Litigating for Private Property Rights—A Western Perspective
Harriet M. Hageman, Attorney, Hageman and Brighton, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Good morning and thank you. I am going to start my discussion
this morning with a few quotes that I think are very relevant
to the private property rights discussion.
The poet and novelist, E. E. Cummings, said that private property
began the instant somebody had a mind of his own. John Emerick,
an English historian, said that “a people adverse to the
institution of private property is without the first element of
freedom.” And finally, according to the economist, Milton
Friedman, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully
as he spends his own; nobody uses somebody else’s resources
as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and
effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized,
you have to do it through the means of private property.”
It is this last quote that probably means the most to me in
terms of what I do for a living and how I was raised and the reason
that I am standing before you today. Before I get into the specifics
of some of the lawsuits that I have handled and some of the battles
that I have fought in terms of dealing with private property rights,
I would like to first describe some of my background. I am not
doing this just because I think that it may be of interest. I
am doing it because it really does, I think, epitomize and put
a framework around the issues that we are dealing with. And I
think that, when I bring it into the work that I have done, it
will describe for you why I see the importance of private property
rights not just being related to individual liberty but relating
to the actual health and welfare of our country, our future, our
children, our grandchildren, our environment, and our economy.
I don’t want to talk in the abstract. I want to talk in the
personal because the reality is we are here because we are concerned
about personal property private rights.
I grew up on a ranch near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, which is a little
town of about 350 people 100 miles north of Cheyenne. The year
before I was born, my parents purchased their first ranch. I was
the fifth of what would eventually become six children. They financed
close to 90 percent of that ranch and, in fact, it is not yet
paid for today. I was talking with my father last week, and he
said that you don’t ever really pay off real property. You
just continue buying more and expanding and doing what you need
to do for the benefit of your family, your children, your grandchildren,
your future, and for your community. They put everything they
had into that property. It represented their future and it represented
the future of their children. It represented our identity as Wyomingites,
as ranchers, as stewards of the land, and it continues to do so
to this day. Our very existence as a family was dependent upon
the success of that ranch, and I can assure you that there were
many times that it was literally touch and go—when sheep
and cattle prices were low, when the rain didn’t come, when
my father was bucked off a horse and broke his back, when the
coyotes and mountain lions killed the lambs and calves, when Cottonwood
Creek flooded and wiped out all of our fences. But the fact is
that it was worth it. However, we gave up a lot in terms of being
able to purchase that property and remain on that land. We didn’t
have a television, we didn’t have a telephone. We were fairly
isolated from the rest of society. Most of our clothes were homemade.
I guess I would describe it the way my little brother did for
his eighth birthday. He was asked what he would like to have and
he said, “boots in a box,” because he had never had
a new pair of shoes in his life. But we all learned to drive when
we were about 4 years old, we learned how to fix fence, we moved
cows, we fixed water gaps, we pulled wells, and we pulled cows,
and that was pretty much our daily existence.
By investing in that property, my parents also invested in their
children’s lives and in our future and in the lives of many
others. They sent all six of their children to college, they adopted
or took legal guardianship of three other children, and they raised
over 40 foster children over a 25-year period. And they invested
in more ranches. There are now 28 people in my immediate family.
We are lawyers, we are teachers, we are ranchers, we are board
members. My father has been in the legislature for 25 years. Prior
to that, he was on the board of the school district. We are involved
in our communities, and we are involved in our children’s
lives and our grandchildren’s lives. My father is 75 years
old, and he still works full-time as a rancher. I have two brothers
and a brother-in-law who are also in the business and have gone
into substantial debt to purchase real property and raise the
children to be stewards of the land.
Through ranching and farming, my family has protected large tracts
of land as open space, they have developed water resources, and
they provide food and habitat for huge elk, deer, and antelope
herds, as well as for wild turkeys, for snakes, for pheasants,
ducks, geese, coyotes, mountain lions. Pretty much any kind of
species you can think of that you would find in the western United
States, we raise. We raise these because we provide the water
resources and we provide the land resources. Their existence and
their future as well as that of the next generation are all dependent
upon our stewardship of these private property resources.
It is that motivation that is so aptly described by Milton Friedman that has provided this country with its unrivaled prosperity, with our educational systems, with our recreational opportunities, and with the wherewithal to protect our environment, which we have done and we continue to do.
