Back in the 1970's, during the ill-fated push for the Equal Rights Amendment, a running joke in some circles was that "ERA" stood for "Earned Run Average".

I'm running into something like that now. Every time I see "BLM" I think "Bureau of Land Management" instead of "Black Lives Matter".

Here in Oregon the Bureau of Land Management is a pretty big deal because it owns about a quarter of the state. The Feds own about half the state total, and the part that BLM doesn't own mostly belongs to the Forest Service. (There's also one moderate size National Park, and a rather large reservation under the nominal control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.)

Now most of what BLM operates could accurately be called "God-forsaken wasteland"; it's basically the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin Desert and a bunch of other deserts. Letting the Feds own it is not a real burden because no one else would want that land. (Not even the Indians, because there's no water there, or not very damned much.)

But BLM has been around for decades and in the western part of the US it's a big deal nearly everywhere. Wikipedia says that BLM controls 1/8 of the landmass of the US, fully a million square kilometers and nearly all of that is in the western states. So it bugs me a bit when eastern know-it-alls usurp that acronym for a transient political movement which will be consigned to the history books within ten years.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 253 words, total size 2 kb.