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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