Tomgram: William deBuys, No More Wide Open Spaces?
By William deBuys
Posted on May 17, 2016, Printed on May 17, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176141/ ;
One summer 43 years ago, I headed west with a photographer friend,
interviewing Americans at minor league baseball parks, fairgrounds, tourist
spots, campgrounds, wherever the moment and our Volkswagen van took us.
Grandiosely enough, our goal was "to tap the mood of the nation," which led
to my first book, Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies. Looking
back, I now realize that, in 1973, three decades ahead of schedule, we met
the precursors to the Tea Party movement, angry and unnerved white Americans
of a certain age, camped out in their RVs and distinctly dyspeptic about
where this country was going. This was a crowd, as I wrote at the time,
that when it came to the lifestyles they had known and enjoyed could already
"feel the tremors under their feet" and I predicted that one of these days
they would be the ones to suffer. "You can bet," I observed, that
"America's corporate pushers won't be going through the same sort of
withdrawal pains as their victims." And I added, "What makes it so
frightening is this: When these people find themselves desperate, they may
panic and grab for the first help in sight, and I'm afraid to think what
that will be." All these decades later, we may finally have a better idea
of what that, in fact, is.
As it happened, for this born and bred New York City boy for whom Central
Park was the wilderness, there was another unforgettable aspect of that
journey from coast to coast. I saw up close and personal something of the
West, of lands that seemed to stretch out toward eternity, that could take
your breath away, and that, as TomDispatch regular William deBuys points out
today, still -- though for how long we don't know -- belong to all of us.
Of our visit to Yellowstone Park (where the warnings about grizzlies in the
campgrounds touched off the panic button in this urbanite), I wrote:
"Early this afternoon, we rested by a lake and watched a Swainson's hawk
hover and hunt, all its energy focused on a few yards of field. Suddenly, it
plummeted out of sight, rose with a field mouse in its claws and was gone.
Yellowstone's been like that, just the opposite of our expectations.
Gigantic, wild-looking, beautiful. The roads don't even dent it, at least in
the eastern part where we've come in. Strangest of all, it's not crawling
with people. We didn't see anybody until we pulled into the parking lot of
the Hamilton General Store."
And here's a small miracle: in this era of privatization -- even the
military now goes into its war zones with a set of corporate warriors in tow
-- those awesome American lands are still ours, still public. My children
can still spend time in them and appreciate a world they would otherwise
have no access to. But my grandson when he grows up? Who knows? As deBuys
makes clear today, behind the latest wing-nuts of the American West lie
corporate interests that, in this age of growing inequality, might someday
take part in one of the great land grabs of modern times. Fortunately,
there are still writers like deBuys to remind us of just what's at stake.
Tom
Privatizing America's Public Land
How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate
By William deBuys
It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or
her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also
entitled to their own facts.
Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that
most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the
trouble is deep, widespread, and won't soon go away. Last winter's armed
take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in
southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if
they hadn't been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called
"terrorists" and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of
western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership -- or at
least that of their leaders, since they weren't exactly a band of
intellectuals -- was only loosely linked to reality.
At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ
wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James
Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal
ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United
States -- a contention that more than two centuries of American
jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.
The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest
throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both
the state and national level to transfer western public lands to states and
counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of
America's national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they
just use them.
Greed can suffice to motivate those who lust for the real estate bonanzas
and resource giveaways that would result if states gained title to, say, the
264 million acres presently controlled by the Bureau of Land Management
(BLM). General combativeness and hostility toward government also play their
roles, and the usual right-wing mega-donors, including the Koch brothers,
pump money into a bewildering array of agitator groups to help keep the
fires of resentment burning.
The louder the drum chant of crazy "facts" gets, the more the
Alice-in-Wonderland logic behind them threatens to seize the popular
narrative about America's public lands -- how they came to be and what they
represent. This, in turn, prepares the way for the betrayal of one of the
nation's deepest traditions and for the loss of yet more of its natural
heritage. Conversely, those who value American public lands have been
laggard in articulating an updated vision for those open spaces appropriate
to the twenty-first century and capable of expressing what the unsettled
"fruited plains" and "purple mountain majesties" of the West still mean for
our national experience and our capacity to meet the challenges of the
future.
