Wildlife Access

District Court Ruling Scorns and Schools Utah's Cowboy Legislators Thereby Providing Hope for Advocates of Green Belts and Recreation Access Points -- Good For Everyone!!!!

The Deseret News reported a major win for the body politic by striking down a Utah Legislative driven resource and land grab. Yes, the good old boys at the Utah Legislature tried to give their buddies land and resources they didn't have to pay for and that didn't belong to them. Now anglers can access waterways for fishing. (My buddy Darrell Smith should be pleased).

You may ask, how is it a land grab? Shouldn't private property owners have a right to bar access to public waterways and mountains? Let's ask this a different way. If the public cannot access public waterways and mountains, who effectively owns them? Answer, only those who have access to them. So if land owners are allowed to trump public access rights, they own them.

Next question: Who owns the water-bound and land-roaming wildlife? The answer: those that have access to them. Who should have access to them? Answer: absent aboriginal rights--everyone. That cannot happen if developers and private land owners can slowly but surely prevent all access.

Isn't that a good thing because it limits use and wild life extraction and protects land owners from having to see that they are not the only people on earth? No because it unnecessarily concentrates use to specific areas--with an inequitable burden on the land owners in that area and resulting in overuse and degradation. It also indirectly prevents adequate resource management because the stakeholders become too polarized and contentious with divergent interests.

Bottom line is it's a step in the right direction. The goal should be to reserve, buy back through eminent domain, and create green belts and wildlife corridors of at least 50 feet or more (the belt should be proportional to the size thereof) around every major body of water, flood plane, unstable or radically uneven land area and all public lands. By this means we should also create, every quarter of a mile, access points to all public lands–including the Wasatch Front Mountain Range. And by this means we should create wildlife and access corridors through farm and industrial lands. Such a plan would actually benefit everyone in the long run. This also increase the value of the land on the edge of these green belts and wild life corridors .

Loren M. Lambert, Nov. 6, 2015 ©