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How Nebraska's Governor Became A General In A Right-Wing War Against Biden’s Conservation Goal

Internal emails reveal how a Texas-based property rights group worked behind the scenes to steer Gov. Pete Ricketts' crusade against the "30x30" initiative.

By Chris D'Angelo

Environment Reporter, HuffPost

Apr. 22, 2022, 05:45 AM EDT

". . .On Friday, which is Earth Day, American Stewards will sponsor a “STOP 30x30 Summit” in Lincoln, Nebraska — A release about the summit that went out last month boasted that it will “spoil environmentalist’s [sic] Earth Day” and “send the clear message that America’s landowners would not be ‘voluntarily’ surrendering their property rights to the environmental agenda.”

Ricketts is hosting the event and will share the stage with Byfield, Boebert, Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, anti-federal land Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory (R) and other leading figures of the anti-30x30 movement.

The event’s sponsors include three of the nation’s fiercest proponents of climate change denialism — the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, The Heritage Foundation, and The Heartland Institute — and Protect the Harvest, a pro-agriculture, anti-animal rights group founded by oil tycoon Forrest Lucas.

> Lucas and Protect the Harvest played an outsized role in securing President Donald Trump’s pardons for Dwight Lincoln Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, the father-son Oregon ranchers whose arson conviction sparked the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. . .

And American Stewards was selective about which media can attend the “most important conference” in its history: The organization denied HuffPost credentials to cover it.

Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, speaks at an anti-30x30 information session in Lea County, New Mexico, in July 2021.

Her Texas-based nonprofit is leading the charge against the Biden administration's conservation target.

Blake Ovard/Hobbs News-Sun

30x30 And The Right’s Deceptive War

Biden’s 30x30 target is in line with a proposed United Nations framework for protecting biodiversity amid the deepening extinction and climate crises, and has growing support within the global scientific community.

A week after taking office, Biden followed through on a campaign promise and set 30x30 as a national goal. His executive order established a process for engaging with a broad range of stakeholders, from states and Native American tribes to farmers and anglers, to get input about how best to achieve the 30% target. (Approximately 12% of all U.S. lands are now permanently protected, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.)

There is absolutely nothing to suggest the plan, which the administration has since branded “America the Beautiful,” will involve confiscating property or deceptive tactics to gain control of private land. In an initial report outlining its vision for protecting and restoring 30% of lands and waters by the end of the decade, the Biden administration committed to “collaboration, support for voluntary and locally led conservation and honoring of Tribal sovereignty and private property rights.”

The overall lack of detail in Biden’s initial directive, however, allowed paranoia and conspiratorial thinking to permeate conservative circles. Almost immediately, American Stewards labeled 30x30 a “land grab” and warned its audience that the Biden initiative “hands the powers of the Federal regulatory agencies to a movement that has been working to abolish private property for decades.”

Within weeks, Ricketts would be a top soldier in the anti-30x30 movement.

> . . .Other rhetoric has been completely outlandish. At one of her anti-30x30 training sessions in South Dakota, Byfield promptly agreed when an attendee compared 30x30 to the Holodomor, a man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine during Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin’s rule and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3.9 million people.

. . .At that same event, Trent Loos, a Nebraska rancher and radio show host who served on former President Donald Trump’s agricultural advisory committee and now helps American Stewards with its campaign, compared 30x30 to Nazi Germany. . ."

More details >> https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pete-ricketts-nebraska-30x30-american-stewards_n_6261dcd5e4b0ea625c04f0fa