The Malice at Malheur
The leaders of the Malheur occupation, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are the sons of
Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher and public lands scofflaw who gained
notoriety two years ago following a standoff with federal law enforcement
officers. Back in the 1990s, the elder Bundy had stopped paying grazing
fees, claiming that the federal government had no authority to regulate the
public lands where his cattle fed. In 2014, with Bundy $1.1 million in
arrears and his grazing permits transferred to the local county government,
the Bureau of Land Management moved to round up and confiscate his 400 head
of cattle.
Via social media, Bundy appealed to militia and "patriot" groups for
support, and hundreds of armed resisters rallied to his ranch 90 miles north
of Las Vegas. When the ensuing showdown threatened to become a bloodbath
like the Waco siege of 1993, the authorities withdrew.
The government's retreat and its failure to arrest members of the Bundy
family or their allies for acts of armed resistance set the stage for the
Malheur takeover, but the roots of the incident go back to the Sagebrush
Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use Movement that succeeded
it. The Sagebrush Rebellion was triggered by a national inventory of public
lands to identify areas appropriate for designation as "wilderness" (under
the National Wilderness Preservation System). Its advocates also protested
the enforcement of government protections for archaeological sites and
endangered species. Wise Use groups echoed those complaints and essentially
argued against anything the environmental movement was for, urging the
amped-up exploitation of natural resources on western lands.
Ammon Bundy put his own rogue-Mormon spin on that message by claiming divine
inspiration and sanction for his actions. Ostensibly, the Malheur occupation
was intended to show support for nearby ranchers Dwight and Stephen Hammond,
who faced jail terms for setting illegal range fires (and who immediately
distanced themselves from the occupation). But Bundy didn't stop there. He
called on "patriots all over the country" to join his cause and help "free
up" federal land for ranching, mining, and logging, pointedly adding, "We
need you to bring your guns."
Malheur was an odd place for white guys to make a stand in favor of
"returning" federal land to its "rightful owners" -- that is, themselves.
The refuge was established in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt declared a modest
area of public domain to be a wildlife refuge. If anyone then occupied the
land, it was members of the Burns Paiute tribe, not white settlers. In the
1930s, the refuge expanded when the government bought the bankrupt remnants
of a former cattle baron's empire. At the time, Malheur was its own
mini-Dust Bowl. The purchase, which enlarged protection for once-fabulous
wetlands supporting thousands of migrating birds, was essentially a bailout.
The people who joined the Bundys in the Malheur occupation were a strange
lot. Few had any relationship to ranching or actual cows, aside from sitting
down to eat a hamburger. Some were ex-military; others claimed to be (but
weren't). Quite a few had links to Tea Party groups or to "patriot"
organizations including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and an
assortment of other militia outfits. One described himself as "an old hippie
from San Francisco," jazzed by the excitement of the occupation and uncaring
about its purposes. He also happened to be a convicted murderer (second
degree) -- of his father.
Straight thinking was not a requirement for admission to the occupiers'
cause. The fellow who photogenically rode his horse around the refuge while
displaying a large American flag, for example, turned out to be acutely
concerned lest the federal government divest itself of public lands. He
feared the loss of access to cherished places where he liked to ride his
horse. Because of that, he joined an armed effort aimed at forcing the
government to do exactly what he didn't want. Go figure.
Following the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur occupier who
committed suicide-by-cop at a roadblock on January 26th, the occupation
unraveled. At last count, the Bundy brothers and 24 others had been arrested
and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including conspiracy to prevent
federal employees from carrying out their duties and destruction of public
property. All but one or two of them are still in jail.
Nor did the feds stop there. They finally nabbed Cliven Bundy at an airport
after he attended a memorial service for Finicum, and also charged 18 others
in connection with the 2014 Nevada standoff. Some of the 18 were already in
custody for their involvement at Malheur. Bundy's illegal cattle, which the
government unsuccessfully tried to confiscate in 2014, remain at large.
