BLUERIBBON COALITION, INC.
NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
         Contact: Greg Mumm, BlueRibbon Coalition
                        208-244-2112
          Date: February 3, 2010
COALITION OPPOSES PLAN TO LOCK UP PUBLIC LANDS IN SOUTHWESTERN SOUTH DAKOTA
RAPID CITY, SD (February 3)-A controversial proposal from the South Dakota Wild Grasslands Coalition to lock up a large area of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands (BGNG) has been met with stiff opposition from a broad group of stakeholders. Recreational users joined cattlemen, landowners, state legislators, and local county commissions in opposing the move. Senator Tim Johnson agreed to sponsor legislation that would put nearly 50,000 acres off limits to most uses, including casual OHV and mountain bike use.
The BlueRibbon Coalition (BRC), a national trail-based recreation group, recently sent a letter to Senator Tim Johnson asking for a public hearing on the proposal. In the request, BRC's Executive Director, Greg Mumm, of Rapid City, observed that,"... I struggle to understand the need for such a designation."
The areas in Johnson's proposal are managed by the Nebraska National Forest and are a national showcase for active grassland restoration. Destructive industrial activities are already banned, and the land managers currently have a productive and cooperative working relationship with user groups and local governments. Mumm said today, "These lands are already being managed well; there is no need for Washington DC to shove its nose in what is already a successful management of public lands."
In a letter to Senator Tim Johnson in January, South Dakota Governor Rounds asked the Senator to reconsider his decision to introduce the Wilderness legislation, citing that "it is unclear what is protected by this legislation."
Mumm agrees.  "Our fear is that Senator Johnson has been misinformed by this Wilderness lobby group. South Dakota and the US Forest Service have worked together to carve these productive and vibrant areas of today from what was a virtual wasteland. The proposal to now designate them as Wilderness is a slap in the face to these efforts."  He concluded, "You don't have to look very far in South Dakota but to the Black Elk Wilderness to see a perfect example of the utter failures of the Wilderness designation on our public lands."
Mumm is calling for Senator Johnson to hold open and public hearings on the proposal, as well as a field trip to the area.  "We want him to see and hear the whole story from the people who live here." 
The full letter can be viewed online here: 
http://www.sharetrails.org/uploads/SD_BGNG_Wilderness_Comment_to_Sen_Tim_Johnson.pdf

Here's an idea that can give us exposure to our elected officials, Senators and congressman. Most SXS clubs have a newsletter. Why not send your club newsletter to your Senators and congressman in Washington. All you have to do is print a few more copies buy few more stamps. Have a club member follow up with a phone call to make sure they look a it. Now what if every club was doing this. That would mean everybody in Congress would be getting several newsletters from the clubs in his or her state. I feel this would give us enormous impact. I'm sure those who oppose us are in regular contact with State and Federal elected officials.
Think about it, we are so huge with all the clubs in this country, we could bury them.
Believe me the last thing they want is for us to do this. 

Later, invite a congressman to attend a club meeting or event.  By sending the newsletters, followed up by a phone call, you begin to establish a relationship.
This puts us on the offense , instead of always playing defense.  We are now proactive instead of reactive.  I hope as many clubs as possible will participate.
Remember "The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease"

Ya it's great to see them get involved.

I got this in my e-mail and thought I would pass it on. I can't believe any one would oppose drilling. Can someone explain this to me.

In 18 days, it may be decided whether or not we begin drilling for more American energy.
 

It may all come down to whether or not you take action right now. Here's how you can help in under 1 minute. 

The U.S. Department of Interior decides when and where we drill, and they decide based on public feedback.

This means that if they hear from more people that are opposed to drilling than are for it, then no new drilling will happen until at least 2015. And they're only accepting comments until September 21.

Those of us who want to drill now must rule the day.

The anti-energy groups are already collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures and we must surpass them.  

The way for you to help right now is to submit your comment at YourEnergyOpinion.com.

