Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Richard Nixon And The Rise Of The Environment" video.

  1. Government sets itself up as the protector of lands and turns right around and builds roads that loggers need into areas loggers and miners otherwise wouldn't've touched, for economic reasons. AND they stand in the way, with their regs and rules, of anybody trying to run a small operation. And small operations in the old days tended to leave parks behind, with plenty of new growth coming back, because they, as owners, saw the land as a stewardship, and they always wanted to have trees to harvest, forever, and pass something on to their kids. But on PUBLIC LANDS? Hell, just go in and get every board-foot possible for minimum investment and move on to the next area. Bitch about how slow the Forest Service is to make the roads they promised... People who live in the woods tend to become stewards of the land. People who receive subsidies to (over-)work public lands tend not to be. I wish we'd just let the tort system and societal evolution manage the problems that the gov't sets itself up to solve. Nasty effluent from your factory? You get sued by the folks downstream. Make being cleaner a selling point. We'd probably be cleaner, now, if we hadn't given shit over to the EPA, and policed ourselves. Nixon jumped on this shit after there was a critical mass in society already pushing HARD in the right direction. But there are some old-school ranchers who DO ranch on public lands and ARE stewards of the land. So there's always exceptions. But if you don't like clear cuts in the wilderness, then you're unhappy with the gov't. But I'm not sure what to do about public lands. I dunno. All of them, combined, are a small fraction of what we took, by conquest, centuries ago. For whose benefit, and how much authority government or citizens should have, are questions that are beyond me. I know there's the law, but if you spend time up in the woods, you meet folks who poach for the dinner table.
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