More Mad Cowboy Disease in Utah
Despite the government's thorough, if belated, crackdown, the hostility
toward public lands on display at Malheur has hardly been contained. Such
resentments are of a piece with the anger suffusing the presidential
campaigns, although paradoxically enough Donald Trump has spoken out in
favor of retaining federal lands. (Ted Cruz, by contrast, campaigned against
Trump in Nevada by promising to "fight day and night to return full control
of Nevada's lands to its rightful owners, its citizens.")
The darkest side of this "movement" is undoubtedly its well-documented
association with armed militia groups and their persistent threat of
violence. Gunmen from the Oath Keepers, for instance, obstructed federal
officials from shutting down mines violating environmental regulations in
both Oregon and Montana. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the
current, rapid growth of militia groups is unprecedented and appears to have
been spurred by the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch. Notices for "meet-ups"
among "patriots" to show support for the incarcerated Bundys and the
"martyred" Finicum are abundant on social media.
A similar virus has infected several western state legislatures, including
those of Montana, Oregon, Wyoming, and Nevada. Representative Michele Fiore,
who hovered at the fringes of the Malheur occupation, for instance,
introduced a bill in the Nevada legislature to transfer federal lands there
to state control, irrespective of federal wishes. Considered patently
unconstitutional, it was quickly dismissed. A Nevada senate resolution
calling on Washington D.C. to initiate action to transfer those lands
received more serious consideration.
The game is being played more cagily in Utah. There, lawmakers approved
legislation in March that authorized and partly funded the state's attorney
general to sue the federal government for title to approximately 30 million
acres of Utah public lands. The suit would pursue strategies advanced via a
study produced by a New Orleans law firm outlining "legitimate legal
theories" that, it contended, might lead to the wholesale transfer of lands
to the state.
The expected cost of the litigation has been estimated at $14 million and
Utah has sought allies among other western states. So far, they've found no
takers willing to join the suit, possibly because other attorneys general
have concluded that the legal theories behind it are rubbish.
Utah has also exported its anti-federalism to Capitol Hill. One of its
congressmen, Rob Bishop, currently chairs the House Natural Resources
Committee and sympathetically held hearings in February on several bills,
introduced by representatives from Alaska, Idaho, and Utah, that would place
federal lands under state control. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska
and chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has promoted
similar bills in the Senate.
Hanging on to "the Solace of Open Spaces"
Lost among the headlines, sound bites, and posturing is any serious
discussion of America's public lands and their purposes. Ammon Bundy was
completely correct, early in the occupation of Malheur, when he said, "This
refuge is rightfully owned by the people." His problem was that his
definition of "people" only included people like him. The Burns Paiute
tribe, whose ancestral homeland includes Malheur and whose sacred sites are
protected by federal law, certainly did not figure into his plans. The
thousands of annual visitors to Malheur, who appreciate its 320 bird species
and other wildlife, and the millions more who support the National Wildlife
Refuge System, also seem not to be the "people" Bundy had in mind. The same
might be said for anyone attracted to the idea of intact natural landscapes
and functioning ecosystems.
The greatest vulnerability of America's public lands is that the millions of
their rightful owners scarcely know they exist. Ask the average New Yorker
what the Bureau of Land Management is, and the odds are that you'll get a
confused stare. Even many people in the West, who live close to those public
lands, have trouble differentiating the National Parks from the National
Forests, though those two classes of land are administered for substantially
different purposes by two different government departments, Interior and
Agriculture. Yet most people agree that the wild open spaces of the nation's
grandest landscapes constitute a collective treasure.
