Good essay on federal land transfer proposal

[Jason Snyder]

[h=1]Selling a Birthright: What would the West be like without its federal lands?[/h] ByGuest Essay | May 12, 2015

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– by Chris Madson
I wonder when hunters and anglers in the West are finally going to take to the streets.
For 30 years, a handful of special interests has been trying to steal the public’s forests and rangelands. The faces of the Sagebrush Rebellion are shirttail bandits like Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has spent a lifetime raping public rangeland in southern Nevada and has flouted federal law and court orders for the better part of 20 years, but Bundy and his confederates couldn’t get news coverage next to the comic strips in the Pahrump, Nevada, Valley Times if it weren’t for the potent financial, political, and legal backing they get from a much different band of activists — the billionaire supporters of organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
With the big money behind it, the Sagebrush Rebellion simply won’t die.
In the spring of 2012, the Utah Legislature passed a bill calling on the federal government to “transfer title of public lands to the state on or before December 31, 2014.” In 2013, the Idaho legislature authorized a two-year interim committee to “study the process for the State of Idaho to acquire title to and control of public lands controlled by the federal government in the state.” Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming have since passed similar bills, and the Colorado and New Mexico legislatures are considering their own versions.
Of course, the states can’t force the federal government to give up its holdings; a move like that would require approval from Congress in Washington. And it’s clear that the same forces that are working to shove proposals through state legislatures are at work in Congress as well. In late March, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to an appropriations bill that would help fund initiatives “to sell or transfer to a State or local government any Federal land that is not within the boundaries of a National Park, National Preserve, or National Monument,” which is to say, any national forest land, BLM holding, or national wildlife refuge said state or local governments might want.
This isn’t the work of a renegade bunch of disgruntled brush poppers. It’s a well-funded, carefully coordinated effort to disinherit 318 million Americans inflicted on us by a tiny group of billionaire outlanders. The injury would be felt across the country, but it would be most painful for the people who have chosen to live, often at great personal cost, in the 12 western states that contain most of the nation’s public land. More than 1.8 million of these westerners hunt, and the overwhelming majority of that hunting occurs on national forests and BLM rangelands. More than 5.3 million westerners fish, and while a solid proportion of these anglers pursue their sport on the ocean or on large reservoirs, many, if not most, spend at least some their time fishing on federal land.
So what would ALEC’s brave new West be like for the average resident and tourist? A poorer place ….
[h=4]Condition of rangeland and forest[/h]Most Monday mornings, I have coffee with three retired biologists who spent long careers with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. The other day, I asked them how well they thought state lands had been managed in Wyoming over the last 30 years. About all I got was a snort.
Most of the land the state currently owns is leased to private interests. The Office of State Lands and Investments has neither the manpower nor the inclination to keep track of how those lessees are managing the state property under their control, which means that much of it is routinely abused for short-term profit.
Even the federal authorities struggle to control the excesses of commercial operations that hold leases on public land. In 2011, the BLM itself reported that nearly 93 million acres of the pasture it manages could stand improvement. That’s about 60 percent of BLM rangeland. Not even BLM officials, with the full weight of the federal government behind them, could make sure that public lands were being managed properly if that meant confronting a leaseholder.
I’ve personally seen a sheep operation leave its flocks on a Forest Service grazing allotment for more than three weeks after they were supposed to be removed. This happened repeatedly over several years, and was no accident. The operator was simply stealing public forage, and there was no one around who could force him to stop.
If federal lands reverted to the state, would state authorities have the personnel or the inclination to act against an operator who violated the terms of his lease? Hard experience with state lands suggests the problem would be far worse.
Timber management on national forests has gone through several phases since the Forest Service was created. In 1905, the Service allowed 68 million board feet to be cut. By 1924, the harvest had increased to 1.1 billion board feet. In 1987, it peaked at 12.7 billion board feet, but soon after, the volume dropped as opposition to large-scale clearcuts and the construction of access roads intensified. These days, timber harvest on the national forests hovers around 2.5 billion board feet a year.
Large clearcuts are good for the timber industry and generally bad for the forest, since they encourage soil erosion, degrade water quality, often delay regeneration of the forest, reduce cover for many species of wildlife, and can actually increase the risk of wildfires when large piles of tinder-dry slash are left behind. On the other hand, small clearcuts and selective cutting may be useful tools in managing for wildlife and reducing the risk of wildfire — their value depends on what the public wants from a forest and how the timber harvest is carried out.
