Keeping America’s 155 national forests healthy requires money. The Wilderness Society works every year to ensure that our forests remain funded and healthy.
As yet another sign of how far the Congress is taking the country off track, keep an eye on how Congress fills the time while the debt ceiling debate stalls.
And this proposal is made even worse by the bill it’s a part of – the 2012 Interior Appropriation Bill – which makes deep cuts to environmental programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and yet more cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Congress’ Great Outdoors Giveaway continued this week with the Aug. 2 passage of a debt-ceiling deal that will make it significantly more difficult for the government to invest in conservation funding over the next ten years.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) uses fees from offshore drilling permits to acquire critical lands within park, refuge, forest, BLM land boundaries. In Fiscal Year 2010, $266 million has been allocated to LWCF for protection of important places such as the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, and the Lewis & Clark National Forest in Montana, among others listed here.
This spreadsheet outlines Federal Land & Water Conservation Fund, Forest Legacy and Stateside LWCF, and Total Federal and Stateside LWCF Budget and Interior Appropriations.
With Congress back in session, our staff and policy experts have been working full-speed with members of the presidential transition team and with members of Congress to prepare them on steps they can quickly take to right many of the environmental wrongs of the past eight years.
