Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Walker showed Trump the way on public resource giveaways

It's important that people are rising up against the theft of public land for private gain in the US West.

Yes, the scale is different, but the same principles are being violated by the pending grab of state park land acreage to enable the construction/destruction for a privately-owned, upscale golf course in a Lake Michigan-hugging nature preserve 

given preliminary approval by Walker's 'chamber of commerce' directed Department of Natural Resources.

Approval granted before the public was allowed its say at a sham public hearing.

Where is the focused, high-profile and dedicated outrage outside of Friends of the Black River Forest and some allies against this demand for state parkland?

And does anyone really believe that all that golf course fertilizer, or road and parking lot runoff won't work its way into Lake Michigan, and past filled wetlands into the already impaired Black River which runs through the proposed golf course site, too?

Yes, there is good work being done statewide by conservation groups and attorneys on this cascade of environmental giveaways - - and public pressure helped undo a blatant handover of primo state land to a major Walker/Trump donor.

But where is the urban-rural environmental, political, civic statewide coalition for constitutionally-guaranteed public water rights and public health and safety that is needed to oppose existing or proposed losses of clean water, wetlands (in one fell swoop, a million acres!), and the Wisconsin land ethic which Walker has or will hand for partisan advantage to Foxconn, major dairy cattle feeding operations, sand and metal mining companies?

Trump, nationally, is just a bigger, badder version of Walker in Wisconsin, where:
since [Walker's inauguration on] January, 2011, the formerly-progressive state that gave the nation the conservation greats Aldo LeopoldJohn Muir and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson is now the Republican's template and proving ground for right-wing favoritism and a public policy wrecking ball freely unbound once the GOP gained control of all three branches of government...
As I said, give these people [Republicans] an inch, and the miles and miles they want and will includes filled wetlands, contaminated rivers, and for many of the nation's poor, seniors, disabled and powerless, a road to personal ruin.

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