Striking a balance between timber yield and other management objectives on national forests has been the subject of lively debate for 50 years or more, and the resulting public dialogue has led to nuances in forest management that would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. I’m not an unalloyed fan of federal timber management, but I have no faith at all in the outcome of similar debates if they are controlled entirely at the state or local level. Without a federal presence to lend some measure of balance to the discussion, industrial interests will prevail.
[h=4]Energy and mineral development[/h]Over the last 20 years, several researchers have studied the effects of oil and gas production on wildlife in the sage. The results of these investigations are sobering. Massive drilling for natural gas began on the Mesa near Pinedale, Wyoming, in 2001. Over the next 12 years, the mule deer population there dropped 42 percent while the wintering populations on less disturbed winter ranges two to 10 miles to the west showed no decline.
Researchers have found that pronghorn are avoiding the heaviest drilling and vehicle traffic on the Mesa, and still other investigators have found that sage grouse stop using areas within three miles of roads and production sites, apparently because of the noise.
The gas field on the Mesa, along with several other major oil and gas fields in Wyoming, is on BLM land and under nominal BLM management. It’s clear that the federal agency had little influence over the decision to develop these fields, but it has at least been able to force a review of environmental impacts, require ongoing research on lingering effects, and mandate some contribution by the energy companies to fund habitat management for affected wildlife elsewhere.
It’s hard to believe that any of these measures would have been required if the state had been in charge when the leases were developed.
Oil and gas are by no means the only valuable commodities under federal lands in the West. Wyoming is now the leading producer of coal in the country, and as domestic demand has flattened, the state is actively pursuing the possibility of shipping coal to the Far East.
Uranium is once again in demand, and a mining operation for rare earth minerals is scheduled to open in Wyoming’s Bear Lodge Mountains as early as 2017. The fight over the Canadian proposal to mine gold and silver in and around the Gallatin National Forest at the headwaters of the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone is still fresh in many minds, and huge deposits of oil shale under BLM holdings will attract attention from industry as soon as the price of oil heads back up. The gigantic Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind energy projects by themselves will cover nearly 220,000 acres.
Finding a way to balance the demand for these resources with the long-term health of wild land and wildlife will be hard enough, even with federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Land Management Policy Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and the Endangered Species Act in place to force a semblance of rational decision-making. In the absence of such environmental laws, big business would be free to use its considerable economic and political power to cut every corner and get on with maximizing profit at the expense of the land and its people.
[h=4]Access[/h]Few management questions on the public domain have generated more heated debate than the issue of access. Whether the proposal at hand is as sweeping as a new million-acre wilderness or as local as a locked gate during hunting season, people on several sides of the proposal are likely to end up fighting mad before a final decision is made.
Most westerners who are familiar with federal lands recognize that there is a balance to be struck when it comes to access. Few of us would be happy if we had to park our trucks at the forest boundary and walk wherever we wanted to go on several million acres, but nearly all of us recognize that, left without regulation, travelers on federal land would pioneer a two-track into every square foot of national forest and BLM land. We know what kind of damage that would cause, not only to vegetation and streams but to the experience most of us come to the public domain to find.
Research at the Starkey Experimental Forest in Oregon has proved what nearly every experienced elk hunt knows: Successful elk hunting begins where the road ends. Elk and most other big game animals have learned from hard experience to stay away from roads. Hunting is just better in the backcountry. That goes for fishing, too — any western angler knows he’d better walk half a mile up the creek before he starts to cast.
The current mix of road and roadless is about as even a compromise as we’re likely to have. It ought to be — we’ve spent two generations wrangling over it. People with the cash and inclination can get to a lot of good places by internal combustion engine. People who are willing to pay for their solitude with sweat instead of gasoline also have that option.
I don’t think the balance we’ve struck would survive if federal lands were turned over to the states. There are already far too many people breaking the law with their ATVs, driving where the law says they should be walking. Without roadless rules and credible enforcement to back them, public land would be overrun with vehicles, and the opportunity to enjoy a day of silence in the backcountry would be lost forever, simply because there would BE no backcountry

 

[Jason Snyder]

continued......

