John Billman, at Outside, reports that 1,600 people went missing from our public lands without a trace.
[H]undreds or maybe thousands of people [ha]ve gone missing on our federal public lands. Thing is, nobody knows how many. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls unidentified remains and missing persons “the nation’s silent mass disaster,†estimating that on any given day there are between 80,000 and 90,000 people acÂtively listed with law enforcement as missing. The majority of those, of course, disappear in populated areas.
What I wanted to know was how many people are missing in our wild places, the roughly 640 million acres of federal lands—including national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management propÂerty. Cases like 51-year-old Dale Stehling, who, in 2013, vanished from a short petroglyph-viewing trail near the gift shop at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park. Morgan Heimer, a 22-year-old rafting guide, who was wearing a professional-grade personal flotation device when he disappeared in 2015 in Grand Canyon National Park during a hike after setting up camp. Ohioan Kris Fowler, who vanished from the PaÂcific Crest Trail last fall. At least two people have recently gone missing outside the national forest where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There are scores more stories like this.
The Department of the Interior knows how many wolves and grizzly bears roam its wilds—can’t it keep track of visitors who disappear? But the government does not actively aggregate such statistics. The Department of Justice keeps a database, the ÂNational Missing and Unidentified Persons System, but reporting missing persons is voluntary in all but ten states, and law-enforcement and coroner participation is voluntary as well. So a lot of the missing are also missing from the database.
GoneWithTheWind
I will go on record as opposed to privatization of public lands. I am opposed to turning the federal lands over to the states. There is an effort by a number of Western states to acquire ownership of federal public lands. The intent is to then give or sell these lands cheaply to politically connected companies and families. Once this happens those lands are permanently removed from public access. This is a scam to rob the taxpayers/citizens.
There is an argument that some of the federal land could easily be sold off with little loss to the public and some gain to the treasury. I would support that providing it was done in a way that would insure: 1. that there is an actual monetary gain to be had for the treasury. 2. That it isn’t sold to an overseas owner or some big corporation or rich family. Something like a policy to sell small parcels, 5-20 acres, that can only be purchased by a citizen and only one parcel per individual with provisions that multiple parcels can never be owned by one person or entity. In other words give the citizens the right to buy the lands without the risk of straw purchasers or other fraud.
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