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G. Alex Janevski, PhD's avatar

There's a lot going on right now with the administration's "Flood the Zone" strategy, so I'm glad to see attention to this issue picking up. Thanks for writing so much about it, and drawing the connections to our local community. It needs to be made very clear that their goal is selling off our nation's lands to the highest bidder. They want to open the floodgates so that prices collapse and some of our most cherished shared resources can be bought up and owned, privatized, all at once, and regular people never have access to them again. The billionaires clamor for an opportunity to own more, and more, and they're angry that there's land allocated for the rest of us, and that the best private resorts and retreats are already owned. And in case anyone is under the very naive delusion that this would be opened up to everyone, just consider the simple logic of whether you think a state government would rather manage selling 10000 small lots to 10000 buyers, or one large lot to one large buyer. Not only do they want to own it all, they want to do so as cheaply as possible.

Historically, one of the reasons some folks from back east (e.g., Texas) move to New Mexico, especially in retirement, is because of the wide availability of public lands. Want to hunt back east? You often have to own land, or know someone with land, or in the Midwest basically trip over other people on the crowded public lands. This is why those states restrict hunting to shotguns or rifle cartridges that don't fly as far, because the risk is too high of a bullet randomly finding a person if fired in a forest. Want to go for a hike, maybe backpack on the way? Even if you live in an area where that's nice to do, the land to do it on is sparse, and keeping illegal outside of private campgrounds. Everything is owned, everything comes with a cost.

And one thing people love and appreciate about being here, maybe even take for granted, are the national forests, which have been conserved by the Forest Service over the last 120 years of its existence. We've learned through mistakes that these forests in the arid Southwest cannot grow back. Once the land is deforested and over-grazed, nothing but desert remains, our natural resources steadily dwindle, and the region gets hotter, and drier. The trees here aren't like forests in the Southeast, which go from sapling to harvestable in 20 years. We don't need these lands opened up to people who don't understand that. My house is a short walk from White Rock Canyon, above the Rio Grande. Over a century ago there was a lumbermill down there on the river, and even a town called Buckman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckman,_New_Mexico. I don't know exactly where the lease was for the Buckman lumber operation. But I do know what after four years they had exhausted it and the town soon ceased to exist.

And the fact that they're claiming these lands, which are sparse, often far from jobs, utility hook-ups, and the other services we depend on for modern life are going to solve the housing crisis is the clearest indicator that it's just a lie. The reason these places remained forests is because they were largely deemed not suitable for housing. We have a cabin in one of those green polygons in the Sandias. At 8000' of elevation, we shut it down every October, and look forward to seeing it again in May. It's not far as the crow flies, and of a similar age, to Oppenheimer's cabin, "Perro Caliente," which was his inspiration for suggesting New Mexico as a location for the Manhattan Project. The roads there are largely impassable in winter, and while we could ski in (no snowmobiles allowed to protect the forest), or maybe even make it in our car given how little snow we now receive due to climate change, the cost of heating it in the winter is massive, and propane delivery is not exactly predictable. Last time I checked "housing" usually needs to be usable for more than six months a year.

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