Everything is pre-written, so all you have to do is enter your information and hit "Submit Letter."

This is about creating more American jobs by developing more American energy. This is about making sure that our energy needs are never held hostage to foreign countries that don't like us.

Please submit your comments right now at YourEnergyOpinion.com and ask your friends to do the same.

Thanks so much for your time and participation.

Sincerely,

Dan Varroney
Senior Vice-President & COO
American Solutions for Winning the Future

Land Rights Network
American Land Rights Association
PO Box 400 – Battle Ground, WA 98604
Phone: 360-687-3087 – Fax: 360-687-2973
E-mail: alra@pacifier.com
Web Address: http://www.landrights.org
Legislative Office: 507 Seward Square SE – Washington, DC 20003
 
Urgent, Massive Park and Landscape Land Grab Plans Revealed
 
Ken Burns, “National Parks” film will be shown nationwide on PBS in September.  Ken Burns films are often very good.  Those such as “Baseball” and “New York” as well as “Civil War” were outstanding.  But the “National Parks” film explicitly promoting NPS as “America’s best idea” is a beautifully done political advertisement.
 
To see important films showing the problems with the Park Service and their abuses of land acquisition and local communities, go to www.landrights.org.   You can see the PBS Frontline episode “For The Good Of All” that told about condemnation and extreme treatment of landowners in the Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio. 
 
-----Important:  Please forward this message widely.
 
There is a funny parody of Park Service land acquisition called “Big Park” also at www.landrights.org.   These will help balance out the fact that the Burns “National Parks” ignores the history of what the national parks have done to local people and communities. 
 
-----To see “Big Park” on “You Tube”, go to
 
http://www.youtube.com/user/AmericanLandRights
 
It is important for you to go see “Big Park” at both sites.  It builds the number of viewers on You Tube and www.landrights.org and that is good for search engine placement. 
 
The Ken Burns “National Parks” is intended to build political support in Congress and the public for massive park expansion, land acquisition and Kelo type condemnation or eminent domain.   Landowners who own land in or near National Park Service areas will be especially threatened but all rural landowners in general face a threat. 
 
The Burns film will try to build support to give more money and autonomous power to the NPS – including a huge CARA type off budget Federal land acquisition trust fund entitlement using Kelo type condemnation funding. 
 
The “National Parks” is designed to build a public groundswell of support in Congress to fund land acquisition and regulations to force you off your land, buy as much of it as possible, and expand the parks several times over.  No landowner, rancher, miner, or rural property owner will be safe. 
 
Unfortunately, the National Park Service has become a political tool for large scale land use control using the love of parks by many people to generate public support for controlling huge amounts of rural land and land around parks as buffer zones.
 
Our parks are important and need to be protected.  But using them as a political tool to control more land claiming perceived threats actually hurts the parks as well as landowners and communities.  Money that should go to take care of important parks is often siphoned off for land use control projects.  The Park Service is over $10 billion behind in deferred maintenance according to the GAO (Government Accountability Office) in a report issued years ago.  
 
The “greens” often claim that any activity anywhere near a national park threatens the park and endangers it, thus stopping important job producing projects such as a mine in the Yellowstone region a few years ago and others. 
 
They use tools like designating parks as World Heritage Sites to control large amounts of land around parks with buffer zones.  The Yellowstone Vision document would have added two million acres to the one million acre Yellowstone National Park.  American Land Rights helped stop that enormous land grab in 1988. 
 
Here is an outline of the huge land grabs by the “greens” and the Obama Administration coming to your area soon helped along by the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA), Ken Burns, American Society of Landscape Architects, the Rockefeller family, and others.  
 
-----1.  In the words of the American Society of Landscape Architects:  “A New National Landscape Agenda:  the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 is just a beginning.”  This report and maps are published on the American Land Rights website at www.landrights.org.  You don’t want to miss this.  You will see huge areas of land they want to set aside as well as Greenline buffer zones they plan to lock up and use to throw you out. 
 