In essence, they are our national commons, our shared resource, not just for
material goods, like timber, clean water, and minerals, but for recreation
and inspiration. Seventy percent of all hunters are said to use public
lands, and the percentages of birders, campers, hikers, and other
recreationists must be at least as high. Public lands also help buffer us
against the uncertainties of the future. Only public lands, for instance,
spread unbroken over great enough distances to offer the connectedness that
many plants and animals will require to adapt, to the extent possible, to a
warming climate. Moreover, as the struggle to wean the economy away from
fossil fuels continues, only public lands, with their unified federal
ownership, are susceptible to the kind of sweeping shift in national energy
policy necessary to "keep it in the ground."
For all these reasons, the future of the nation's 640 million acres of
public lands deserves a more prominent place in our national discourse. The
patterns of the past, emphasizing extractive, industrial uses of those
lands, have long been in decline. An alternate path focused on restoration
and biodiversity conservation has instead steadily gained traction, and
indeed, its priorities -- which include making room for endangered species
-- have inspired many of the objections of the Malheur occupiers.
Two things are certain: when large acreages of public domain are transferred
to the states, significant portions of them end up being sold off to private
interests. That creates a new kind of inequality that, in the natural world,
parallels this era's growing economic gap between rich and poor. It is an
inequality of access to big, wild lands and to the ineffable something that
Wyoming writer Gretel Ehrlich called the "solace of open spaces" and
Pulitzer-winning novelist Wallace Stegner termed "the native home of hope."
Thanks to the great western commons, which the Bundys and their legislative
champions would like to dismantle, all Americans still enjoy the freedom to
roam on some of the most spectacular lands on the planet. That access and
that connection have been part of the American experience from Plymouth Rock
through the westward migration to the present day. It is part of what makes
us Americans.
The Depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie understood the issues attending
the privatization of common land. He offered his opinion of them in the
least sung verse of his most famous song:
"There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said: "Private Property"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
This land was made for you and me."
William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books, the
most recent of which is The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest
Creatures. He has written extensively on water, drought, and climate in the
West, including A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the
American Southwest. Based in New Mexico, he has managed ranches and devised
cooperative grazing programs involving both ranchers and government land
managers.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 William deBuys
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176141
Tomgram: William deBuys, No More Wide Open Spaces?
By William deBuys
Posted on May 17, 2016, Printed on May 17, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176141/ ;
One summer 43 years ago, I headed west with a photographer friend,
interviewing Americans at minor league baseball parks, fairgrounds, tourist
spots, campgrounds, wherever the moment and our Volkswagen van took us.
Grandiosely enough, our goal was "to tap the mood of the nation," which led
to my first book, Beyond Our Control: America in the Mid Seventies. Looking
back, I now realize that, in 1973, three decades ahead of schedule, we met
the precursors to the Tea Party movement, angry and unnerved white Americans
of a certain age, camped out in their RVs and distinctly dyspeptic about
where this country was going. This was a crowd, as I wrote at the time, that
when it came to the lifestyles they had known and enjoyed could already
"feel the tremors under their feet" and I predicted that one of these days
they would be the ones to suffer. "You can bet," I observed, that "America's
corporate pushers won't be going through the same sort of withdrawal pains
as their victims." And I added, "What makes it so frightening is this: When
these people find themselves desperate, they may panic and grab for the
first help in sight, and I'm afraid to think what that will be." All these
decades later, we may finally have a better idea of what that, in fact, is.
As it happened, for this born and bred New York City boy for whom Central
Park was the wilderness, there was another unforgettable aspect of that
journey from coast to coast. I saw up close and personal something of the
West, of lands that seemed to stretch out toward eternity, that could take
your breath away, and that, as TomDispatch regular William deBuys points out
today, still -- though for how long we don't know -- belong to all of us. Of
our visit to Yellowstone Park (where the warnings about grizzlies in the
campgrounds touched off the panic button in this urbanite), I wrote:
"Early this afternoon, we rested by a lake and watched a Swainson's hawk
hover and hunt, all its energy focused on a few yards of field. Suddenly, it
plummeted out of sight, rose with a field mouse in its claws and was gone.
Yellowstone's been like that, just the opposite of our expectations.
