family, either head of family, which is interesting back then because there was recognition of the woman, but even the woman or the man as head of the family had to be 21 years old or a veteran of just 14 days in service in the Armed Forces. And if you were a citizen, you could acquire a tract of land under private ownership. You could acquire a tract of land of 168 acres.
And what happened, every American's dream, every American's dream is to own private property. Every American's dream back then was to own a farm. You see, our land, our economy back then was 98 percent agriculture, and it was your dream back then to go out and have your own piece of land. And 160 acres under the Homestead Act, even the poor people of our country could go out. You did not have to be rich to have the land. All you had to do was commit to that piece of land 5 years. You had to live on it and work on it for 5 years.
That was enough incentive to entice a lot of our population, not a lot, but enough of our population would be more proper terminology, enough of our population to go West, young man, go west, and that is what they did.
They begin to move into these areas. They begin to go into the Iowas and the Nebraskas and the Ohios and down here in the regions, the Oklahomas. As they got up here in the Dakotas and so on, a funny thing happened, what is that saying, a funny thing happened on the way to the play? A funny thing happened on the way to the West Coast.
What happened was this, when they started to move West, they found out in the State of Kansas or up there in Nebraska that 160 acres really was not quite enough in some spots to produce enough agriculture to support one family. In a lot of areas, it was enough land to do that.
They actually amended the Homestead Act to double the 160 acres in some places to make it 320 acres. That is why you have a homestead of 160 and some of 320. Some areas out in here took 320 acres to support a family. Remember the focus of the country back then was a family. What was necessary to provide for an average family?
{time} 2045
They based on that on acres, 160 acres or 320 acres. But as I said, something happened on the way to the West. They hit the Rocky Mountains. What happened in the Rocky Mountains? This starts to begin to explain our differences, why we have so much government ownership in the West and very little public ownership in the East, why in the East we are dominated by private property ownership, and in the West we are dominated by government ownership.
What began to happen is when people, our frontiersman, the explorers, the brave people, the men and the women and the husbands and the people who went out, a typical life-span was probably 35 years old, the disease and so on that took so many of their lives, but they continued as frontiersmen to go into the West.
When they hit the Rocky Mountains, guess what they discovered? They got up in that kind of country, number one, they found out that, in the East, you try to get rid of your water. In the West, you try and conserve water. They discovered that the West was a very arid place, that it did not have water like the East did.
On top of that, they discovered 160 acres in many places would not even support a cow. There was no way possible for you to be able to support a family in the Rocky Mountains on 160 acres from an agricultural point of view.
So what was the result? We found that our populations were going around the mountains. They found here in California, see this patch in California where you have private property, the white spot there, a lot of private property ownership there. That was prosperous. People were skipping this area, and they were coming around into the private property ownership areas of California where you could become prosperous, where you could support a family in the valleys and so on of California.
Well, the government realized that this was a problem. We did not want people bypassing and going around and ending up in California. We wanted people to live all the way from California to New York.
So they had to come up with some kind of remedy to convince people to live in the Rocky Mountains, to convince people to live in this arid part of the country.
So they did the calculation. Somebody came up and said, you know, in order to support a family in the Rocky Mountains, a family may need 3,000 acres, not 160 acres, which was later amended to 320 acres, but like 3,000 acres to support a family.
The government, as one can understand, said, wait a minute. We cannot give 3,000 acres to everybody that comes in under the Homestead Act. We cannot amend the Homestead Act to provide 3,000 acres.
Thereupon was born the idea, hey, instead of selling the land, instead of allowing our citizens to go out and work the land and take title to the land, let us loan them the land. Let us keep ownership of the land but allow the people to go out and use the land.
They talked about it, and they debated it. It was never the intent of this government, ever, it was never the intent of this government to take this part of the Nation and tie up almost the entire Western United States and almost all of Alaska.
Take a look at when we brought Alaska in as a State. Take a look at when the Seward's Folly bought Alaska. It was never the intent of the government and it has never been the intent of the government to make that land off limits to people. It was never that intent.
