This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 10th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Native American Tribal lands are supposed to be sovereign and in some ways they are,

but when it comes to forest management, it turns out that local

control, tribal sovereignty over that forested land, produces significant dividends for

healthy forests.

Todd Myers with the Washington Policy Center describes why.

When somebody describes to me a tribe that is operating on tribal lands and they have tribal

sovereignty, what I have come to discover over years of having discussions

with people like Terry Anderson, formerly a perk, and others is that tribal sovereignty doesn't actually mean what I think it ought to mean, which is ownership, control, and all the bundles of a bundle of rights that you would associate with owning a piece of land.

So what does that mean?

What does tribal sovereignty mean in those

environmental preservation.

Tribal sovereignty means is very complicated because of the legacy

that the United States basically holds those lands in trust for the tribal members through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

So rather than allow the tribes to control what they want and their land, they have to get permission from the federal government in many cases, which is not property rights, which is not sovereignty, it is essentially a socialist.

And that's, and as a result, what you have seen are it is essentially a socialist.

And that's, as a result, what you have seen are lots of environmental problems and

other property rights problems that are a legacy of that approach.

In many cases you would see out in the west where I live where there were timber

harvests where the benefits were supposed to go to the tribes but they would essentially

go to the federal government and then the money would be used for the tribes, whether the tribal members

...