-----2.  New Obama National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis is the brother of Destry Jarvis, a long time leader in the green movement and a former official of the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA).
 
Destry Jarvis was the primary motivator behind the giant Rockefeller funded NPCA 8 volume Big Park expansion plan published by NPCA and Destry Jarvis in 1988. 
 
Now, with Jon Jarvis in charge of the Park Service, the NPCA and their green allies have their best chance yet for an enormous park expansion plan, huge buffer zones around every park, and a multi-billion dollar land acquisition trust fund (we call the plan Big Park). 
 
A summary of the Big Park report, written in 1990, is on our website at www.landrights.org.  It is as fresh as if it were written yesterday – except that now the “green” groups want even more of your land.  
 
Joe Wrabek, former Managing Editor of the National Inholder News that became the American Land Rights News after American Land Rights changed its name in the mid 90’s, wrote this Big Park summary.
 
-----3.  Ken Burns “National Parks” film coming in September is designed to build public motivation and Congressional support for a huge funding trust fund like CARA that will be used to force you off your land or home, mining claim, ranch or out of your private business to clear the way for their massive park expansion and land acquisition plan.  They plan to use Kelo type condemnation or eminent domain and Greenline buffer zone land use prohibitions to force you off your land or out of business.  Rural communities will be especially damaged with lost jobs and businesses. 
 
Both the National Landscape Agenda and Big Park are critical to you because in September PBS will air the Ken Burns documentary the “National Parks.” This film was actually led by a person highly involved in the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA), Dayton Duncan. 
 
Duncan, who wrote the script and produced the “National Parks” ‘documentary’, was appointed by President Clinton in the 1990s as chairman of the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee and to the board of directors of the National Parks Foundation (NPF) where he began working on the ‘documentary’. 
 
In the past Duncan has been a big Democrat political operative involved with presidential campaigns.  Obama’s Secretary of the Interior Salazar has already publicly endorsed the “National Parks” film. 
 
NPF is a non-governmental organization (NGO) created by the Federal government in 1967 (with $100 million in startup money from Laurence Rockefeller) as a “private” non-profit to promote the National Park Service.
 
Both Duncan and Burns have collaborated closely with NPCA and were recently given 'awards' for NPS promotional purposes.  The release of the ‘documentary’ is timed to be coordinated with a big upcoming push from NPCA lobbying Congress for more money and power for NPS.  
 
Unfortunately, the NPS has very little Congressional oversight because no politician wants to appear to be “anti-park.”  Thus the Park Service gets away with a lot of activities other agencies can’t.   The agency wastes huge amounts of money. 
 
-----Burns cannot say about his “National Parks” film that he was independent and objective.  He was a captive of the NPCA and the government National Park Service bureaucracy lobby.
 
-----The film is intended to build support for the National Landscape Agenda, Big Park, the NPCA 8 volume park expansion plan and a huge new CARA type land acquisition trust fund that could destroy rural America. 
 
The 8 volume NPCA Big Park Plan was largely funded by the Rockefellers.  See the excerpt from Robin Winks bio of Larry Rockefeller shown below.  Winks was a former member of the National Park System Advisory Board and a well known historian.
 
While the Big Park Summary was originally written by Joe Wrabek in 1990 about the NPCA 8 volume park expansion plan, nothing has changed about the goals of the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA) – except now they demand more.
 
-----The National Landscape Agenda was just released.  It overlaps perfectly with and enlarges the Big Park expansion plan by the NPCA, using additional Greenline Park agenda targets also developed by NPS and NPCA from the 1980s.  
 
-----Now, with Jon Jarvis in charge of the Park Service, and his brother Destry Jarvis still highly involved in the green movement, landowners, inholders, ranchers and anyone living in or near a Park Service managed area, or potential Park Service Area, or in rural America, are in greater danger than they have ever been.
 