Today you will hear people who urge, hey, let us get them off the Federal lands. Ironically, most of those claims and those urges come from the East because they feel no pain. They do not have a lot of government land in the East. But we are completely surrounded.
For example, in my district, outside of the city of Pueblo, my communities, whether it is Glenwood Springs, Colorado, whether it is Durango, whether it is Grand Junction, Meeker, Craig, Telluride, Aspen, Snowmass, Vail, it is completely surrounded by government lands.
The fact is that never ever, and I keep stressing this because it is so critically important, never in the history of this country was it the intent of the government, of the people, of the citizens, or of any organization to take that part of the country that is in color on this map and make it off limits to the citizens of this country. It was always the intent of the Federal Government and the government lands here to manage those lands in such a way that you could have a concept called multiple use.
Now, many of my colleagues grew up, as I did, going into the National Forests. Do my colleagues remember what the sign was that hung on the National Forests? For example, the White River National Forest, whose headquarters are in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, do my colleagues remember what that sign said? It says ``Welcome, you are now entering the White River National Forest''. Underneath that hung a sign that said ``A land of many uses''. That is exactly what our forefathers wanted, a land of many uses.
The government would keep title because of the politics. Because of the politics of giving that much land to one person, the government kept title, which explains exactly why the government owns these vast amounts of land. They kept title. But they always intended for it to be a land of many uses. That concept has worked very well over the years.
Now obviously the government maintained the management responsibility. Every one of us in these chambers have management responsibilities on government lands.
As science advances, as our own technology and management of lands advances, we have to change our management process. But never has our management required that, in bulk, we take people off the lands.
I come from a land where we are surrounded by the government. We live in a country where we all dream of private land ownership. We live in a country that was to be free of the government, that the government worked for the people. The people did not work for the government. That is the concept of our country.
Yet, in the West, we find ourselves besieged by people who do not face the same challenges we do, and some who face the same challenges but, in my opinion, do not appreciate the fact that we are almost totally dependent upon government lands for our subsistence, our recreational subsistence, our environmental protection, our highways, our power lines, our water.
I will give my colleagues an example. Water in the State of Colorado, almost every drop of water in Colorado in the western half is stored upon, originates, or runs across Federal lands. Can one imagine if our use of that water, if the many uses of lands, a land of many uses was prohibited as some people now urge?
Now, let me say that the public lands have with it, as I mentioned earlier, a very high responsibility. These lands do belong to the people of the country. But I am tired of hearing the argument that, hey, the people back here, the people that enjoy complete private ownership, look, some of these States we cannot even find a government spot in, but I am tired of some people who say, look, you know, we should not allow these people, for example, to have a ski area in Colorado, to expand a ski area, to have a highway, to have power lines. My colleagues cannot imagine what we go through.
To give my colleagues an idea, out here in the East, when one wants to build a ditch for water, when one wants to build a highway, when one wants to do some kind of alteration of the land, one goes to one's public zoning board. One may go to one's municipality or to one's county, the zoning board.
When we want to do it out here in the West, our zoning board is located here in Washington, D.C., the BLM or the Department of Interior or the Forest Service or the United States Congress. That is where our planning and zoning board is. So as one can expect, it gets somewhat frustrating for those of us.
I can tell my colleagues that, for some reason out there, there seems to be a connotation that, if one supports many uses of the public lands, why, one must be against the environment. That could not be further from the truth.
The reason many of us live out there is because of the environment. We do not live out there because we get rich living out there. We live out there because, and I happen to think my district is one of the most beautiful, and I think most of my colleagues on the floor would agree, my district is one of the most beautiful districts in the country.
My district has got 54 mountains over 14,000 feet. My district is the highest district in the Nation. We live at the highest elevation in the Nation. It is beauty everywhere one looks.
But do my colleagues know what we have discovered over the years, people can live amongst that beauty without scarring it.