One of the things that my family started on our ranch many
years ago was an archeological school for troubled children. There
are many troubled children who come to our ranch and over a three-
to four-month period they are again isolated, as I was growing
up. They are not allowed television, they are not allowed cell
phones, they are not allowed i-pods and the other type of electronic
equipment, and they have teachers who work not only on the archeological
issues but also catching them up in their school subjects, such
as math or English or whatever it may be that they need help with.
My father has opened his ranch to many people throughout our entire
community. They do many things out there. People will go camping
on our ranch. People hunt on our ranch. Our ranch is used for
the community and it is used for the community good and it has
been, as I said, an extremely important part of our existence.
It is with that background that I got into the water and natural resource issues and why I became the kind of attorney that I did. What I have seen is that there are numerous threats to our private property rights. Those threats are not just individualistic in the sense that they would affect my family when someone comes in and attempts to either limit our use of our property or take the property outright. It also affects our communities. It affects our environment. It affects our educational system, and it affects the future of our children.
I don’t know how much you all know about Wyoming, but I will give you a few statistics before I go directly into the comments about the types of lawsuits and battles that I have fought.
Wyoming is the ninth largest state in terms of territory. We have almost 98,000 square miles, but we are also the least populated state. We are right at 500,000 people. Our largest city, which is Cheyenne, where I live, has a population of around 60,000. Approximately 50 percent of the surface’s state in Wyoming is owned by the federal government—BLM, National Parks such as Yellowstone, Forest Service lands, etc. Another substantial percentage of our mineral estate is owned by the federal government. We have numerous federal projects that were built pursuit to the Reclamation Act such as Pathfinder Reservoir, Seminoe, Guernsey, Glendo, Big Horn. I can go on and on and on. Resource use management and development is studied and analyzed probably more in Wyoming than in any other state. On any given day there are literally hundreds of environmental analyses going on—EIS, Environment Impact Statements, Section 7 consultations under the Endangered Species Act, Resource Management Plans, Forest Management Plans, etc., etc., etc. You would think that, in light of that federal footprint, both the federal government and others would leave private property out of it, but that is not the case. In fact, what we have seen is a trend that is increasing in intensity and in numbers literally on a daily basis in terms of efforts to focus on private property use and management. The result is that it is affecting all of our rights.
I am going to describe for you two examples today under the Endangered Species Act as to how private property rights are being substantially impacted in Wyoming, and then again I will talk a little bit about what my law firm has done in terms of addressing those issues.
Both of these are offered to you to show how the Endangered Species Act is being manipulated, not for the purpose of benefiting endangered species, but for the specific purpose of limiting management and use on private property. I will describe for you what has been done in terms of all the limits that there are and the encroachment on our private property rights.
I will first talk to you about the Preble’s Jumping Mouse. Has anyone here ever heard of the Preble’s Jumping Mouse? Ah, we have a few hands raised in the audience. Then I would, also, like to talk about the federal government’s decision to bring the Canadian gray wolf into Wyoming. How many of you have heard of the Canadian gray wolf? Many more. I could give you many examples. These are just two of them.
What I wanted to first talk about is the Preble’s Jumping
Mouse. The Preble’s Jumping Mouse was identified in 1954
as a separate subspecies of jumping mice based upon examination
of three skulls and eleven skins. The importance of that subspecies
designation relates to the operation of the Endangered Species
Act. If a mouse or a wolf or whatever is identified as a separate
subspecies, it can be entitled to particular protections under
the Act. While that 1954 study could not in any way be considered
scientifically sound or even worthy of note, that little mouse
came in awfully handy in the late 1990’s when there were
several environmental groups that wanted to stop development south
of Denver in the Castle Rock area. They figured that, by forcing
the Fish and Wildlife Service to designate the Preble’s Jumping
Mouse as a separate subspecies and hence entitled to protections
under the Endangered Species Act, they would be able to stop that
development. So based upon that 1954 study and claiming that they
couldn’t find very many of those little puppies, the Fish
and Wildlife Service specifically designated the Preble’s
Jumping Mouse as threatened. They then began to identify the critical
habitat or the recovery area.
In identifying that recovery area, the Fish and Wildlife Service
designated three types of habitat: I will just identify them as
habitat A, B, and C, with C being the largest block of land. Because
so much development had already taken place in the Castle Rock
area, they were unable to find very many large tracts of land,
very many areas of habitat that could be designated as Habitat
Type C. So for the first time in Endangered Species Act history
the Fish and Wildlife Service crossed state lines into Wyoming
and designated four counties encompassing thousands of acres of
land as part of the Preble’s Jumping Mouse recovery area.