The following shows the Rockefeller involvement in the NPCA plan from Robin W. Winks' biography "Laurence S. Rockefeller", Island Press, 1997:
 
"Larry [Laurence Rockefeller's son] was appointed to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission in 1979, succeeding his father, and ably defended New York's Minnewaska State Park from the threat of development. 
 
“As staff attorney for the Natural Resources Council, he worked long hours on behalf of various projects.  He took an interest in the nation's barrier islands and in Alaskan lands.  He acted as go-between on behalf of the National Parks and Conservation Association and the Richard King  Mellon Foundation when the Association needed money to complete its ambitious multi-volume study of the National Park Service's future requirements, leading to perhaps the fullest inventory ever of potential park units...  
 
“For such initiatives the National Park Foundation presented him with its 1988 Horace M. Albright Award for 'sustained contributions to the enhancement of the nation's natural and scenic environment',  and the
Wilderness Society and NPCA likewise honored him in the 1990s."
 
Action Items:
 
-----1.  Please forward this critical message to your entire list.
 
-----2.  Go to “You Tube” to watch Big Park using this link: 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xvAB6DAhtM
 
-----3.  Go to www.landrights.org to watch the PBS Frontline episode called for the “For The Good Of All” about Kelo type condemnation by the Park Service.  You can also see the short films “Big Park” and “In Condemnation, The Cuyahoga Valley.”
 
-----4.  Call your local PBS station to complain about the bias of Ken Burns film, the “National Parks.”  It ignores the over 60,000 people who lost their land to condemnation to create the “National Parks.” Many, if not most of these condemnations were completely unnecessary.  It further ignores the over 100,000 people who lost their land to the Park Service under threat of condemnation. 
 
-----Ask why PBS is not showing the PBS Frontline film “For the Good Of All” which documents the horror stories of Park Service management and Kelo type condemnation at the Cuyahoga Valley, in Ohio. 
 
-----Ask them to show this episode of Frontline to balance things out with the Ken Burns “National Parks” film.  They need to show the Frontline episode “For the Good Of All” so viewers will understand that as the National Parks were created, they often crushed landowners and local communities without reason or necessity. 
 
-----5.  Call, fax, e-mail and visit your Congressman to let him or her know you oppose any new land acquisition trust fund and the conversion of private lands into government land.  Ask him or her to go to www.landrights.org to see the PBS documentary about Park Service land acquisition abuses, “For The Good Of All.” 
 
Many of the new parks created since the 70’s are what we call “ego political parks” that have little to do with preserving something and more to do with land use control and making members of Congress feel important.  
 
The Cuyahoga Valley National Park was originally set aside as a National Recreation Area.  It did not qualify as a national park then nor does it qualify now.  Creating ego-political parks cheapens the real national parks and dilutes the Park Service budget ability to take care of the important “crown jewel” parks. 
 
The local people at Cuyahoga were promised easements and were supposed to be allowed to stay.   Only Congressman John Seiberling and the editor of the Akron Beacon Journal got easements.  Condemnation forced hundreds of others out. 
 
Take a look on www.landrights.org at our Congressional testimony on CARA, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act (we called it the Condemnation and Relocation Act).  You’ll see details on how the creation of new parks is used as a tool to undermine and condemn local landowners and communities. 
 
You may call any Congressman at (202) 225-3121.  Call and ask for the staff person who handles National Park issues.  Get their fax number and e-mail address.  Ask them to look at the films at www.landrights.org.  Especially the films “Big Park” and the PBS Frontline episode and documentary “For The Good Of All.”
 
-----6.  Call, fax and e-mail both your Senators to oppose more land acquisition funding or any trust fund and the conversion of private lands into government land.  Tell him or her no condemnation or eminent domain.  Follow the same instructions as above in number 4. Call any Senator at (202) 224-3121.   
 
-----7.  Don’t forget to keep up your calls to your Congressman and Senators about the Clean Water Restoration Act, the big water and land grab.  The bill number is S 787 in the Senate.  The House bill does not have a number yet.  There are likely to be votes in both houses in September or October so you must keep the pressure on. 
 