Now, we have learned a lot. We learned that the mining techniques, for example, which pretty much are gone now in the mountains, and that argument could be held one way or the other, we learned that the old mining techniques tore up the land, and we are now recovering a lot of that land.
But we also know, for example, for our forests, we have learned a lot about forest and forest health. We know that in forest and forest health that management of that forest, taking timber out of the forest, not for the sake of commercial timber, not for the sake of commercial timber, but to manage the forest for our wildlife, for the health of the forest is necessary.
I think it is incumbent upon those of my colleagues who do not live near public lands, I think it is incumbent upon them to take a little time to understand why in the West we have different problems because of the fact that we live on government lands or we are surrounding by government lands, compared to the problems my colleagues have under private ownership.
Let us go just for a moment, I want to talk about another book here that is very fascinating about the forests in America. This is strictly now limited to forests, not just public lands. This book is by Douglas McCleary. It is called ``American Forests, a History of Resiliency and Recovery.'' Now, again, I have never met the author to the best of my knowledge. I am just telling my colleagues this is a good book, a good reference book for something I am talking about. I think it would be good to talk about a few interesting factors that are highlighted by this book.
Now, this book, by the way, is not put out by an environmental organization. It is not put out by a lumber company. It is put out by an individual who has gained a reputation for integrity in his investigations and his facts.
Let us read a few things. ``Following two centuries of decline, the area of forest land has stabilized. Today the United States has the same amount of forest area as it did from 1920.''
Now, if my colleagues listen to some of this propaganda, a lot which, by the way, has just come on recently to raise funds, attacking the Interior Secretary Gail Norton, who I know personally. I have dealt with Gail. I have worked side by side with her, she is from Colorado, for years and years. This is an individual in my opinion of high integrity, but who is being assaulted by certain organizations who want to use her as a fund-raising technique. If one listens to some of this advertising, one would think the forests out here have been devastated.
Again, look at it, the forests today are as large as the forests were in 1920. One could never gather that from those commercials that one hears.
``Nationally, the average volume of standing timber per acre in the United States forest is about one-third greater today than it was in 1952. In the East, the average volume per acre of standing timber'', this is not processed timber, this is not commercial timber, this is standing timber, ``in the east, the average volume of standing timber is almost doubled.'' In the West, it is a third greater than it was just 50 years ago, a third greater in standing timber.
Now, remember, a large part of this is because, in the early days, for example, when the transcontinental railroad went through, they took a lot of forest. They took a lot of timber down. The trains, the steamships, the food, everything depended on timber. They put their cows in there. They did not manage the harvest of it. They cut timber tree after tree after tree for the ties underneath the rail. Remember all those steam locomotives, before they put coal in there, they through wood in there.
And the fence, back then, the fences were all built by wood. Today, this is before the invention of barbed wire or wire for fences. So a lot of the uses of wood have been reduced. So that is in fact a contributing factor that we have to consider when we talk about the increase here.
But nonetheless, listen to this: ``The populations ever whitetail deer, wild turkey, elk, pronghorns, and many other wildlife species have increased dramatically. Tree planting on all forest land rose dramatically after World War II, reaching record levels in the 1980s. Many private forests are now actively managed for tree growing. 70,000 certified tree farms encompass 95 million acres of privately owned land.''
In other words, now the big thing is not farming, but actually growing trees.
``The tens of millions of acres of stump lands that existed in 1900 have long since been reforested. Many of those areas today are mature forests. Others have been harvested a second time, and a cycle of regeneration to young forests has started again.
``Eastern forests have staged a major come back. Forest growth nationally has exceeded the harvest since the 1940s with each subsequent decade generally showing increased margins. Recreational use on our national forests has increased many fold.''
I am going to talk about recreational management because it is very important.
``American society in the 20th Century changed from rural to urban and industrialized. And although this change has been accompanied by a corresponding physical and psychological separation of people from land and resources, today's urbanized nation is no less dependent on the products of its forests and fields than were the subsistence farmers of the Americas past.''
