Even More Grievously Faulty Decision-Making by the Ancien Regime of the US
Privatization of US public lands continues. Buyers to be urban environmental groups.
I pointed out recently that science very clearly shows that aging brains, more often than not, become less and less able to make good decisions over time.
Further, in the same post I provided public data showing that the median age of US policy makers has – since 1980 – progressively (sic) exceeded 50 years. That fifty-year mark, you might recall from the earlier post, is the average age when human problem-solving and reasoning powers begin dropping off away from their adult optimum.
Now the Biden Administration has just announced a new initiative that will remove US public lands from public economic use. This initiative will permit private environmental groups to effectively purchase these public lands, and thereby ‘protect them’ from the traditional multiple-uses of forestry, grazing, oil and gas, and mining legally permitted to the American public.
Here's a link to an article describing the Ancien Regime’s new plan.
Note in the graph below that the US Homestead Act of 1862 and the (still somewhat valid) US General Mining Law of 1872 were both put into place by young, relatively clear-thinking American brains. Several similar other laws granting public access to public domain land were enacted up to 1916 (Stock-Raising Homestead Act) when the median Congressional age was about 50 years of age, and before that median age started being consistently exceeded in Congress.
Speaking as a mineral exploration geologist who has long worked on the lands concerned, and given the large amount of US public land administered by the BLM, it is a certainty that this new initiative — if put into place — will make it much more difficult for the US to be self-sufficient in metals, industrial minerals, wood products, and dietary protein in future years.
Who would have thought? One of the major North American managers of the environmental SRK Consulting group (https://www.srk.com/en/) cancelled his subscription with Grundvilk within 30 minutes of my posting this piece on Substack. Probably older than 50 years of age.
Without arguing about the first graph on cognitive decline, I do think that it would be useful to plot the US life expectancy on the graphic showing the congressional age distribution. Improved health and longer life have, without doubt, changed the natural selection profile. Idiocracy, combined with age-related loss of cognitive function, may doom our legislative process.
With regard to the withdrawal of public lands from multipurpose use, this is just another example of the congitive dissonance represented by the same people calling on one hand for the green energy revolution and on the other blocking all attempts to find and develop the resources required to achieve that goal.