What was significant about that designation was that it was undertaken
to provide mitigation for the development that had taken place
in Colorado. Property owners in the state of Wyoming were required
to provide mitigation for development that was occurring hundreds
of miles to the south, which was the next milestone related to
the Preble’s Jumping Mouse.
Southeastern Wyoming is predominately privately owned, not
federally owned. The western half of Wyoming you will see as having
the federal lands; the eastern half of Wyoming is again predominately
privately owned.
So they did two things with the Preble’s Jumping Mouse. They
crossed state lines to force the private owners in Wyoming and
citizens of Wyoming to provide mitigation for activities that
had taken place in another state. Second of all, they started
imposing substantial restrictions upon private property use and
management within the state of Wyoming. They did so without ever
having found a Preble’s Jumping Mouse in the state of Wyoming.
Never have they found a Preble’s Jumping Mouse in Wyoming.
So they come up to Wyoming, they designate the critical areas, four counties in southeastern Wyoming, and then they start imposing restrictions. We can’t burn our irrigation ditches. We are required to use chemical application. Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of putting chemicals on the ground. That is not something that I think is environmentally sound. Start impacting fence building, start impacting our municipalities’ ability to divert water out of the rivers and the streams for purposes of providing supplies to their citizens. They figure that to date the Preble’s Jumping Mouse has cost over $100 million in development costs associated with mitigating the impacts that we would potentially have on that particular mouse.
Here is the kicker. The only way that you can determine whether
a mouse is a Preble’s Jumping Mouse or some other type of
mouse is you have to kill it. And you have to measure its cranium.
So during the meetings where they are going to be designating
critical habitat and they are identifying these areas where they
are going to impose some restrictions, someone asked what I thought
was a very common sense question of how are we ever going to recover
the species if you keep killing them? The Fish and Wildlife representative
had the audacity to say we had never thought of that.
Anyway, one of the proposals they had in terms of protecting the
Preble’s Jumping Mouse is that they were going to require
all the land owners and ranchers and the people in the communities
to put leashes on their cats. That was one of the land use restrictions
that they came up with. So, because the measuring of craniums
of mice is subject to interpretation, they never could really
determine whether a mouse was a Preble’s Jumping Mouse or
not. So, as Wyoming was going through this process and dealing
with these mitigation requirements, there were people who would
say, well, this mouse is a Preble’s Jumping Mouse and someone
else would say, no, it is not. The cranium is the wrong size.
Then the Fish and Wildlife Service came up with the idea that
they were going to do nuclear testing but that cost a million
bucks a pop so that seemed to be even a little rich for the Fish
and Wildlife Service. Throughout this entire time Wyoming had
taken the position that the Preble’s Jumping Mouse was not
a separate subspecies—that the 1954 study was scientifically
invalid and it was not a separate subspecies. So the state of
Wyoming commissioned a study and for $80,000 the state of Wyoming
had a DNA test done. Guess what that DNA test showed! It was not
a separate subspecies. The Preble’s Jumping Mouse is a mouse
is a mouse is a mouse is a mouse is a mouse. It was not a separate
subspecies, but keep in mind that because it has been listed under
the Endangered Species Act it remains so to this day.
In the meantime, even though the Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to de-list the Preble’s Jumping Mouse, it has not happened yet. We do not know when it will happen. It has been over a year since we received the final report demonstrating that it is not a separate subspecies, and in the meantime all of the restrictions remain in place. So when people are attempting to do certain things on private lands or even public lands such as a state school section or something in southeastern Wyoming and in certain areas of Colorado, they have to go through the Endangered Species Act and they have to mitigate their impacts. For example, if they want to build a development of ten to twenty acres or forty acres or a hundred acres, they have to buy mitigation lands for the benefit of a mouse that does not exist.
This all seems absurd, but it gets worse. I would also like to talk to you about the wolf. In 1994 the Fish and Wildlife Service brought the Canadian gray wolf into Wyoming. It was not a native species to Wyoming and, in fact, it is different. The species that was native to Wyoming was called the Rocky Mountain wolf. But, because we don’t have any more Rocky Mountain wolves, they went to Canada, picked up a bunch of Canadian gray wolves, and in the dead of night, literally, with no notice to the governor of the state of Wyoming, released wolves into the Yellowstone National Park area. Now, one of the things that it is important to keep in mind is that the gray wolf is neither threatened nor endangered in terms of definition. They exist by the tens of thousands in Canada. They don’t exist anymore in New York City. They don’t exist in Chicago. They don’t exist in Denver. They are many areas where they don’t exist anymore because we do. But that doesn’t make them threatened and it doesn’t make them endangered unless you are the Fish and Wildlife Service.