I think, and I will not read much further here, but I think the summation that I am trying to say here is, look, we have to retain, and we have to stand strong for the preservation of multiple use, of many uses on Federal lands. It is critical for the well-being of half of this Nation.
Now I realize that this takes some patience on people who do not deal with Federal lands. Oh, sure, out here in the East, you have the Appalachians. Down here in Florida, you have got the Everglades. You have some spots up here near the lakes, Great Lakes and so on.
But for the most part, I am asking the understanding of my colleagues, before they draw automatic conclusions about people's use, about people as being a resource on government and public lands, take into consideration the management of those lands.
There are lots of ways that we manage Federal lands. The most exclusive way and the way that is fixed forever, it is locked in, I guess theoretically Congress could change it, but short of a world war, I do not see it changing, the most aggressive, most nonflexible and most locked-in management of Federal lands is called a wilderness area.
I know a lot about wilderness areas. I sponsored wilderness areas. Last year I put in over 100,000 acres of land into wilderness on different projects. The year before, I think I put in another 18,000 acres. Wilderness is a very extreme tool and it is a very proper tool in its appropriate use.
{time} 2100
But from wilderness clear over to this end of the spectrum would be no management of Federal lands. That is no good.
The days of being able to allow people to go onto the public lands and cut timber or recreate or take water or destroy the environment, those days are gone. Every one of us who lives in the West has an additional responsibility. Because we live on the land, we can monitor the land more carefully. We have to be the enforcers of making sure that those public lands are not abused.
But at the same time we need to understand there are different methods. There is a strong advertising campaign going on out there that would suggest to my colleagues that if these government lands, if large parts of these lands are not put into wilderness areas, then these lands will not be protected. The reason wilderness was used as the designation is that it is a very popular word. Stop 10 people in your district and see if you can get any negative view about the word
``wilderness.'' That is like motherhood and apple pie.
The reality is that you have to look at the fine print. What does the fine print do for water rights, and in the West I intend to speak extensively about water soon in one of my night-side chats, but wilderness areas have significant impacts on water rights. And Colorado is the only State in the Union, Colorado is the only State in the Union where all of our free-flowing water goes out of the State. We have no free-flowing water for our use that comes into the State. So water rights are a big deal; and when you have the Federal Government out of Washington, D.C. coming in and doing things with land designations that impact our water rights, we kind of get up in arms. We kind of become a little defensive, which is why you see such extensive debate when we have Congressman from the eastern coast who decide let us put a wilderness out in Colorado or Utah or Nevada, it kind of burns us when one of you colleagues steps forward, and you have probably never spent a night in the West unless you were doing a political trip or on vacation, and you step forward and say it does not impact my constituents, we are not going to put a wilderness area in Central Park of New York City or Connecticut, but let us put a wilderness in Colorado.
The impact and the management of government lands, what does it do to the local people? What is the fine print? We have a lot of different management tools, and by the way, every other management tool allows more flexibility. We have national parks, national monuments, special management areas. We have areas where we allow mineral protection and grazing and hunting. We have areas that have special designations like Lake Powell for water storage; and by the way, California, for power production.
We have an array of management tools. Many of you may remember the tragic fire of Storm King Mountain that occurred in Glenwood Springs. We managed that land under one plan one day; and because of the fire, a few days later we switched the management plan because we had an entire different set of factors to deal with.
The wild fires that take place, we have discovered that many fires are healthy for the forest; but many of these fires do damage which needs to be managed in a different way. The wildlife that we try to preserve, the Endangered Species Act, we find out that there has to be certain management of the forest to preserve these.
