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According to a 1993 history at hand, the Sagebrush Rebellion ended in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan named James Gauis Watt as Secretary of the Interior.
Watt said he was part of the Sagebrush rebellion,
and so conveying public lands to the states or selling the
land to private companies would be a waste of money
since he was willing to sign coal leases, expand grazing
allotments, increase timber sales and otherwise assist
multi-national corporations in exploiting the American West
as a Third-World low-cost commodity production zone.
But things didn't happen that way. While the Reagan
folks were bragging about Morning in America,
it was
Sunset in the West
for all those traditional
industries. Commodity prices collapsed; mines, sawmills and
processing plants closed everywhere between Canada and
Mexico. Watt was offering the West at bargain rates to
strip-miners and clear-cutters in the 1980s, but he
couldn't find any takers.
And the Sagebrush Rebellion didn't end. It's back with a vengeance. Western counties and legislatures pass resolutions claiming control of public land, pipe bombs explode in ranger stations, federal land managers travel in pairs and carry cards that advise them of the proper course to take in case of arrest by a zealous county sheriff.
You get the feeling that the West has been inspired by the South of 1962. Instead of George Wallace posing in the schoolhouse door to protect local customs and culture (i.e., racial segregation) from federal power, we've got a bunch of county commissioners standing on bulldozers as they try to protect local customs and culture (subsidized grazing, subsidized timber sales, etc.) from federal power.
Throw in lots of guns, citizen militias and posse comitatus types, and you've got the potential for an insurrection, followed by a brutal suppression.
Uncle Sam does not like to have his authority questioned. If you think the DEA, BATF, FBI and Secret Service have trouble understanding the Constitution now, just wait until Nye County, Nev., or Catron County, N.M., gets serious in fighting the feds.
If we're lucky, we might get by with only a decade or two of martial law. If we're not -- well, it has never before bothered the federal government to drop nuclear bombs on the West, and this part of the world has served well for testing chemical weapons, too.
What's the problem with total federal control of most of the land in the West? After all, in a financial sense, it's generally a good deal for states and counties.
Part of the problem is that the federal government
manages public land with scientific principles
toward some vague principle called the national
interest.
How scientific are these principles? Granted, real science changes over time as researchers and theorists develop a better understanding of the universe.
But science doesn't change every four years, and federal policies do. One year you hear that good scientific management allows a sustained annual harvest of ten million board feet out of a tract of forest; next election, good scientific management says the forest should be a wilderness preserve to preserve the ecosystem; a few years later, maybe twenty million board feet and an open-pit mine.
This gives science a bad name. And what's the national interest? During World War I, it meant heavy over-grazing of the Sangre de Cristo range to produce wool and mutton needed to defeat the Huns; now the national interest says to preserve it as a sort of pre-Columbian zone, except there won't be wolves and grizzly bears.
We face two related issues regarding public-land management. One is who should manage them: local and state governments, or the federal government. The other: To what end should they be managed?
Generally you've got environmentalists and Democrats supporting federal control, on the grounds that the federal government is big enough to withstand corporate pressures, whereas states or counties just don't have the know-how or the integrity.
Meanwhile Republicans and Wise Use types support local control, figuring that they could have their profitable way with the land if it weren't for those pesky feds.
Both strategies have some problems. The feds are just as good at trashing the landscape as any dozen greedy corporations, and local control, especially in resort areas where scenery has economic value, won't guarantee a return to the good old rip-and-run days that the Wise Users want.
But we can't be sure of either. So how about experimenting in a few places with increased local control?
How to experiment? My friend Randy Russell, a land-use planner and economic-development consultant in Carbon County, Utah, is working on a method right now.
There's a bunch of state land and BLM land around Price
which serves as an informal community commons now -- some
wood gathering, target-shooting, etc. Russell is drawing
from the Colorado charter school
concept to develop
a charter commons
-- the county would sign a
management agreement with the public-land agencies, and
undertake certain responsibilities. In return, the locals
might treat the land better because they'll have a stake in
it.
His idea is still in what he calls a brain-dump
stage,
but if it were pursued, we might avoid Civil War
II.
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