Your help is greatly appreciated. 
 
Chuck Cushman
Executive Director
American Land Rights Association
(360) 687-3087
ccushman@pacifier.com
 
You may buy a high quality personal copy of the film “Big Park” for $19.95 plus $4 shipping and handling.
 
“For The Good Of All” is also $19.95 plus $4 shipping and handling.  You can get both for $35 with no cost for shipping. 
 
Send your check for the appropriate amount listing the films you want to American Land Rights, PO Box 400, Battle Ground, WA 98604. 
 
Short bio of Chuck Cushman.
 
His father was a ranger naturalist, what is now called an interpreter, in Yosemite National Park.  Chuck was a volunteer in what are now three national parks, Yosemite, Channel Islands and Olympic.  In Olympic he was a member of the Student Conservation Corps in 1959.
 
Chuck began to fight certain Park Service activities in the early 70’s when the Park Service tried to take his house and all the rest of the homes in the community of Wawona, inside Yosemite National Park. The community existed before the park was created. 
 
President Ronald Reagan appointed Chuck to the National Park System Advisory Board in 1981.  He has visited and worked in a great many national parks and has testified numerous times before various committees of Congress about Park Service issues and abuses.
 
Chuck has been Executive Director since 1978 of what was first called the National Park Inholders Association.  It became the National Inholders Association in 1980 as people within Forest Service, BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service boundaries joined.  Finally it became the American Land Rights Association in 1995 as thousands of landowners, recreation organizations, associations and businesses throughout America joined up to help the cause.
 
Few, if any, have as much personal knowledge and background about the National Park Service as Chuck Cushman.  For more information, go to Google on the Internet and look up Chuck Cushman, Charles Cushman, National Inholders Association and American Land Rights Association. 
 
 
If you wish to unsubscribe, reply to this e-mail with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.  If you know of others who would like to receive these alerts, reply with their e-mail addresses.
 
Please forward this message as widely as possible. 
 
It is incredibly important for you to forward this message.   By forwarding the message, you can help get millions of copies of this critically important e-mail distributed. 
 

BLUERIBBON COALITION, INC.
The BlueRibbon Coalition Announces Its New Member Incentive Program
We have never experienced such a relentless onslaught against OHV recreation and access as we are right now. Almost daily, we learn of some new planning initiative, a new piece of Wilderness legislation, a new lawsuit, or new attempt to rip-off dedicated OHV registration fees.
BRC is drawing from our unparalleled experience to turn the tide and build lasting solutions that make sense for the land and the people.  Your membership in the BlueRibbon Coalition is critical.  Now is the time to join together and expand our influence on the issues.
With the help of Rocky Mountain ATV-MC, we've made joining, renewing, or extending your membership in the BlueRibbon Coalition especially worth your while.  For a limited time, we are making you this special "no buts-no brainer" offer where you can join BRC and literally double the value of your money:
Join-renew-extend your membership in BlueRibbon Coalition now and you will get a $25 gift card from Rocky Mountain ATV-MC!
Do the math:  $29.00 BRC Membership
                        -$25.00 Gift Card 
                         $  4.00 Your final cost
YOU CAN'T LOSE!
► It's the right thing to do-at the right time
► You're helping to save trails
► You stay informed on issues
► Righteous deal for you
► Join-Renew-Extend membership in BRC for a full year
► Get the gift card-buy what you wanted to buy anyway
► Final membership cost to you is $4
Hands down, there has never been a better opportunity to help protect trails through membership in the BlueRibbon Coalition.  Won't you please join with us?  We've made it very easy for you at www.sharetrails.org/brc-rmatv-mc
Share this with your friends-we'll give them the same opportunity when they JOIN!
###
The BlueRibbon Coalition is a national recreation group that champions responsible use of public lands and waters, and encourages individual environmental stewardship.  It represents of 10,000 individual, business, and organizational members for a combined total of over 600,000 recreationists nationwide.  1-800-258-3742 www.sharetrails.org