We have to understand that recreation, many of the people, unless you are very wealthy in my district, for example, if you live in Glenwood Springs or Aspen or Steamboat, most of the mountain communities in Colorado, unless you are very wealthy, you do not own a lot of land because the land out there is very expensive, and most people are not wealthy, although it is a very wealthy district, and most of those people recreate on Federal lands. Some of our biggest family recreational sports are skiing or recreating at Lake Powell. Yet we have people out there, primarily again out of the East, we have special interest groups who want to drain Lake Powell. Lake Powell has more shoreline than the entire Pacific West Coast. It produces massive amounts of power. It gives us flood control. But again as I said, it is probably the primary family recreation spot in the State of Utah; and of course you have that family recreation area in Arizona, and these groups want to drain it. They want to take down the dam to go back, as they say, to days they never experienced, and with very little knowledge.
And here we have a State like California who suffered blackouts yesterday and suffered blackouts today, and they may suffer rolling blackouts tomorrow. Why? Because on a per-capita basis California produces less power than any other State in the Union. Recently in the last 10 to 20 years, they have kind of bought into this picture: not in my backyard. No power production in my State. Let somebody else do it.
That kind of philosophy is what creates problems. Let me come back. There are lots of ways to manage these lands which does a good job. For example, the Colorado Canyons Conservation Area, that was my bill last year. My wife and I hiked the conservation area this last weekend. There are very few weekends that my wife and I are not hiking public lands, recreating on the lands, talking to people that use the lands, talking to the environmentalists and the water experts on these lands.
The Colorado canyons, and if you are ever in Grand Junction, Colorado, go walk the canyon. Go down to the Great Sand Dunes or the Black Canyon National Park, take a look at the Rocky Mountain National Park. There we have used in a responsible fashion, and we have been able to manage these public lands. Do not take it away from us. It is our life-style. We subsidize. It is our subsistence, and we think that we have good teams out there.
My Colorado canyons legislation could not have happened if I had not had cooperation from environmental activists, if I had not had cooperation from the ranching community, if I had not had cooperation from the locally elected officials, from local groups like the local chamber of commerce or from the mountain bikers, the users, or from the people, the water experts, because the Colorado River came there.
There are a lot of different people that can come together, but they ought to come together in a straightforward fashion. From the ads that I hear about wilderness, the perception, especially here in the East, because those in the East have not really lived it, it is very easy to kind of direct your perception of what is happening in the West. And the easiest way to kind of propagandize or direct your vision of what is going on in the West and on the government lands is to make you visualize that the only way to protect the lands is to put it in wilderness; that the people have overrun the lands and that we need to take people off the lands.
In some cases, that is accurate. In most cases, it is not. In most cases, the land is being properly managed. Can we improve? Of course we can improve. Who cannot? Education can improve, health care can be improved, highways can be improved, environmental organizations can improve. Of course we can improve that management. And it is a responsibility of ours to improve that management. But we should not take the most dramatic, the most radical step, and that is to join that movement to take people off these lands.
Now, I am going to have an opportunity here in the next week or week and a half and I will have another night-side chat where I will talk to my colleagues about water. Water really is an amazing subject to talk about, especially when we take a look at exactly the differences that we have in the East and the West. My colleagues are going to see that, as I mentioned, there are dramatic differences between ownership and so on.
And before I close out on water, I want to give some comparisons of some interests. My comments here are focused towards those here who represent eastern States, States like Kentucky, Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Maryland. Let me give some comparisons so my colleagues can understand where my focus, where my devotion is in the West. You will get a pretty broad picture.
Let us compare some States. I picked 11 eastern States tonight in preparation for these comments. I picked 11 eastern States, and I picked 11 western States to compare the amount of public ownership and the amount of government land in the West compared to government land in the East.
The State of Nevada. In the State of Nevada, roughly 83 percent of the land is owned by the government. Eighty-three percent of the State of Nevada is owned by the government versus the State of New Jersey, which is only 3 percent. Three percent in the State of New Jersey.
