Land of The Free?

For decades, environmentalist wackos have howled that we're destroying our wilderness, losing our parkland, uglifying our most pristine natural grandeur. America is becoming concrete and steel, they claim: "From Connecticut to California, sprawl is increasing air and water pollution, devouring wetlands and forests," whines the Sierra Club on its website.

Wrongo. The facts completely contradict the doom-and-gloom rhetoric. The truth is, my friends, out of the 1,944 million acres in the United States, only 5.2 percent of it is developed. Let me say that again. Only 5.2 percent of the land in the United States is developed - that is, supporting streets, highways, stores, homes, schools, Sierra Club headquarters, whatever.

The rest falls under the following categories: cropland (20 percent); pastureland (6.3 percent); rangeland (21.4 percent); forest land (21.5 percent); federal land (21.2 percent) and other rural land (4.4 percent). (These 1997 government figures - and we know the government does not lie - do not include Alaska, which is two-thirds federally owned.)

Amazing, isn't it? There's virtually as much federally-owned land as there are forests across the fruited plain! That's an astonishing statistic, folks. Over four times more land is controlled by the federal government than has been developed by Americans. No surprise that most of the western states such as Wyoming (1 percent developed) and South Dakota (2 percent) are sparsely populated. The stunner is in the East Coast states, where settlers have been building homes, businesses, and industry for over 400 years. Yet Delaware is only 15 percent developed. The most heavily concentrated state, New Jersey, is only 34 percent developed! Of course, that didn't stop Jeff Tittel, director of the state's Sierra Club chapter, from warning, "If we don't do something now [in New Jersey], the environmental consequences are going to be devastating."

"Do something"? What is he going to do, export New Jerseyans to Nebraska? This map should prove to you that these folks are not only dishonest, they are panic-oriented fearmongers, using the environment as a means of advancing their anti-American, anti-capitalist, socialist agenda, pure and simple. Too bad they've fooled so many people with this myth. All anyone has to do is look out the window of an airplane flying at 30 to 40,000 feet to see exactly what these statistics demonstrate - the lies of environmentalist extremists.