All the land you’ll ever own – if you can keep it

“Here is your country – do not let anyone take it or its glory away from you. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skim your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance. The world and the future and your very children shall judge you accordingly as you deal with this sacred trust.”   

    ~~  Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.

After the 1789 Constitutional Convention finished its work, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government had been established by the newly signed document. Franklin’s famous response was: “a republic if you can keep it.”

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and another landmark juncture of the creation of the American nation is reached. Passage of two federal laws: the Federal Land Management Policy Act and the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act completes the core legal structure for the great national public estate of lands and waters. And what has been established by these documents – a Great American landscape treasury if you can keep it.

‘Keeping it’ is the conservation challenge of the 21^st Century. For our shared estate of national lands and waters holds immense monetary value and ambitious people spare no effort to legalize the robbing of it.

Are public guardians asleep in their watchtowers?

From the first pilgrim’s footstep onward we newly minted Americans have used the land for sustenance, industry and prosperity. The WAY in which we use our natural resources, however, has often been nothing more than a robbery of future generations for the satisfaction of the present. Theodore Roosevelt called this “skinning the land.”  He rallied a strong political movement over the 25-year period from 1887 to 1912 to break the robber baron trusts and preserve a large federal estate from spoilage.

The concept of ‘conservation’ was born from this Gilded Age movement: the using of resources in such a way as to preserve their value across generations – ‘wise use.’ Please note that use of resources is organic to the conservation idea. But the outcomes of the way in which we use land and water have been the sticking point in every resource political battle since. Always the question: what does the future nation of American people get to keep out of each withdrawal from our national resource account?

Two polar land ethics have evolved among Americans consistent with our Western dualistic worldview. One is the age-old “get-all-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can” ethic of the industrial Skinners. For them any incremental cost paid to preserving resources for the future is just an expense item and an unwelcome reduction of profit.

Against this contra-ethic stands a land ethic of community permanence best described by Aldo Leopold: "A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."

Advocates of both ethics will use natural resources to support our civilization. But one ignores the future while the other plans for it.

As I have written before, the creation and preservation of our Great American Commons is the sole national edifice that distinguishes Americans from all other nations on Earth. Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold were not speaking of an inconsequential national problem.

Past generations of American hunter conservationist were energetic even ferocious in their defense of keeping newly created national forests, wildlife refuges and monuments in public hands.  Unfortunately our contemporary American generation appears to be about as protective of their public assets as a drunken sailor is of his wallet.

I have finally come to the sad conclusion that most hunters and anglers simply don’t deserve their public estate inheritance. They would be justly served if our national forests and BLM prairie lands are sold off, and locked up for the exclusive enjoyment of a gang of super-rich land masters. An elemental truth applies: “you don’t deserve it if you will not fight for it.”

We’ve kept our republic for 224 years but the metaphorical King seems to be creeping back while the citizenry keeps their nose pressed against a digital fantasy screen.

If the outdoorspeople of today were worthy of their ancestors they would be outraged at the current political moves by so-called conservative politicians to turn federal lands over to states where the property can be privatized. Does anybody vote such politicians out of office anymore?  Instead, we hear barely a whimper of protest. Do today’s heirs of the Republic think they can sleep through their slice of history without being convicted for their dereliction?

We Americans make a big deal of being ‘free.’ But what does freedom mean if you have no open spaces in which to roam and exercise actual power of being free?

Private ownership of land is a basic cultural norm of our American way of life. But only a tiny fraction of Americans can own, or ever hope to own, any substantial amount of rural land. Public land is all the land we will ever own – ever – for all the remaining millions of us.

Of course 95 percent of the American people don’t know such a thing as public land exists. They have some sense of a national ownership of national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite but even there they are vague on the details. The recent Cliven Bundy affair in Nevada produced enough mainstream press coverage to plant a small seed in the public mind; but don’t count on that to bear any political fruit.

So here we have a nation of people who don’t know they are shareholders in a public estate. And then we have a generation of hunters and anglers who are either oblivious to the real threat of loss, or incredulous that the threat is real, or too cowardly to confront the aggressors. What could go wrong?

The Great American Land Robbery now in progress shows itself with several faces – here is a short list:   {caveat: everything you are about to read is perfectly legal – or will be by the time it takes place.}

State – Federal Land Grab -- The Republican National Committee recently passed a resolution endorsing proposals to turn federal public lands over to Western states. Utah already has passed a state law for such an action and other red-state legislatures have bills in progress. State ownership will be nothing but a pass-thru account to a massive sell-off on a scale not seen since the Oklahoma Land Rush.