The State of Utah. Sixty-four percent of the State of Utah is owned by the government; in Maryland, just a little over 2 percent; Utah, 64 percent. Maryland, just over 2 percent. Idaho. Sixty-one percent of the State of Idaho is owned by the government. In Delaware, 2 percent. Pennsylvania, 2 percent. Indiana, 1.7 percent. Oregon, back to the West again, 52 percent. Wyoming, 50 percent. Half of the State of Wyoming is owned by the government. Arizona. Almost half of the State of Arizona is owned by the government. California. Forty-five percent of the State of California is owned by the government. Colorado. Thirty-seven percent of the State of Colorado is owned by the government. And, by the way, most of that ownership is in my district.
In Ohio, less than 1.3 percent is owned by the government. Massachusetts. Less than 1.3 percent of Massachusetts is owned by the government. Maine, less than a percent. New York, less than a percent. Rhode Island, less than half a percent. Connecticut, two-tenths of a percent. On the other hand, back to the West, New Mexico, 32 percent; Washington, 28 percent; Montana, 28 percent.
So when one of my colleagues from Massachusetts, where about 1 percent of the State is owned by the government, proposes legislation dealing with a State like Nevada, which has 83 percent of its land owned by the government; or Alaska, Alaska is in the high 90s, I think 94 or 96 percent of Alaska is owned by the government, it is nice to understand these comparisons.
My point is this: we work as a team back here, theoretically, in the United States Congress. Not theoretically, we really do. There are a lot of things we agree on. A lot of people say to me, gosh, back at the United States Capital it is always Republicans and Democrats, Republicans and Democrats. Always division. That is not necessarily true. There are a lot of differences back here between urban and rural, between East and West, and I am here tonight to try to explain the justification.
It is not evil that there are differences between the East and the West, but it is something that should be understood. For us to do our jobs efficiently, for us to be Representatives of the United States of America, we need to understand some fundamental differences brought about during the early days of our country and the settlement of our country. That is what I hope my comments tonight have accomplished.
Now, I want to come back in a week or so, and I want to spend an hour talking about the differences in water. Water and the West. It is uniquely different than water in the East. The water tastes the same, perhaps; but the water laws and the allocation of water and the amount of water and the implications of storage of water and the power production of water, all of those issues have factors that create a differentiation between the East and the West.
We clearly, in the West, are outnumbered by those in the East. We know this. It is like the same in my district in Colorado. In my district in Colorado, we have 80 percent of the water resources, and 80 percent of the population lives outside my district.
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We have to try and educate and work with each other so that we truly can have a team effort towards a common goal. But many times in the West we feel left out. And so my purpose in speaking with Members this evening and my purpose in speaking with them next week about water is so that they have a little clearer understanding of why we get so energized here, why we are so concerned when we talk about something as fundamental to us, not necessarily fundamental to you but fundamental to our subsistence in the West, such as government and public lands, such as water.
I look forward, Mr. Speaker, to again next week having a similar discussion where we will focus on water. I think Members will be impressed, they will be surprised how much water is necessary, I think about 1,500 gallons of water to serve them a Big Mac, a French fry and a malt. That is about the water that is necessary to grow that kind of food for them. The amount of water that agriculture takes, we never even think about, because you do not think about how much water it takes to get a Big Mac hamburger at McDonald's. You do not think how much water it takes when you buy hamburger buns at the grocery store. You do not think how much water it takes when you have the oak tree outside. It is a lot of water. The management of that water is just as critical to us as the management of public lands.
In conclusion, I would recommend, it is fascinating, regardless of where you live in the United States, it is fascinating to read this book about the transcontinental railroad, 1863 to 1869. It is entitled
``Nothing Like It in the World,'' Stephen Ambrose. Members may remember, he wrote about the Lewis and Clark exploration and so on. It is fascinating. I would challenge each of my colleagues to go out and get this, and I would bet you that every one of them in a couple of weeks will say, wow, that is a great book. That really gave me a perception and a study of American history. I would also recommend that any time you come across a history teacher or a business teacher, ask those instructors to present this to their classes, to talk about the difference that the transcontinental railroad made in everything from timekeeping in the United States to the amount of federally and government owned lands in the West compared with government and privately owned lands in the East.
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