What is interesting is that, with the Preble’s Jumping
Mouse, one of the primary reasons that it was listed and the reason
that it imposed the restrictions on us was because it was a separate
subspecies. One day I was visiting with the attorney for the solicitor’s
office, and I made the comment about them bringing wolves into
Wyoming, and I said, you know, you didn’t even bring the
right species into Wyoming. The Canadian gray wolf is not native
to Wyoming and you know that. And she said, a wolf is a wolf is
a wolf. And I said, and a mouse is a mouse is a mouse. She didn’t
agree with that one. I think what that demonstrates is the hypocrisy
of the Act and the way that it is being manipulated, again, not
for the benefit of species but for the purpose of restricting
land use, which is really what it has become. I describe it as
a zoning ordinance.
The recovery goal for the gray wolves was done pursuant to a recovery
plan. They wanted to bring the gray wolves into Wyoming and you
know what? Wyoming agreed. Wyoming said, you can bring the gray
wolves into Wyoming, but we need to have some restrictions, because
the reality is we have ranchers and we have wildlife and we have
people who live here and we don’t want to destroy what we
have for the benefit of your bringing wolves into Wyoming. So
they put together a recovery plan. They put together and they
did their NEPA analysis, they put together a final rule, and here
is what they came up with. They wanted 300 wolves within a tri-state
area. That was Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The recovery goal
was 300 wolves. The recovery goal was approximately 100 wolves
per state. The recovery area for Wyoming’s purposes was in
northwestern Wyoming. They needed 3,000 continuous square miles.
Wyoming said, hey, that’s fine. We have got a lot of space
here. We have got National Parks. We have wilderness areas. We
have roadless areas. We have Forest Service lands. That’s
fine. You can bring them in here and these are the rules that
we will abide by. So that was the rules under which they brought
the wolves into Wyoming. And part of the reason again was to make
sure that they could protect private property and livestock.
Since that time, Wyoming has agreed to protect over four times
that area of land for the benefit of the gray wolves. We are protecting
and we have agreed to protect over nine million acres for the
benefit of the gray wolves. Guess what? It isn’t enough.
They won’t allow us to go forward with managing the wolves
because they say the recovery area is now the state of Wyoming.
One of the other guarantees that the Fish and Wildlife Service
gave us was that they would have an effective control and management
plan in place to minimize impact upon our wildlife and upon our
livestock. I also want to give you a few other statistics that
I think are important. Prior to wolf introduction, Wyoming was
the home to one of the preeminent moose herds in the lower 48.
We are also home to one of the preeminent elk herds. Wolves travel
100 miles a day. Although we had always been told that wolves
are self-limiting, where the numbers of wolves are self-limiting
because only the alpha male and the alpha female would reproduce,
our history and our experience demonstrate that is not true. In
fact, they told us what we would be dealing with would be a reproductive
rate of three to four pups per wolf pack. We are experiencing
twelve to sixteen pups per wolf pack. Approximately two months
ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that there were over
900 wolves in the three-state area, but they also admit that they
substantially under-estimate the number of wolves that are in
the area. And the reason that they do is because they used to
have a radio-collaring program in place and so they will only
count packs that have at least one radio-collared wolf within
the particular pack.
The problem is that a couple of years ago they were caught releasing
some drugged wolves. A rancher up in northwestern Wyoming came
upon the scene of a helicopter out in the middle of his calving
pasture and three wolves lying out on the ground that had been
drugged and been brought in. He brought trespassing charges against
the Fish and Wildlife Service, against the federal government.
A federal court threw that case out saying you cannot bring a
trespassing action against the federal government, but he did
not find they had not trespassed. And, in fact, that was the guy’s
calving pasture at the time that they had the wolves lying out
on the ground. Their argument was, we were just collaring the
wolves, we didn’t know if it was private or public lands.
For goodness sakes, they have GPS all over the place. They knew
exactly where they were. They brought those wolves in there.
They have since discontinued the collaring program, so they
now don’t know how many wolves that we have. We estimate
at a minimum we have 400 to 500 wolves in the state of Wyoming
alone. Now here is what is important.
Each wolf each month consumes a minimum of two large animals.
