On October 6, 2022, the Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland and the National Park Service teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to expand the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
The U.S. Department of Interior announced the acquisition of 9,362 acres using funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).
Secretary Haaland said: “This acquisition underscores the central role that locally led conservation efforts play in the Biden-Harris administration’s America the Beautiful initiative and our ongoing efforts to conserve, connect and restore public lands and waters.”
She continued: “Great Sand Dunes and The Nature Conservancy have built a model for collaboration that will help guarantee that future generations have access to this special place.”
First of all, Haaland’s claim this is a “locally led” effort is not accurate. As American Stewards has been reporting for more than a year, 30 x 30 (America the Beautiful), is an internationally led agenda advanced by radical environmental activists who want to eventually set aside 50 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2050, starting with 30 percent by 2030.
Their desire to “conserve” and “restore” lands and waters is all hype and not accurate. They will not define “conserve,” but, they want to “permanently protect” land in its “natural state” with no human use.
Initially, President Herbert Hoover designated 35,528 acres as the Great Sand Dunes National Monument located on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado. In 1999, The Nature Conservancy purchased 15,690 acres known as the Medano-Zapata Ranch located in the San Luis Valley.
TNC immediately began, according to their own press release, to develop a “plan to transfer some of the acquired land for the creation of Great Sand Dunes National Park.” In November of 2000, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Act passed Congress expanding the park to 149,028 acres and apparently TNC’s Medano-Zapata Ranch acres were conveniently within the boundaries of the Park. They were inholders.
Using the newly funded Land and Water Conservation Fund, the National Park Service purchased 12,498 acres of the TNC owned ranch, and the organization plans to “transfer the remaining 3,192 acres to NPS in the future.”
TNC and the federal government are closely tied and working together to set aside 30 percent of our nation by 2030. We will continue to report on these transactions and expose the convenient relationship with TNC and other land trusts with the federal government.
