FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 26, 1997
Members of two different county advisory committees continued meeting in Las Vegas last week, attempting to fine-tune a 581-page plan to ensure the "protection" of 200 wild plants and animals in Clark County.
The Clark County Commission will eventually submit the plan to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will then presumably decide whether the local proposals are sufficient to protect the bearpaw poppy and the red-tailed skink, or whether more heavy-handed federal action is required -- perhaps something more along the lines of what the federal government is now undertaking on 20-mile-long Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Los Angeles.
Francis Gherini, an 83-year-old retired attorney in Ventura, Calif., owns the last sliver of private land on the island, regarded as "the crown jewel of the Channel Islands National Park." Mr. Gherini's family owned the entire island back in 1880, maintaining a sheep ranch, a winery that bottled red zinfandel, and an olive grove that still stands.
And what efforts will the Parks Service now make to preserve that pioneering heritage?
You've got to be kidding.
The federal goal is to "restore the ecosystem back to a time when the Chumash Indians called Santa Cruz their home," reports The Associated Press.
The thousand remaining Gherini sheep will be rounded up and sent ashore for auction. The 250 feral pigs will be shot. Native scrub plants will be re-introduced to replace such nasty imports as fennel, mustard, and olive, which will be poisoned out. The federal government condemned Mr. Gherini's last piece of private land last February. When he declined a $4.3 million offer, the government seized it anyway.
Here in Clark County, better than 90 percent of the land -- an astonishing 6,000 square miles -- is already controlled by Washington for military use, "National Conservation Areas," "National Wildlife Ranges," and what-have-you. But that was not enough. Vast additional tracts have recently been ruled off limits for human use, designated as "conserved habitat" and "critical habitat" for the desert tortoise and other theoretically "endangered" species.
When all the set-asides are set aside, only a tiny island in the center of the map is still labeled "private."
Do the federal officials who will eventually pass on this "conservation plan" hold our accomplishments here in the same regard as those of the pioneering Gherini family on Santa Cruz?
In fact, the "committees" putting together these "voluntary" plans are a classic symptom of the federal government playing its now routine game of "Good cop, bad cop."
First the arrogant high priests of the new state religion of Species Protection flex their muscles, threatening to arbitrarily close all those millions of acres of desert land to motorcycling, Boy Scouting, rock collecting ... everything ... citing the need to "protect" every acre until it can be thoroughly studied to determine whether it might contain "endangered" weeds and bugs.
The citizens run crying to the local politicians, who run crying to their congressman. Whereupon -- O happy day -- a "compromise" is offered. If the County Commission will empanel a volunteer "citizens committee" -- liberally spiked with government factotums and "directed" by government staffers -- and if the resultant plan proves "acceptable," the Wildlife Police will refrain from beating us within an inch of our lives.
Thus do our local "representatives" -- elected by no one -- end up signing off on the closure of huge new parcels in exchange for "looser regulations in some areas."
Little do such well-meaning Quislings realize how much their reports sound like the apologetic mutterings of the obscene "Councils of Jewish Elders" set up by the Nazis in their concentration camps, earnestly reporting back "They threatened to cut the food ration for everyone by another 20 percent, but we got down on our knees and convinced them not to cut back the children's rations quite so far ..."
Later, of course, if we complain about their forcibly closing off the lands, the federals will earnestly protest, "Oh no, this was done by the citizens themselves; they voluntarily wrote their own plan. See, here it is ..."
The county commissioners are fools and traitors if they entertain a plan which thus surrenders final sovereignty to the federals.
No one wants to see all of Nevada's beautiful places paved over, or all the wild creatures hunted to extinction (if anyone actually hunts skinks.) But those are not federal concerns.
The County Commission should issue its own plan, for the rapid expansion of Clark County "habitats" in which homo sapiens is now welcome to settle, grow and thrive. Cut the fences; open the roads. If the federals don't like it, let them come with their guns.
At least then the velvet glove will be off the mailed fist, for all to see.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams