For over 100 years public lands have been available for grazing sheep and cattle. Now, preservationists are threatening to.lock up the land and put family livestock operations out of business by increasing grazing fees. The government's cheap grazing fees give an unfair competitive advantage to corporations and wealthy individual operators over small family ranchers, who must pay the full cost of grazing their cattle on private lands. Meanwhile, livestock overgrazing has eroded soils and despoiled riparian areas, taking a huge toll on wildlife habitat, and the scenic, archaeological, and recreational values of public land that all Americans own. We don't need to save every endangered species and subspecies, particularly when people's jobs are at stake.
Extinction is a natural part of evolution.
Using science, we can determine a balanced approach for protecting important species and jobs. While extinction is a natural part of evolution, human activities have accelerated it 10,000 times. Natural selection is the process for strengthening biodiversity, while the unnatural selection prompted by people artificially robs the Earth of its most important genetic resources. The genetic information inside one mouse would fill all 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica published since 1768. The cure for diseases like AIDS may be hidden in one of the 100 species which become extinct every day.