The Bureau of Land Damagment
Westerners know the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) far better than our brothers on the Atlantic coast.
Their web site says they are ‘an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, (that) administers 261 million surface acres of America's public lands, located primarily in 12 Western States. The BLM sustains the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.’
Huge cattle, farming, mining and drilling operations operate on BLM leases from the federal government.
But there’s an ebb and a flow to management integrity in this imperfect world.
What constitutes even-handed and economic handling of those public resources is defined differently by Dick Cheney (resident of Wyoming) and Dave Freudenthal (its Governor).
Wyoming is ebbing at the moment, big-time.
Talk to different people, hear different things. An anonymous senior official at the BLM claims it’s become cultural practice to spend money that’s assigned one pur…