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Show Private Lands Attacked Japanese land is so scarce, price so high, it requires the efforts of generations of a family to pay off a small parcel using a 100-year mortgage! mort-gage! Will similar scarcity be artificially arti-ficially created in Utah? Of 54,346,240 square acres that is Utah, purchased by pioneer sacrifices, sacri-fices, the Federal Government owns 67 percent of Utah's land area! No other state has more National Parks set aside: Bryce, Canyonlands, Arches, Zion, Capitol Reef. Three huge national recreation areas and six national monuments are in Utah. In 1872 there existed one National Na-tional Park in America, Yellowstone. Yellow-stone. By 1907 there were eight; now there are 37 National Parks with 16 more planned! Add to that 487 pieces of land (91 million acres) called the National Wildlife Refuge system; millions of acres of BLM land and National Forest land, all out of private circulation! In Utah 2,407,509 acres of Department De-partment of Defense land are locked up; bombing ranges that could also act as land fill dump sites; 7,906,033 acres of National Forest and 23,268,250 acres of BLM land in Utah provide living space where buffalo, deer, elk and antelope roam. Don't, huge areas like Uinta Wilderness, the Beaver Dam Wilderness, Wilder-ness, or the Nebo Wilderness area provide enough wilderness designated desig-nated land? Couldn't those who need additional wilderness travel to the wilderness areas located in other slates? Cities and railroads own 430,014 acres in Utah. Only a small proportion of land is privately pri-vately owned, and that is heavily regulated through zoning laws, land use permits, building codes, federal EPA regulations, federal wetland laws, etc. In 1849 my great, great, great grandfather on my mother's side, who the town of Hatch was named after, was encouraged to settle and "improve the land;" now government govern-ment seems to discourage people from having any effect whatsoever on land. Land is for the trees and animals, we are told, not for destructive de-structive human beings. I'm tired of humans being portrayed that way. Anyway doesn't government ownership of the land typify the Communist-Socialist governing system? Private property ownership is a Creator-endowed right that built free America. Now government seeks to own all property either outright or through regulatory control and taxation. Hasn't the federal government gov-ernment usurped too much land in the West? Couldn't the five NATIONAL NA-TIONAL PARKS in Utah be, owned by Utah as STATE PARKS? Income gained thcrcfjrom. could lower our property tax burden! bur-den! Shouldn't Utah manage it's own land and also allow more private pri-vate property ownership? (At1as of Utah. Brigham Young University Univer-sity Press.) Bliss W. Tew Orem, Utah |