Terry Anderson on the Forest Service Ranger Alex Sienkiewicz scandal
Excellent commentary from PERC’s Terry Anderson on the scandal caused by National Park Ranger Alex Seinkiewicz, who urged enviro activists to trespass on private property:
For the eight years that President Barack Obama reigned in Washington, environmentalists cheered his agenda. There was his War on Coal, his signing of the Paris Climate Accord, his executive order giving EPA regulatory authority over all Waters of the United States (WOTUS), and his creation of more national monuments than any previous president.
“With President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, conservatives in favor of less government regulation are cheering. In a matter of months he has declared war on the War on Coal, withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accord, rescinded the WOTUS executive order giving EPA power to regulate virtually every drop of water in the United States, and sent Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, on a mission to decide whether national monuments created in the past 25 years should be “rescinded, resized or modified in order to better benefit our public lands.”
Less well known on the national scene, but visible to those of us who live in Montana, are both administrations’ stance on private property rights and access to public lands. Back when politics was more civil, land management agencies cooperated with private owners whose land provides access to national forests. They purchased or negotiated easements and acknowledged the good will of landowners who allowed access, some literally through their front yards…
Such cooperation, however, changed under the Obama administration as the Forest Service took a more strident approach in asserting claims to “traditional public access” routes. The dramatic change is reflected in a posting by Yellowstone District Ranger Alex Sienkiewicz who publicly advocated “NEVER ask permission to access the National Forest Service through a traditional route shown on our maps EVEN if that route crosses private land. NEVER ASK PERMISSION; NEVER SIGN IN. … By asking permission, one undermines public access rights and plays into their lawyers’ trap of establishing a history of permissive access.”