Gigantic, wild-looking, beautiful. The roads don't even dent it, at least in
the eastern part where we've come in. Strangest of all, it's not crawling
with people. We didn't see anybody until we pulled into the parking lot of
the Hamilton General Store."
And here's a small miracle: in this era of privatization -- even the
military now goes into its war zones with a set of corporate warriors in tow
-- those awesome American lands are still ours, still public. My children
can still spend time in them and appreciate a world they would otherwise
have no access to. But my grandson when he grows up? Who knows? As deBuys
makes clear today, behind the latest wing-nuts of the American West lie
corporate interests that, in this age of growing inequality, might someday
take part in one of the great land grabs of modern times. Fortunately, there
are still writers like deBuys to remind us of just what's at stake. Tom
Privatizing America's Public Land
How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate
By William deBuys
It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or
her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also
entitled to their own facts.
Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that
most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the
trouble is deep, widespread, and won't soon go away. Last winter's armed
take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in
southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if
they hadn't been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called
"terrorists" and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of
western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership -- or at
least that of their leaders, since they weren't exactly a band of
intellectuals -- was only loosely linked to reality.
At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ
wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James
Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal
ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United
States -- a contention that more than two centuries of American
jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.
The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest
throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both
the state and national level to transfer western public lands to states and
counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of
America's national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they
just use them.
Greed can suffice to motivate those who lust for the real estate bonanzas
and resource giveaways that would result if states gained title to, say, the
264 million acres presently controlled by the Bureau of Land Management
(BLM). General combativeness and hostility toward government also play their
roles, and the usual right-wing mega-donors, including the Koch brothers,
pump money into a bewildering array of agitator groups to help keep the
fires of resentment burning.
The louder the drum chant of crazy "facts" gets, the more the
Alice-in-Wonderland logic behind them threatens to seize the popular
narrative about America's public lands -- how they came to be and what they
represent. This, in turn, prepares the way for the betrayal of one of the
nation's deepest traditions and for the loss of yet more of its natural
heritage. Conversely, those who value American public lands have been
laggard in articulating an updated vision for those open spaces appropriate
to the twenty-first century and capable of expressing what the unsettled
"fruited plains" and "purple mountain majesties" of the West still mean for
our national experience and our capacity to meet the challenges of the
future.
The Malice at Malheur
The leaders of the Malheur occupation, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are the sons of
Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher and public lands scofflaw who gained
notoriety two years ago following a standoff with federal law enforcement
officers. Back in the 1990s, the elder Bundy had stopped paying grazing
fees, claiming that the federal government had no authority to regulate the
public lands where his cattle fed. In 2014, with Bundy $1.1 million in
arrears and his grazing permits transferred to the local county government,
the Bureau of Land Management moved to round up and confiscate his 400 head
of cattle.
Via social media, Bundy appealed to militia and "patriot" groups for
support, and hundreds of armed resisters rallied to his ranch 90 miles north
of Las Vegas. When the ensuing showdown threatened to become a bloodbath
like the Waco siege of 1993, the authorities withdrew.
The government's retreat and its failure to arrest members of the Bundy
family or their allies for acts of armed resistance set the stage for the
Malheur takeover, but the roots of the incident go back to the Sagebrush
Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use Movement that succeeded
it. The Sagebrush Rebellion was triggered by a national inventory of public
lands to identify areas appropriate for designation as "wilderness" (under
the National Wilderness Preservation System). Its advocates also protested
the enforcement of government protections for archaeological sites and
endangered species. Wise Use groups echoed those complaints and essentially
argued against anything the environmental movement was for, urging the
amped-up exploitation of natural resources on western lands.
