Word: babbittism
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...Interior Department, long viewed as a captive of commodity interests, & has until now carried out a 19th century mandate to encourage resource exploitation in order to stimulate development of the West. Babbitt wants to emphasize protection of those lands and to demand that those who profit from them pay a fair share. All told, the fee increases he proposes would produce an estimated $1 billion over five years, which would help reduce the budget deficit as well as maintain the lands. Among the measures...
...Babbitt wants grazing fees raised across 16 Western states, which would affect 29,000 ranchers whose cattle and sheep graze on about 280 million federal acres. The current fee, $1.86 per month to graze one cow and her calf, is well below market value. But any raise is tempered by concern for small ranchers. An estimated 45% of ranchers using federal lands have fewer than 100 cattle. Babbitt's idea: a two-tier fee structure that charges the small rancher less and offers a credit to those who improve the land. In May he will hold hearings on the issue...
...Babbitt will try to persuade Congress to amend the mining law of 1872, under which miners may purchase mineral rights for as little as $2.50 an acre. Babbitt will ask for a royalty on the value of the extracted minerals, with a fee schedule favoring small operators. "We ought to have progressive fees to make a populist statement that it's good public policy to make sure the small guys stay on the land. We're not trying to just lock the West up and turn the whole thing into a national park," says Babbitt. Mining interests know they will...
...Also likely to come under scrutiny are below-cost timber sales at Babbitt's sister agency, the Agriculture Department. The government is currently losing money on logging operations in more than half of its 155 national forests. The U.S. spends money to build roads and make the timber accessible but then often sells it cheap. Over the past 14 years, the U.S. has subsidized logging companies to the tune of $8.5 billion, according to Robert Wolf, a forestry economist...
...Babbitt's most ambitious long-term goal is a broad reinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act. "I think it is absolutely the overarching issue," says Babbitt. He proposes to focus less on rescuing individual species already on the brink of extinction, taking instead a multispecies approach in which ecosystems will be examined as a whole. This will require government scientists and researchers to integrate their efforts across agency lines and produce comprehensive biological surveys. As a case in point, Babbitt cites the feuding among federal agencies in the fight over the northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest forests...