No More Public Land Choke Collar – Bills in state legislatures, i.e. Montana, to ban state fish and wildlife agencies from acquiring new lands for wildlife management and public hunting -- much better that such lands be owned by zillionaires who are the only buyers who can afford current inflated land prices.

Antiquity Act Attacks – A new bill in Congress would greatly diminish power of the President to designate new monuments, etc. This Act was one of Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite tools for upgrading the public estate.

Land Skinner Bills – A new batch of recent state and congressional bills would dictate increased logging and drilling on public lands regardless of environmental and economic harm.

Unequal Land Exchanges – back room political deals to force federal resource agencies into land exchanges that give billionaire landowners power to acquire vast land empires while trading away public hunting and recreation opportunities.

Dirty-is-Better Politics – Attacks on EPA, Clean Water Act and any other law or regulation intended to protect air, water and land from industrial pollution.

Human-Caused Climate Change – It’s real, and our generation at this time is the last chance for humanity to avoid the worst of coming disasters. What is valid for the planet as a whole is exponentially more instructive for keeping wild habitats fit for use by large game and a variety of wildlife.

Self-Government is hard to do. Human nature naturally seeks the comfortable and avoids the difficult. Being a citizen of a Republic, therefore, is the worst thing that can happen to the typical human – with the exception of not being a citizen of a Republic.  Hunters and anglers should consider the alternatives before deciding the Great American Commons is not worth fighting to keep.

This column is not intended as an alarm call, not even a warning. I’m really just pointing out that our grandchildren and their descendants will despise us if we are the prodigal generation that squanders their Great American Commons birthright.

Whatever!

Across the sagebrush divide – will western resource battles ever end?

The publicly owned lands and waters of the Rocky Mountain States are worth a lot of money – more now than ever before.

Enterprising Americans have been trying to put that public money into their private pocket ever since the first white man stuck a claim stake in western soil. History seems to flow forward into today’s headlines out here in the West.  The methods of privatizing the public treasury have stayed fairly consistent over time. What has changed is the privateer’s sales pitch for why the American people should be grateful for having their pockets picked.

“Energy Independence” comes to mind as the hottest cause de jour for resource rape on the public estate. Actual energy independence is a contemporary impossibility; but never mind, sucking the rocks dry for a five percent cut in oil imports is close enough.

A great American irony laughs at us, however, because we all find ourselves with our hands in each other’s pockets when it comes to exploitation of public resources. 

Bashing oilmen, miners, timber-cutters and grazers comes easy to those folks whose paycheck is filtered through several economic layers from its original source in the Earth. Those filters make it easy to demand change from industry and hard to demand of oneself the sacrifices that will shrink our personal footprint a shoe-size or two.

Bashing strikes both ways, of course. 

Oilmen, ranchers and other resource industrialists cling to their historic hegemony over resource policy in which commercial production dominates resource use and environmentalists are supposed to butt out.

Thus we get the “privatize profits and socialize costs” syndrome – and all the ingredients for endless political conflict. 

So, yet another acrimonious season of turf warfare is shaping up in the Rocky West as 2014 rolls along. Call it the Sagebrush Rebellion, but know it really is the unending battle over who gets the good out of public lands and waters.

In Nevada, a rancher is defying the whole idea of federal public ownership of land. Having refused to pay grazing fees for 20 years he successfully defies the law with the help of armed anarchist ‘militias’ who traveled in from other western states just to make sure the BLM doesn’t stop the public pocket-picking going on there. 

Not to be overlooked in that confrontation is the rancher’s claim that only Nevada can own public land; “federal government go home(?).”

Meanwhile, up here in Montana, an attempt by the state fish and wildlife agency to develop some consensus ideas on re-locating publicly owned bison to areas away from Yellowstone Park was canceled in the face of livestock industry blowback.

Sandwiched in between are efforts by right wing / industrial political factions in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and Montana to force the federal government to surrender ownership of national forests and BLM range lands to state control.

This state takeover ideology has been a key project of western state Republicans for decades. The last serious effort was in the mid-1990s when red-state legislatures started resolution drives coordinated with Republican bills in Congress to give the federal lands to the states.

That campaign failed when conservation organizations caught on to the seriousness of the action and rallied a strong grassroots revolt.  

People see what they want to see. Some people see how states maintain public infrastructure, and how much tax money states actually invest in keeping up existing parks and open spaces. Consequently they can’t see how states will do anything with the huge federal estate but give it away to the industrial campaign donors who are really driving this great land grab.