Ammon Bundy put his own rogue-Mormon spin on that message by claiming divine
inspiration and sanction for his actions. Ostensibly, the Malheur occupation
was intended to show support for nearby ranchers Dwight and Stephen Hammond,
who faced jail terms for setting illegal range fires (and who immediately
distanced themselves from the occupation). But Bundy didn't stop there. He
called on "patriots all over the country" to join his cause and help "free
up" federal land for ranching, mining, and logging, pointedly adding, "We
need you to bring your guns."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316232866/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316232866/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Malheur was
an odd place for white guys to make a stand in favor of "returning" federal
land to its "rightful owners" -- that is, themselves. The refuge was
established in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt declared a modest area of public
domain to be a wildlife refuge. If anyone then occupied the land, it was
members of the Burns Paiute tribe, not white settlers. In the 1930s, the
refuge expanded when the government bought the bankrupt remnants of a former
cattle baron's empire. At the time, Malheur was its own mini-Dust Bowl. The
purchase, which enlarged protection for once-fabulous wetlands supporting
thousands of migrating birds, was essentially a bailout.
The people who joined the Bundys in the Malheur occupation were a strange
lot. Few had any relationship to ranching or actual cows, aside from sitting
down to eat a hamburger. Some were ex-military; others claimed to be (but
weren't). Quite a few had links to Tea Party groups or to "patriot"
organizations including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and an
assortment of other militia outfits. One described himself as "an old hippie
from San Francisco," jazzed by the excitement of the occupation and uncaring
about its purposes. He also happened to be a convicted murderer (second
degree) -- of his father.
Straight thinking was not a requirement for admission to the occupiers'
cause. The fellow who photogenically rode his horse around the refuge while
displaying a large American flag, for example, turned out to be acutely
concerned lest the federal government divest itself of public lands. He
feared the loss of access to cherished places where he liked to ride his
horse. Because of that, he joined an armed effort aimed at forcing the
government to do exactly what he didn't want. Go figure.
Following the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur occupier who
committed suicide-by-cop at a roadblock on January 26th, the occupation
unraveled. At last count, the Bundy brothers and 24 others had been arrested
and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including conspiracy to prevent
federal employees from carrying out their duties and destruction of public
property. All but one or two of them are still in jail.
Nor did the feds stop there. They finally nabbed Cliven Bundy at an airport
after he attended a memorial service for Finicum, and also charged 18 others
in connection with the 2014 Nevada standoff. Some of the 18 were already in
custody for their involvement at Malheur. Bundy's illegal cattle, which the
government unsuccessfully tried to confiscate in 2014, remain at large.
More Mad Cowboy Disease in Utah
Despite the government's thorough, if belated, crackdown, the hostility
toward public lands on display at Malheur has hardly been contained. Such
resentments are of a piece with the anger suffusing the presidential
campaigns, although paradoxically enough Donald Trump has spoken out in
favor of retaining federal lands. (Ted Cruz, by contrast, campaigned against
Trump in Nevada by promising to "fight day and night to return full control
of Nevada's lands to its rightful owners, its citizens.")
The darkest side of this "movement" is undoubtedly its well-documented
association with armed militia groups and their persistent threat of
violence. Gunmen from the Oath Keepers, for instance, obstructed federal
officials from shutting down mines violating environmental regulations in
both Oregon and Montana. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the
current, rapid growth of militia groups is unprecedented and appears to have
been spurred by the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch. Notices for "meet-ups"
among "patriots" to show support for the incarcerated Bundys and the
"martyred" Finicum are abundant on social media.
A similar virus has infected several western state legislatures, including
those of Montana, Oregon, Wyoming, and Nevada. Representative Michele Fiore,
who hovered at the fringes of the Malheur occupation, for instance,
introduced a bill in the Nevada legislature to transfer federal lands there
to state control, irrespective of federal wishes. Considered patently
unconstitutional, it was quickly dismissed. A Nevada senate resolution
calling on Washington D.C. to initiate action to transfer those lands
received more serious consideration.
The game is being played more cagily in Utah. There, lawmakers approved
legislation in March that authorized and partly funded the state's attorney
general to sue the federal government for title to approximately 30 million
acres of Utah public lands. The suit would pursue strategies advanced via a
study produced by a New Orleans law firm outlining "legitimate legal
theories" that, it contended, might lead to the wholesale transfer of lands
to the state.