It is fairly easy to do the math. We are losing a thousand animals
a month to this wolf introduction program. Those are the large
ungulates, cows, elk, moose, but you also have to keep in mind
that wolves kill for sport. They are one of the few other mammals
that actually do. I have seen some photographs of the kind of
slaughter in the elk feed grounds that I think would sicken most
people, for example. The elk no longer will use the elk feed grounds
in Northwestern Wyoming because they realize that when they went
in, they just turned into lunch. The Fish and Wildlife Service
has completely refused to manage and control the wolves although
the NEPA analysis and the recovery plan all stated that they would
have an effective control program in place. They have since abdicated
that responsibility. They will only control or use a management
technique if they can confirm a wolf kill—if it is actually
confirmed. They can find the animal, the downed animal, and they
can confirm it is a wolf kill. I just gave you some statistics
about how big Wyoming is. Wyoming is a very, very big state, and
if you have an animal that has been slaughtered by a wolf, you
have got maybe 24 to 48 hours to confirm what it is before other
scavengers, before weather, and things like that will impact the
ability to determine the reason it was killed.
The other important point is that the Fish and Wildlife Service has always refused to compensate ranchers for their livestock losses associated with wolf depredations. But the Defenders of Wildlife in a PR campaign—that’s what my position is on that—stated that they would compensate for confirmed kills. My clients, the livestock producers in western Wyoming, can show that for every confirmed kill they lose between eight and ten head of livestock. So for every 100 head of confirmed livestock kills we have lost 1,000 head.
I will give you an example. Actually it is higher than that. I have a situation where one of my clients, Jim Magagna, who is the executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, has some sheep in western Wyoming. Earlier this year a wolf pack moved in and denned on his lambing ground. And there was a lot of controversy about it because we kept telling the Fish and Wildlife Service, you have got to move these wolves. We are moving 10,000 head of sheep into this area in two weeks. We cannot have a denning wolf pack. Fish and Wildlife Service said, we do not do anything that is proactive, but if they kill any sheep, we will come in and kill them. I thought that that was a real interesting response. Well, a couple of weeks ago, in fact, they did kill them. They went in and they killed 30 head of sheep. You know how many were confirmed as being killed by wolves? One. Fish and Wildlife Service went in there and none of these sheep had been consumed. This was one of the sport killing incidents. They were able to confirm one sheep because they said it was in water and it froze and they were able to determine by looking at it that it was in fact a wolf kill. But the fourteen more they said were probably killed by wolves but the other fifteen they have absolutely no idea what happened. So that is, we are talking about confirmed kills of less than fifty percent.
Here is the other irony about this. Here is what happens when this kind of ecological manipulation or social manipulation occurs. The ranchers in northwestern Wyoming are not sitting back to watch their livestock slaughtered. They are selling out. But they are not selling out to other ranchers. They are selling out to developers, because it is one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I don’t know how many people have been to Cody, Wyoming, or Jackson or Dubois or Lander or those areas, but it truly is just spectacular country. What they are doing is those ranchers are selling out to developers. So the real irony of these things is that we are losing open space. We are losing migration corridors. We are losing our wildlife. We are degrading the environment all, for the benefit of a species that is neither threatened or endangered.
The second irony is that we are losing our elk and our moose herds. So the legacy of the wolf in Wyoming is going to be less open space, more housing developments, urbanization of one of the most beautiful areas on earth, more congestion, and a decimated moose population. Just to give you an idea statistically, you have to have a reproductive rate for moose of approximately thirty to forty percent to have a self-sustaining population. We are down around thirteen percent. We know that they are wiping out our moose population. Our moose are very, very territorial. They do not more away. The elk will. The elk are moving out of Yellowstone. The elk are moving out of Teton County. The elk are moving into other areas. I don’t know to what extent they are going to be able in the long term destroy our elk population, but we do know that they are going to destroy our moose populations.
So what has really happened is that, in addition to all that I have described, we have got serious trampling of private property rights. The wolves are moving, they follow the prey base, and so they are moving into private property areas. They are wiping out livestock. And not only are they killing livestock, but they are also impacting the rancher’s ability to put weight on their livestock. I was visiting with one rancher one day. He said he had a herd of about 150 cows out in one pasture, and he said that they just ran and ran because those wolves were on them nonstop. So even when they were able to protect themselves from actually being taken down by a wolf, he was unable to continue operating because he had so much weight loss.
