I have long believed these types of collaborative agreements are a far better approach to federal land management than the contentious battles that too often sidetrack proper resource management.
For a variety of reasons, I believe, the time is right to resolve many of the long standing and thorny land use, recreation, and wilderness designation issues in Central Idaho.
The ongoing conflict between us has caused heavy suffering to both peoples. The future can and must be different. Both our peoples are destined to live together side by side, on this small piece of land. This reality we cannot change.
As for now, we must not forget who would have to exchange the land? those villages which live more than others on irrigation, on orange and fruit plantations, in houses built near water wells and pumping stations, on livestock and property and easy access to markets.
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.
I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.
The tract through which we passed is generally very good land, with plenty of water; and there, as well as here, the country is neither rocky nor overrun with brush-wood.
With the recent news that the State of Florida has agreed to purchase 181,000 acres of U.S. Sugar land, we have an historic opportunity for our larger restoration efforts and for the people of Florida. This too will not come without difficult challenges, but it reminds us that anything is possible.