The expected cost of the litigation has been estimated at $14 million and
Utah has sought allies among other western states. So far, they've found no
takers willing to join the suit, possibly because other attorneys general
have concluded that the legal theories behind it are rubbish.
Utah has also exported its anti-federalism to Capitol Hill. One of its
congressmen, Rob Bishop, currently chairs the House Natural Resources
Committee and sympathetically held hearings in February on several bills,
introduced by representatives from Alaska, Idaho, and Utah, that would place
federal lands under state control. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska
and chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has promoted
similar bills in the Senate.
Hanging on to "the Solace of Open Spaces"
Lost among the headlines, sound bites, and posturing is any serious
discussion of America's public lands and their purposes. Ammon Bundy was
completely correct, early in the occupation of Malheur, when he said, "This
refuge is rightfully owned by the people." His problem was that his
definition of "people" only included people like him. The Burns Paiute
tribe, whose ancestral homeland includes Malheur and whose sacred sites are
protected by federal law, certainly did not figure into his plans. The
thousands of annual visitors to Malheur, who appreciate its 320 bird species
and other wildlife, and the millions more who support the National Wildlife
Refuge System, also seem not to be the "people" Bundy had in mind. The same
might be said for anyone attracted to the idea of intact natural landscapes
and functioning ecosystems.
The greatest vulnerability of America's public lands is that the millions of
their rightful owners scarcely know they exist. Ask the average New Yorker
what the Bureau of Land Management is, and the odds are that you'll get a
confused stare. Even many people in the West, who live close to those public
lands, have trouble differentiating the National Parks from the National
Forests, though those two classes of land are administered for substantially
different purposes by two different government departments, Interior and
Agriculture. Yet most people agree that the wild open spaces of the nation's
grandest landscapes constitute a collective treasure.
In essence, they are our national commons, our shared resource, not just for
material goods, like timber, clean water, and minerals, but for recreation
and inspiration. Seventy percent of all hunters are said to use public
lands, and the percentages of birders, campers, hikers, and other
recreationists must be at least as high. Public lands also help buffer us
against the uncertainties of the future. Only public lands, for instance,
spread unbroken over great enough distances to offer the connectedness that
many plants and animals will require to adapt, to the extent possible, to a
warming climate. Moreover, as the struggle to wean the economy away from
fossil fuels continues, only public lands, with their unified federal
ownership, are susceptible to the kind of sweeping shift in national energy
policy necessary to "keep it in the ground."
For all these reasons, the future of the nation's 640 million acres of
public lands deserves a more prominent place in our national discourse. The
patterns of the past, emphasizing extractive, industrial uses of those
lands, have long been in decline. An alternate path focused on restoration
and biodiversity conservation has instead steadily gained traction, and
indeed, its priorities -- which include making room for endangered species
-- have inspired many of the objections of the Malheur occupiers.
Two things are certain: when large acreages of public domain are transferred
to the states, significant portions of them end up being sold off to private
interests. That creates a new kind of inequality that, in the natural world,
parallels this era's growing economic gap between rich and poor. It is an
inequality of access to big, wild lands and to the ineffable something that
Wyoming writer Gretel Ehrlich called the "solace of open spaces" and
Pulitzer-winning novelist Wallace Stegner termed "the native home of hope."
Thanks to the great western commons, which the Bundys and their legislative
champions would like to dismantle, all Americans still enjoy the freedom to
roam on some of the most spectacular lands on the planet. That access and
that connection have been part of the American experience from Plymouth Rock
through the westward migration to the present day. It is part of what makes
us Americans.
The Depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie understood the issues attending
the privatization of common land. He offered his opinion of them in the
least sung verse of his most famous song:
"There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said: "Private Property"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
This land was made for you and me."
William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books, the
most recent of which is The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest
Creatures. He has written extensively on water, drought, and climate in the
West, including A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the
American Southwest. Based in New Mexico, he has managed ranches and devised
cooperative grazing programs involving both ranchers and government land
managers.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 William deBuys
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176141