Another group of people view western federal lands through the eyes of investment bankers and profit speculators. Where ordinary people look at a national forest and see their freedom space, the Wall Street tribe comprehends only a chance to flip a deal for profit – and to control the future of life in America thru ownership of our foundational resources.

My own concern, however, is with the persistence of such disputes more than the substance of them.

Rural and urban westerners just can’t get off first base with each other to work out durable resolutions to chronic conflicts. Leaving these wounds open can only lead to greater infections and the eventual collapse of our interactive western public-private land system.

The Montana bison re-location fracas makes a good case study.

At one level the conflict derives from city people and rural people not understanding each other.  At the next level it’s about these two cultural clans being so inwardly focused on their own tribal values that they inflict grievances on each other without realizing they are doing so. 

With these two levels of misunderstanding as barriers we never get to the third level where ideas for mutual agreement can arise.

About four years ago a national environmental group started a publicity campaign promoting the ‘return of wild, free-roaming bison to the prairie.’ This idea sounds fabulous in the ears of city folks whose shared value is the romance of a wild, untamed west. 

Those same words shout a declaration of political war, however, if you are one of those people whose livelihood and heritage is bound up in a fenced-and-leased public land estate.

The net result is a conversation that starts as a shouting match and never progresses beyond stalemate.

Clearly, city people don’t understand the agricultural occupancy of the Great Plains as a product of national policy founded in homestead laws and the Taylor Grazing Act. Those public spaces where the city crew would like to see bison roam is already fully occupied by a public land grazing industry legitimized by more than 100 years of law supported by the national consensus of manifest destiny. 

Making room for bison will require coming to terms with the people of that industry – a more difficult task than preaching platitudes.

On the other side of the fence, rural residents don’t understand the reasons why city people will not go away and leave them alone. The social and emotional need of 300 million urban dwellers for large open, natural spaces to which they can dream if not visit just doesn’t make sense to people whose whole world is composed of open, natural spaces. 

Thus, an idea like ‘wild, free-roaming bison’ sends rural folks right over the edge – and slams the door to both conversation and any opportunity for profiting from that urban desire. This situation will not change until city people start avoiding words that make rural people crazy and come to terms with rural reality. 

Rural people, on the other hand, face an existential survival crisis unless they stop pretending their livestock-centric world is not changing - and that they can prevent the 21^st Century from happening to them.

Personally, I very much want to find a way to keep western agriculture in the hands of traditional family-owned farms and ranches. Demographic change and inflated land values are squeezing the vitality out of the traditional rural way of life. People of the land can’t stop this death-squeeze by themselves; they need some form of partnership with those irritating city people.

These dramas will come and go in the headlines. The rural way of life will live or die as wounds are either healed or deepened. 

Meanwhile, back in the city where the vast majority of voters live, a deeper, stronger force is at work where control of federal public lands is concerned.  People of the Rocky Mountain West are adamant that their national outdoor treasury must continue to be owned and controlled by federal agencies and that access to this treasury must improve.

Over the long haul I predict this public will shall prevail, but only if voters decide elections on this issue.

Desire for a strong federal public estate means nothing if voters elect pick-pockets to their Legislatures and Congress.

  ~~ Ron Moody

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Roots, Respect and social permission to hunt

Yet another political dust-up over trapping appears headed for the November ballot here in Montana.

If memory serves, this will be the third such effort to ban trapping (on public land) by way of a popular vote on a ballot initiative in the past several years.

An old aphorism has it that: “friends come and go. But enemies accumulate.” The persistent efforts by anti-trapping advocates who continue counter-attacking after serial failures can be rationalized by supporters of trapping in several self-justifying narratives.  What cannot be explained away, however, is the existential threat posed by an accumulation of persistent enemies to a way of life like trapping that lingers from yesteryear at the rural margins of the modern urban society.

Ironically, leaders of the modern trapping industry have made a great effort to stop accumulating new enemies. During my tenure on the Montana Wildlife Commission I participated in two regulation-setting cycles for trapping. In both cycles the Montana Trappers Association presented a plan of self-regulation and trapper education that I could not improve upon. I’m confident the majority of trappers adhere to the Association program and have not been the impetus for the recurring political attacks by trapping opponents.

That doesn’t matter much, however, if you fall victim to the 10-percent rule: that 10 percent of trappers will cause 90 percent of problems. In the case of trappers the proportion is probably more like five percent afflicting 95 percent. But a trouble-making five percent obviously is plenty of enemy-breeding activity.

The fact that ethical trappers cannot stop a few crude and contemptuous people from setting traps near public land trails used by urbanites with pets delivers an object lesson to practitioners of that other death-inflicting outdoor activity – hunting.

