Wyoming wants to move Black Hills land into public domain

Forty years ago I logged in the Buckhorn and Moskee, Wyoming areas of the Black Hills when much of it was owned by Homestake Mining Company. At that time it was home to some of the last old-growth ponderosa pine stands in the region.

In Wyoming if a federal or state parcel is surrounded by private land it is closed to the public.

A date has been set for the public hearing related to the State Board of Land Commissioners’ plans to purchase a chunk of land in the Grand Canyon area of the Moskee in Crook County. The acquisition would see over 4319 acres of private lands return to public ownership and has been in progress now for three years. The 60-day comment period for the project began this week. The hearing has been scheduled for December 9 at 5:30 p.m. in the courthouse basement. The acquisition is then expected to go before the Board of Land Commissioners on February 6 for a final decision. [Sundance Times]

In 2010 after Barrick acquired Homestake it returned some Wyoming holdings to the tribes; and, after it takes responsibility for its complicity in the destruction of the Missouri River Basin it should divest of its remaining holdings in the sacred Black Hills remanding them to the owners by treaty.

In 2012, Wyoming Public Radio’s News Director Bob Beck began an interview with Senator John Bare Asso (earth hater-WY) asking the question: "Senator, why do you hate the environment?" Needing a new boogeyman the Republican Party began hating the Earth in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Add the very high number of private inholdings within the Black Hills National Forest that make the wildland urban interface (WUI) very large to one of the highest road densities in the entire national forest system and Region 2 to lots of logging, hardrock mining and pesticides like Carbaryl then understand why over a hundred species in South Dakota alone and a million worldwide are at risk to Liz Cheney, Dusty Johnson, Jim Neiman and the Republican Party.

Preserve the legacy pine by saving them from the Neimans, clear cut without building new roads especially where doghair chokes aspen, birch or hazelnut, convert it to biodiesel, and burn, baby, burn.