Federal land in the West is far from perfect wildlife habitat. The concessions that have been made in the name of multiple use; the relentless pressures brought by special interests, from Exxon to Wild Horse Annie, have left the nation’s forests and rangelands in less-than-optimum condition. But if the feds can’t hold out against these pressures, I’m sure I don’t know how anyone can expect the states to do better. If federal lands were given to the states, wildlife habitat, both terrestrial and aquatic, would inevitably deteriorate as the demands of special interests were served. There would be less fish and game.
And what was left would spend more time on private property. For several years, I’ve hunted elk on a little mountain range close to the exact center of nowhere. The range itself is BLM ground; the sagebrush flats on all four sides are private land, jealously posted. The mountains aren’t a bad place to find an elk, if you’re willing to get down into the canyons and pack your quarters a thousand vertical feet and a mile or two back to the truck. Better get him in the first three days, though — after that, the whole herd will be down on the private ground, laughing at you. If the access on public land were better, the elk would just move across the fence sooner.
I doubt that any of the western states could summon the will or budget to enforce restrictions on access, should they find a way to lay claim to the federal estate. Without the enforcement, hunting and fishing opportunity would migrate onto private land.
There are a few hunters and anglers who are lucky enough to have connections on a big ranch or two. Some of them may be thinking that more fish and game on private land could be a great thing. I wish them luck with that approach. As quality hunting and fishing become rarer, their value increases. Half a dozen times in my life, I’ve lost a great hunting spot on private land because the owner decided to lease it. I can’t fault such decisions because they mean that the owner may be encouraged to invest more time and money in his wildlife habitat, but the trend clearly favors the hunter who has enough money to lease hunting privileges or buy top-quality game cover outright. I can’t afford to go very far in the bidding for this kind of opportunity, and I doubt many other hunters can, either. This is the way a uniquely American system of hunting becomes Europeanized.
When it comes down to a confrontation between the interests of thousands of hunters and other conservationists on one hand and the interests of even a single landowner on the other, the states have a long, sad record of siding with the landowner. In Wyoming, we now have a law that orders the Game and Fish Department to remove a herd of bighorn sheep if it interferes in any way with a domestic sheep operation.
The bighorn is the West’s rarest and most spectacular game animal. Before settlement, there were as many as 2 million bighorns in North America; now, there are about 50,000. Hunting licenses for bighorns are prized and, at auction, have brought more than $100,000 each. Over the last century, tens of millions of acres of bighorn habitat have been stripped of their wild sheep to make way for domestics. None of this seems to make the least difference to the Wyoming Legislature or its governor. What was it Saint Matthew said? Ah, yes: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
[h=4]Cost [/h]Nailing down the current cost of managing federal lands in the West is a challenge. Budgets for the federal departments of Interior and Agriculture are broken out by activity, not management unit or state. Still, I think it’s fair to assume that the clear majority of the U.S. Forest Service’s activities are carried out west of the 100th meridian, and practically all of the Bureau of Land Management’s work is done in the West.
The Forest Service’s overall budget for fiscal year 2016 is $6.5 billion. Of course, the Forest Service collects money from many of the entities that use the nation’s forests — payments for mineral leases, timber leases, grazing allotments, camping permits, and the like defray some of the cost of operation. In fiscal year 2016, the Service estimates that its income will be about $493 million.
That leaves a Forest Service operating deficit for fiscal year 2016 of about $6,000,000,000 — that’s billion.
Federal mineral royalties from public lands is in the neighborhood of $7 billion, but that goes to the U.S. Treasury (and to states where minerals are extracted) while Congress is always in the mood to cut budgets in the Interior.
These numbers prompt a simple question: If the western states manage to convince the rest of America to give up national forests and rangelands, how could the states possibly afford to manage these lands?
The answer from the proponents of the scheme is twofold: first, eliminate all that federal bureaucracy and, second, charge more for activities on these lands.
The current condition of many of the West’s public lands clearly shows that federal agencies are underfunded — they’re strained to even inspect the properties they’re supposed to manage, and hard experience has shown that they struggle to enforce the land management plans already in place. The cost of federal land management can certainly be cut or entirely eliminated, but that will open the public domain to uncontrolled timbering, mining, mineral extraction, grazing, water diversion, and exploitation of archaeological and paleontological sites. A refined way of describing that situation would be “the tragedy of the commons.” Or you could simply call it what it would be — land rape.
Any effort by state officials to raise more money from leases on public lands would be doomed before it started. Political pressure from special interests has kept user fees and leases on federal lands at fire-sale prices for the last century. State or local authorities would face even more intense pressure to keep fees low. In the end, the asking price for leases and other fees would be a moot point, since there would be little, if any, surveillance or enforcement on the public domain because there would be little, if any, budget or manpower to support these activities.
[h=4]Sell out[/h]Of course, there’s a way states could avoid all the complications that would come with taking over federal land — once they gain title, they could just sell it. I doubt that they could find a buyer for it all; bear in mind that the federal government spent years trying to give some of this land away, without success. However, I’m sure there are lots of corporations who would be happy to negotiate rock-bottom prices for the rights to minerals, timber, or forage on some of the federal estate, and the CEOs of those firms certainly have the money to buy the best of what’s left, a few not-so-little corners of paradise for the super rich. Whoever might hold the title to those acres, you can be sure the first order of business would be to build fences and hang out “no trespassing” signs.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees the Adobe Town Wilderness Study Area southwest of Wamsutter. The Wyoming Legislature recently joined several other western states in research to take over management of federal lands in the West. (BLM photo)