The vast majority of hunters can be of high-principle and sound ethic; but the culture of hunting will still accumulate enough social enemies to bring it to an end when the larger society concludes the good of hunting is not worth the trouble of putting up with the bad.

 The roots of sub-cultures such as trapping, hunting and fishing go deep into the greater urban population. Without the sustenance of these roots new recruits will not rise to fill the ranks of future outdoors people. More immediate, political and social permission to hunt and trap progressively declines. Political attacks by anti-hunters and anti-trappers typically are only the final, visible stage of a below-surface, step-by-step decline in which hunters and trappers become ever more isolated from mainstream values and interactions. 

In a human dominated world, social isolation is prelude to cultural extinction. Hunters and trappers are especially vulnerable to this isolation hazard given the physically secluded nature of hunting and trapping. Practitioners of the woodscrafts are forced to exert themselves toward social relationships even as their cherished experiences pull them away from society into lonely and wild places.

The smaller the portion of America’s non-hunting majority who know and respect the practice of hunting the smaller the social permission society will grant to hunters.  Sadly, trappers seem already to be dangling way out at the end of the social permission rope. Nobody should overlook the pathos of ethical hunters and trappers who plead their own good behavior as defense. When social permission is withdrawn, it is withdrawn for all.

Trappers who snare pet dogs near popular hiking trails on public land around large cities create a public relations disaster for all trappers. Makes no difference whatsoever if their sets are legal the enemies still accumulate – and enemies vote. 

Hunters have their own cadre of public relations 10-percenters.

Regardless of one’s opinion about large predators, the way hunters currently portray themselves to non-hunters by their treatment of wolves is generating an accumulation of political enemies in the larger society. The lynch-mob mindset against wolves displayed here in the northern Rockies is gnawing at the roots of hunting support among urban Americans who view the wolf, not as an elk-eater, but as an emotional icon. 

My engagement with hunters tells me the majority of western urban hunters want to think of the wolf as a valued trophy game animal – not as vermin. They would look at the wolf in the same way they view black bear – as a predator but also as a valued game animal that must be managed as such. Many of these same hunters, however, are swayed by the groupthink telling them every bite of wild meat swallowed by a wolf is stolen from the mouth of a human hunter.

Even the mountain lion, which, unlike the wolf, has acquired a hunter fan club, is sometimes targeted for over-harvest by policy makers obsessed with producing larger elk populations.

The point of this essay is to advise all these good hunters that they are not invisible as they cast their cultural portraits on the social wall for all those non-hunters to observe and judge. Believing you are right will be a poor consolation if your self-righteousness breeds more enemies than you can out-vote.

A shrill minority of hunters shout their contempt for all those ‘bunny huggers’ they despise.  State legislators, governors and wildlife commissions scramble to appease this groupthink of contempt. They could care less about the distant accumulation of political enemies. Thus uncaring, they certainly can’t be concerned about a growing urban indifference to whether or not hunting continues as part of our American way of life.

But this is root-rot at work. And it will lead to the shriveling away of the flower, leaf and limb of our hunting tradition. Until we hunters learn to grow allegiances among the larger society instead of accumulating enemies we cannot avoid arriving at the same troublesome place now occupied by those ethical trappers who personally do nothing to offend.

Remember, political collapse of the social contract that supports hunting does not require a majority of Americans to become anti-hunters: collapse only requires that they stop caring – stop seeing value in the hunters’ presence in society.

Only by earning the respect of non-hunters by showing ourselves as champions of values shared by non-hunters can we avoid the social oblivion of indifference.

And non-hunters have made crystal clear the one value they expect from hunters above all other values.  They expect hunters to show respect for the wild animals we hunt. Poll after poll pops this value to the top of the chart.

Hunters displaying contempt for an animal like the wolf, which is valued by the larger society, can expect only an accumulation of contempt in return.

To its credit the Boone and Crockett Club continues to emphasize the importance of keeping the respect of the non-hunting public. Among the 10 points of the Club’s Code of Ethics is the pledge: ‘To do my part in upholding a positive public image of hunters and hunting.’

Jack Ward Thomas, in an article titled “A Hunting Ethic” published in the spring edition of FAIR CHASE, the B&C Club magazine, cites four ‘filters’ or tests to establish a standard of fair chase. Prominent among these, he says, is “The action does not facilitate negative criticism toward hunting in general from those who do not hunt.”

Contempt breeds contempt; respect earns respect. Hunters who sneer at the values of non-hunters are pulling all hunters down the social rope toward the noose now tightening around the neck of trappers.

  ~~ Ron Moody