What has happened with both the Preble’s Jumping Mouse and the gray wolf is that we are expending enormous amounts of money on alleged endangered or threatened species, not for the purpose of benefiting or protecting a species, but literally for the purpose of limiting land use not only on state or federal lands, but on private lands as well. By doing that we are actually diverting money from those endangered and threatened species that could actually be benefited. With the wolf there are close to 1,300 species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf is number 24 in terms of federal expenditures. They spend millions and millions of dollars on this program every year, but that is because I would argue that the program is unsuccessful. I think many people would argue that it is highly successful because it is doing exactly what they intended to do, which is to limit private property use which is to limit the use of our other resources.
What do we do? Hageman and Brighton files lawsuits. I enjoy that and so I would also say to Mr. Gile, I apologize for some of the experience that you have had with attorneys because I can assure you there are other attorneys out here who really do fight. And I know that you know that. We fight very hard for these because these are battles that are extremely important to what we do. We fight our lawsuits and we fight what is going on with this and you can look at my biography. I have fought the roadless rule, I have fought many, many water issues to make sure that we can protect our uses.
Several years ago, my business partner and I realized that filing these lawsuits is not necessarily the best way. We decided that we need to get in at the front end of this. My partner and I created what is called the Wyoming Conservation Alliance, although we are changing the name to the Conservation Alliance because we are moving more regional and national actually more quickly than we intended to. The purpose of the Conservation Alliance is to monitor what is going on in the federal government and in the state government in terms of water and natural resource issues. So what we do is we review the Federal Register every day. How many of you here review the Federal Register every day? How many of you have ever seen the Federal Register compiled in one place? This is one week of the Federal Register! And it was a slow week because it was Christmas, so they only had four days. That is the federal regulations that are going on. Now, these will deal with so many other agencies. They deal with the Department of Education and many other agencies. We focus on those agencies that affect water and natural resource issues—the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of Interior, and I could go on and on and on. We monitor that every day. Then we have members and we notify them of every thing that is going on in the state of Wyoming that may impact water or natural resources, because what we want to do is we want to get in on the front end. When the Preble’s Jumping Mouse was listed it was before anyone in Wyoming even knew it was on the radar. Nobody even knew that the Preble’s Jumping Mouse was being considered for listing.
We need to get in on the front end. Everybody in this country needs to get in on the front end because what is going on is our Congress may pass statutes, but it is our agencies that hurt us. These federal regulations are so onerous and burdensome in such situations and so far outside of what Congress ever intended those laws to be. This is where we have got to be fighting this battle. Mr. Blackman had commented on this federal regulatory process and how critical it is. It is critical. These agencies and what is going on in these agencies affect every single one of us every day. And we can fight these battles and we can fight the roadless case and the Preble’s Jumping Mouse and the wolves and I can have those high profile cases, but this is where so many of those decisions are being made, and this is where we need to be out there protecting our rights.
Just to give you an example of the agency impact in this country, in the Department of the Interior there are 350 appointed positions; there are 76,000 career employees. They have to have something to do. And this is what they do. So what we have found is that by getting in at this level and by submitting these comments, we can actually make a difference. We have done it at the state level and we have done it at the federal level, and we are starting to see, I don’t know that I can say, I would like to say we are starting to see changes, but we are starting to see people pay attention to us. They are looking at the WCA. We actually had a federal agency become one of our members so that they could figure out what was going on.
I want to leave you with one final comment about the environment.
There are many people who, because of who I work for and what
I do, would argue that I am not out there protecting the environment,
and I can assure you that is what I do every day of my life, because
I protect open space, I protect ranchers, I protect the ability
to preserve those resources and to protect our water resources
and to protect our water sheds.
If you want to see what happens when you take away private property
rights, simply go to Romania fifteen years ago. And I don’t
know how many of you remember when they overthrew Ceausescu in
1989. When they overthrew him and had a trial and he and his wife—they
both received the death penalty that was carried out I think the
next day. When they went into that country, if you will remember,
the devastation, the environmental devastation and destruction
of that country was sickening. The smoke stacks. It was unbelievable,
in addition to the fact of all of the children, remember, in the
orphanages. All of the children that had been taken away, they
were called Ceausescu’s children, because their families
did not have the resources to raise those children, to keep them,
to feed them, so they put them in the orphanages and they laid
there in those beds for year after year without anyone ever holding
them. And the environmental degradation. That country didn’t
believe in private property rights. That country didn’t believe
in protecting the rights of its citizens, and they destroyed themselves.
The leaders of that country destroyed them. That might be an extreme
example, but it is something that happened within the last sixteen
years. If we need any incentive whatsoever to protect private
property rights, if we need any incentive at all, all we need
to do is look at our own environment because if we don’t
protect private property rights, we can’t protect our environment.
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