[h=4]Why federal lands matter[/h]This all comes down to a matter of trust: Can state officials, legislators, and bureaucrats be trusted to withstand pressure from oil and gas conglomerates, mining companies, timber magnates, well-connected wind energy corporations, the manufacturers of off-road vehicles, and the livestock industry? Very little that I’ve seen in the last 30 years leads me to believe they can.
And that’s one of the very few convictions I share with the captains of industry. Like me, they’re certain that most of the politicians at the state level can be bought, bullied, or bamboozled into giving them an even freer hand in “developing” the resources of the West than they’ve had in the past. That’s why they continue lurk in the shadows of the debate, pouring untold millions into the effort to take federal lands away from the rest of us. They want to return to the good old days of the nineteenth-century robber barons when they could take what they wanted, when they wanted it, without any concern for the damage they did to the land and its people in the process. They measure their freedom now, as they did then, entirely by their bottom line.
I grew up in a place where I had to ask permission if I wanted to pull off on the shoulder of the road. Like so many others, I was drawn to the West by the mountains and sagebrush basins, the badlands and the big sky. I stayed, like so many others, because these places were open to common, everyday people like me. I can’t understand why anyone with a love of these wild places would ever willingly give them up.
More than government or business, more than constitutions or flags, the land held in common for us all is what keeps real freedom alive in the West. The nation’s forests and ranges are the foundation of a way of life. Without them, this part of the world would be like any other, a landscape whose only purpose is profit, subject to the will of a tiny minority, closed to the rest of us. I can’t even imagine it. I don’t want to try.

 

[Trial153]

Can this be reposted on other forums?

 

[Jason Snyder]

Go for it, it's not my article.

 

[dotman]

Man that should be forwarded to every newspaper and TV station Across the Nation!

 

[Eric Bailey]

Thanks, Jason!

 

[SDC]

It's a damn shame that so much sense will fall on so many deaf ears.

 

[Trial153]

Go for it, it's not my article.

Thank you.

 

[Wasatchbuck]

I will admit that for the most part I do not engage myself in politics as often as I should, a shortcoming I intend to remedy. With that said few topics in politics have me as pissed off as this one. The anger I feel over this legislation is difficult to put into words. For too long special interest groups with the politicians in their pockets have dictated the course of this country. Even more frustrating is how powerless I feel to stop any of it. yes I vote, but at the end of the day I feel like my vote doesn't matter for anything, especially in the ultra republican state of Utah. I have voted against Hatch every time he has come up for re-election. This guy has been in office 38 years.

I bought a lifetime membership to backcounrty hunters and angers, I have emailed, my senators and congressman but there has to be more I can do. I moved out west 14 years ago for the very reason this legislation is seeking to destroy. sorry for the rant but this really pisses me off.

