Dear President Trump,
Many of your supporters in Utah want you to follow through with draining the swamp and putting term limits on members of the House of Representatives and Senate. We have too many career politicians in our country who no longer think about their constituents. They are only concerned with getting campaign contributions for the next election.
Our Utah representatives have come to you seeking to take over federal lands. They want to secure priceless lands for pennies on the dollar and take back national monuments to sell/lease, that priceless beauty to campaign contributors from extraction industries.
If Mike Lee, Rob Bishop, Orrin Hatch, and Jason Chaffetz want to sell their houses or their property, then they have the right to do so. If they want the right to sell priceless beauty of our public lands and national monuments, which belong to the people of the United States of America, for their own purposes and campaign contributions, then you and Secretary Zinke must take our trust seriously and tell them no.
Millions of people visit these national treasures every year. Countless sportsmen fish and hunt in these vast open public lands. Numerous residents and visitors from around the world come to Utah to hike, bike, drive and commune with a higher power inside their hearts amid the vast beauty of Utah’s scenic land. Humans need the contrast between brick-and-mortar, asphalt, noisy traffic and the thousands of people seeking a private life inside their cell phones. People need to hear the silence of nature, the sound of a stream, to see a vista of uninhabited beauty.
Most of us live in cities and most of our time is not our own. We have our jobs, families and constant interruptions in our daily routines. How much more important is it now to have a place of silence, emptiness, and aloneness? We have an obligation to our children’s children to save these wild lands which nourish the hearts and spirit of all who see them.
To allow these priceless treasures to be sold off or destroyed is simply a move to please their major campaign contributors. This move by Utah’s representatives to usurp the American wild lands is a move which underlines the need for term limits for Congress and the Senate. We cannot tolerate career politicians selling off these priceless American trust lands to prepare for their next election campaign fund.
