The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) has released the following statement:
US federal public lands are home to the majority of bighorn, desert bighorn, and Dall’s sheep in the country. The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) cannot sacrifice these lands any more than we could sacrifice these wild sheep that are our life’s mission. We are committed equally to the entirety of the public land estate beyond the ranges of wild sheep. The many values of these lands held in trust exceed the value of any other use or tenure.
Proposals to dispose of these lands emerge occasionally. While no specific proposal has yet advanced in this Congress and administration, we are affirming our opposition to any proposal that would diminish public lands in size or quality.
No past proposal to dispose of public lands has succeeded. This testifies that the value of public lands in public hands has prevailed against the best and worst conceptions of disposal. Those notions are again being voiced, so we are speaking against ill-consideration and for thoughtful commitment to gaining the best value from public lands now and in the future.
Instead of liquidating the value of public lands, we support multiplying their value. This is what true conservation does. Conservation – now misunderstood by too many – is use and care. Uses produce values for people now, and care sustains those values for people in the future. Care is both restraint in what we use today and active management and restoration for what we can use later. Use includes both what people take away from the land and what we enjoy and leave in place. Properly conserved, our public land asset will produce wildlife and wood, minerals and memories, excitement, and energy, and many other products, either with economic prices or priceless ecological value.
WSF supports two approaches to achieve the sustainable multiplication of public land values.
Public land policies must reactivate conservation from a 50-year-old lapse. The prohibitive policies of recent decades turned the wisdom of a precautious “hard look” before acting into the folly of an endless stare of idleness. Projects of all purposes take years to devise, more years to litigate, and still more to carry out. Nature moves faster than that, and we need to catch up.
Also, existing public land policies governing transfers, swaps, acquisitions, and boundary consolidation must be applied more effectively to improve the overall value of public lands. Any tract of public land sold for a good reason – such as its condition, isolation, or inaccessibility – should fund the improvement and acquisition of public lands retained for good reason.
As any landowning family knows, the estate is a valuable asset for what it produces and provides more than what it brings at sale. When it’s time to sell, another family knows the same thing. The United States as a family has no other to succeed it in the use and care of the public land estate. Our lands are not for sale, they are forever.
The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), based in Bozeman, Mont., was founded in 1977 by sportsmen and other wild sheep conservationists. WSF is the premier advocate for wild sheep, having raised and expended more than $145 million, positively impacting these species through population and habitat enhancements, research and education, and conservation advocacy programs in North America, Europe, and Asia to “Put and Keep Wild Sheep On the Mountain”®. In North America, these and other efforts have increased bighorn sheep populations from historic lows in the 1950s-60s of 25,000 to more than 85,000 today. WSF has a membership of more than 11,000 worldwide. www.wildsheepfoundation.org