 

[airlocksniffer]

Great article but I'm what Mike21 might call a 'libtard'.

 

[Jason Snyder]

June 25, 2014[h=1]The Unsung Value of Our BLM Lands[/h]
by Hal Herring

95

My daughter just turned 11, and she’ll be taking Montana’s hunter safety classes next fall. We’ve been shooting more this spring, running rounds through an old Ruger 10-22 that I tricked out with a Burris Red Dot sight because I was having trouble getting her on the paper using open sights. She’s hitting pretty consistently now, and I’m ready to take her back to the open sights on the forward-heavy (for a small person) Remington Fieldmaster pump .22, a very accurate 1952 model with a lot of miles on it and the magazine duct-taped to the barrel, bought for 50 bucks from an old friend who crossed over the river a few years back. In my crystal ball, I can see a Rossi Trifecta birthday present in my daughter’s future, and lots more shooting with it right here on this windy, empty stretch of prairie with the perfect hills as backstops, an expanse where my son and I have killed antelope, dodged rattlers, sniped gophers and called coyotes over the past 12 years or so.

All of this has taken place on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Other than our elk hunting, which is mostly done in the Bob Marshall Wilderness or one of the National Forests, most of our hunting and shooting and camping is on BLM lands. Over the past two decades we’ve roamed the big open of the West, watching sage grouse dancing on the leks, drifting forgotten coulees littered with buffalo and older, more indecipherable bones and fossils, watched bull elk battle it out north of the Missouri Breaks, woken in windy dawns to a sky lit like a hippie dream with streaks of red and purple and rose. We’ve enjoyed crossing paths with the lone-riding men and women who make their living on these lands, pushing cows or horse herds from one grazing allotment or waterhole to another on horseback or ATV, ranchers and cowboys who follow an older code and always seem to have time for a conversation, out here where the opportunities for that are so scattered. It’s great country for an older breed of outdoors fanatic, as well, the hunter and fishermen or wanderer who can see the beauty in a vastness of sage and gumbo and knows how to make camp where night overtakes, who carries two spare tires, an extra jug of gas for the truck and extra drinking water for the family.

These are austere, even harsh lands, and most of them cannot produce enough forage to put enough pounds on cows to pay for the property taxes a rancher would have to pay if he or she owned the property themselves. That is one reason they are public lands, in federal ownership rather than private. Huge expanses were once occupied after the Expanded Homestead Act of 1909, but homesteaders abandoned them during periods of drought or after a series of brutal winters. The explorer, geologist, soldier, and scholarly wild man John Wesley Powell (I highly recommend the biography by Wallace Stegner) warned against that kind of conventional agriculture in the arid West, but the railroads, which would profit from as many people as could be hoodwinked into plowing them, lobbied Congress to the contrary, and won. “Rainfall follows the plow!” was the slogan, backed up by books and pamphlets and a barrage of media, but it never did. By the Dirty Thirties, the dust was a-blowin, much of the land was ruined, and our roads were filled with legions of destitute environmental refugees.

To help solve what had become a full blown crisis in national security--the Dust Bowl was replete with homeless people, erosion gullies that used to be cropland, rivers once used for irrigation clogged dirt and sand--Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, creating grazing districts (managed by the Department of Interior) on unclaimed and federal lands, which had become so degraded by overgrazing during the years leading up to the droughts of the 1930s that it was feared the land might never recover, hampering our nation’s ability to feed itself. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act followed in 1937, allowing Interior to manage and heal abandoned homestead lands, establish grazing fees to help support land grant colleges, and restore wildlife and fisheries. Today, the Bankhead-Jones lands, hundreds of thousands of acres of them, are leased for grazing and other resources, and are open to public use. A lot of good wandering and hunting country north and south of Montana’s Missouri Breaks is Bankhead-Jones land, now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and grazed by local ranchers.

I’m not trying to put on my professor hat (I don’t have one) and give a history lecture here. It’s just that, like everybody else, I followed the uproar in Nevada over the Bundy cattle, and I watched enough television news to realize that not a single person I listened to on TV knew anything about the history of those public lands. (The situation was different here in Montana, and I’m sure it was in rural Nevada, too. My neighbor, who was in a bind trying to find a grazing lease for his horse herd of 65 head, said “Man, if I had 20 years’ worth of free grazing like that guy, we’d have a brand new house.”)

The anger I saw in the news coverage was baffling. The brandishing of American flags infuriated me, since the American public lands, and the reason we have them, is a source of tremendous pride for anybody who understands the issue. What other nation would respond to the ecological calamity of the Dust Bowl with the brilliant Taylor Grazing Act? What other nation would hold onto these lands in trust, allowing public access and leasing them to grazers like Bundy for around $1.35 for the forage eaten by one cow-calf pair for one month—a cost that is much less than almost any grazing fees for state or private ground? That lease agreement alone, despised by so many environmentalists, is responsible for the survival of smaller-scale ranching across the American West. If the lands were given to the states, as some claim they want, the grazing fees, at least here in Montana, would have to be raised over 600%. There would be a whole-scale abolishment of what we know as ranching culture in the American West, replaced by…what? Ranchers would have gone from some of the cheapest grazing fees on the planet to oblivion, all because they refused to adjust their grazing plans to accommodate a desert tortoise, sage grouse, or other federally protected flora or fauna.

Are the demands of wildlife protection and environmental regulation on federal land onerous? Heck yes, they are. But is the grazing price among the world’s lowest? Yes, it is. Does public land ranching lose money at the rate of over $36 million every year? Yes, but it is also the lifeblood of many rural Western economies, and that subsidy helps support a huge and too-often overlooked list of benefits, including watershed protection and recreational opportunities (a $256 billion dollar economy in the West alone) that are a big part of the American quality of life.

Is it a situation tailor-made for conflict? Indeed it is. But conflict is a primary energy in America, a dynamic luxury that helps to measure the health of our republic. May the best idea win, and the devil take the hindmost. So far, the American public lands have been one of the best ideas we ever came up with.

If the states obtain control of the lands, they have no incentive to keep them, because they don’t make money. They lose money, and always have. It’s possible that some company could buy the lands, and do something with them, farm them for whatever could be gained, graze them intensively, settle refugees from various parts of the world, but then we’d be right back to the Dust Bowl.

Energy companies might be interested in buying the lands outright, at least where there are energy resources, thereby bypassing some of the more onerous laws created to protect wildlife and fisheries on public lands…but they already have a pretty sweet deal, simply paying royalties on production and low reclamation bonds, holding a lease and being able to move on when the resource runs low. Why would they want to own? And what would happen to the lands owned by energy companies when the resource was played out? No state or federal reclamation bonds and few laws to protect wildlife, no public access, resources drained and then the lands abandoned or sold again, but to whom? Would that be a step forward for us as a nation?

In listening to the news coverage, I realized that not one of the pundits pronouncing so solemnly on the Bundy situation knew about Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT), another federal law, enacted in 1976 that pays money to states and counties where there is a preponderance of federal lands. PILT is widely lambasted in the rural West as insufficient and insulting, as if the public lands, if they could only be seized from the feds, would yield a perpetual source of treasures (“rain follows the plow!”). My state of Montana got $26,497,071 last year. Nevada took in $23,331,913. The anti-federal firebrands in Arizona got $32,203,852 . PILT may be widely despised in the rural West but it has not ever, to my knowledge, been refused.

This weekend, I’ll join the tens of thousands of other Americans who will be taking their families on summer adventures on BLM lands. Some of them will be working on their handgun skills in the coulees of Wyoming, or riding horseback in the green and cool high mountains of Colorado. There’ll be rock climbing, river rafting ,and canyon running in Utah, or long ATV rides and cross country hiking in Nevada. If it does not rain and turn the roads to impassable gumbo, I’m headed for a place called Crooked Creek, a big block of public land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, that falls away into the fantastically rough Breaks of the Musselshell River. I’ll walk south and east and see what the river bottoms look like, see if there are any catfish in that windy, muddy old stream, haunted with the ghosts of outlaws and Native Americans and homesteaders with grit, busted luck, and iron determination.

95

 

[ttrains]

Two great articles, thanks for sharing.

 

[Mike7]

Interesting, persuasive articles. I missed these when they were first posted, but the topics discussed are timeless.

 

[pyrotechnic]

Thank you for sharing those articles.