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Show 107 In 1976 Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Before that year people had assumed, if they bothered to think about it at all, that public lands would eventually be sold or transferred to private owners, or to the states vihere they were located. The new law clearly stated that all remaining lands would be owned by the federal government, forever, for the benefit and use of all the American people in all 50 states. That meant that large areas of the Western states would never belong, by title, to the people viho lived on or near them. 66?o of Utah, 86$ of Nevada, 64$ of Idaho, 96$ of Alaska, and anywhere from one-third to one-half of California, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevi Mexico, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming would be ovined in perpetuity by the United States government. Decades earlier, vihen these states had entered the Union, they'd agreed to give up all rights and titles to these lands - which had belonged to the federal government all along - in exchange for statehood. No one had worried about it at the time, because the lands hadn't seemed to be worth much. In 1976, after the lands could no longer be acquired, people began to realize that they had value after all. And then they wanted to ovin them. Many Westerners felt that they were being discriminated against. The Eastern states, they argued, hadn't given up large parts of their lands to the federal government as a condition for statehood. This was true, because the Eastern states had been heavily populated from the beginning - there viere no vast tracts of "land nobody wanted" in the East. |
