Rachel is giving us some history lessons on land wars in Nevada

[malaise]

Who remembers Dick Carver on his bulldozer declaring independence for his county.
Not to mention the bombs that followed.

[villager]

1. Speaking of bombs, I posted this in another thread about "Sagebrush Rebellion" history:

Death Threats on My Answering Machine:


Was doing environmental organizing back then. Could see the rise of the far, violent right quite clearly in enviro circles, though most big city liberal apparatchiks dismissed it all, of course (just as issues that were too "far out" -- like, well, climate change, were routinely dismissed).

But those of us that knew people getting blown up in their cars, or who were receiving these threats via phone or mail, knew this particular toxic genie -- abetted by a rightwing Federal government, and sympathetic "police" all over the West (where most of these issues played out) -- was not going back into its bottle...

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. From the present...some of the things at times I hear

At board meetings, and planning groups tells me this is not at all diminished, why the Feds backing down will come back to hunt is.

[villager]

3. The Feds were blatantly sympathetic then, and afraid now (at best)

The results of not going after rightwing terrorists will be the same.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Actually I think it will be worst

And I hope to be wrong

[villager]

6. I agree with both contentions, Nadin.

Alas.

[malaise]

11. Thanks for this villager

I really am clueless about a lot of this RW madness

[Demo_Chris]

4. My wife's family was heavily involved in this sagebrush rebellion a while back...

And at the risk of offering some offence, allow me to say that I have yet to see a single news report offer a complete and balanced picture of all of the issues involved here. I do not know, or care, about this particular flare up or the (apparent) jackass involved this time, but I witnessed what was going on at the time, the gross incompetence of the BLM and Forest Service, including behavior on their parts that was CLEARLY intended to be harassment designed to drive smaller ranchers out of business.

I personally witnessed, I SAW IT MYSELF, government helicopters flying low slow grid patterns over these rancher's property, spooking cattle through fence lines and scaring the crap out of people as well. I was there when a government black helicopter -- and yes, it was black -- landed in our family's front yard in the middle of the night, they stayed there idling until everyone came outside, before taking off again. I remember the continuous hassles over grazing permits and AUMs, with arbitrary and ridiculous changes designed to do nothing more than to put small ranchers trying to follow the rules and practice responsible land management out of business.

The point is that there is usually more than one side to a story.

I do not know or care about this guy. From what I can tell, he is probably a nutcase and an asshole, but I would be VERY hesitant to believe anything the government or media were telling you about the situation either.

[villager]

7. The goal of Federal "management," and of "wronged little-guy" welfare rancher stories are the same:

Corporate exploitation / extraction from public lands.

But a lot of these self-described "little guys" were easily lead to vent their fury at them "damn environmentalists," etc., and violence ensued.

Which, again, primarily benefited the corporate sector.

[Demo_Chris]

9. I suspect that there is some truth to this (if I am reading you correctly)...

Again, if your only news source is the mainstream media or the government (essentially the same thing) it's easy to assume that the government official citing generic environmental concerns simply must be in the right and the rancher in the wrong. But that would be incorrect. We are talking here about rural Nevada, and country so remote and rugged that no one (including the BLM and Forest Service) other than the occasional rancher ever goes there.

In some cases the ranchers have been grazing cattle there since before the Forest Service or the State of Nevada even existed, on their own in the middle of nowhere. If you have not been out into the depths of the Nevada wilderness you simply cannot grasp just how desolate and isolated this land is. If the ranchers don't manage it no one does.

But big corporate ranches want to gobble them up and everyone wants what water rights they have, and these big interests work with the government to get what they want.

So you get arbitrary crazy nonsense used as regulatory weapons. Dry washes that haven't seen running water in a thousand years might be suddenly declared a protected wetland. Crazy? That's the kind of crap they are pulling. Or take so-called wild horses. These aren't some magical and rare native species, they are just regular horses. The ranchers just let them run free and they would go get some new ones if they needed them. The ranchers kept the numbers down. In the valley my wife's family lives in the BLM made a deal with the ranchers, if the ranchers would stop managing horse numbers the BLM would do it for them, and that way everyone -- including environmentalists who had never been to Nevada or seen a wild horse -- would be happy. Instead, the BLM let them run fucking wild, and they have decimated the ecosystem these ranchers had maintained for a century. Instead of small healthy herds of horses and antelope and deer and carefully preserved grasses among the sagebrush, you have thousands of often diseased horses and destroyed grasslands. Then the BLM blames cattle and ranchers for their own complete mismanagement.

It's obscene and offensive as hell. I remember going out with my wife's step dad (who owned the ranch at that time) and walking through the valley, walking for miles as he surveyed the damage, and seeing the pain and frustration. He LOVED that land, he was trying to actually take care of it and all of the animals who lived there. Hell, he was trying to save them and the only time you would ever even see the BLM was when they showed up to screw with people. They damn sure weren't inspecting the wilderness areas, I'm not even sure they knew how to get there.

Anyway, I could go on all day, but I suspect most won't want to read it.

Off to bed.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Some of that is happening right now

In my back country, but I will not say a word why. Some folks here take an issue with...in this case corporate interests combined with the Feds. It involves a sacred cow.

[malaise]

13. Thanks for another side of the story

[Demo_Chris]

15. Note, I don't know and don't claim to know another side to THIS particular story...

But I do know the kinds of games the BLM and Forest Service played with my wife's family. I will give you one example:

During the summer they would drive their cattle up onto this one mountain then collect them (as necessary) in the fall. Generally, when the weather started to turn a little cool and the feed was depleted the cattle would basically come back on their own. In any case, my father in law would ride and drive up there and look at the feed. The ranchers on this property had been doing just this since about 1860. To understand just how remote this ranch is, it is about a hour and a half over two mountain passes to the CLOSEST small town.

In order to legally do this today you need a grazing permit. Without these permits the ranch is worthless, as it cannot produce enough hay to feed their cattle year round. It's not just this ranch, they are all that way in the desert west. The cattle and sheep are a critical part of the ecosystem as they munch on the grasses without trashing the roots. Without this grazing the land burns. Because these ranches have existed since long before there ever was any federal 'management', they are (as I understand it) basically grandfathered in. These ranchers believe that they have a legal right to utilize certain tracts of land for their grazing.

In the case of my wife's family, they began arbitrarily screwing with these rights. For example, one year instead of the normal 350 cattle they usually put up on the mountain, the Forest Service told them that this time they could only put up thirty, or if they wanted to put the usual amount up there they would have to collect them whenever this particular Forest Service employee said to do so. Per his letter, it might be all season, it might be a week. Considering it takes a week on horseback just to drive the cattle there in the first place, this is simply absurd. And again, consider that you are putting a few hundred cattle to wander around a section of forested mountain land measuring a thousand square miles. An area that could have supported fifty-thousand head of cattle (until it got cold) was suddenly incapable of supporting a few hundred.

It gets worse for the rancher. Either they put the cattle up there or they legally lose their right to use the land at all. In that particular case and year, my father in law simply did what he had always done before-- he looked at the amount of feed, put his usual number of cattle out there, and ignored the Forest Service letters that started coming a week later demanding he now remove them. Nor was he alone in this, but once the feds had selected you for special attention you had every federal agency riding you.

Anyway, I have to go, so signing off for mow.

[Paladin]

10. The well-armed right wing militia movement is spoiling for a fight.

And at some point in the not-too-distant future, they're going to cause that fight to happen. It's happened before, and it's fixing to happen again. This is what takes place when a country squanders its resources in waging pointless wars on the other side of the world, while ignoring the growth of home-grown terrorist forces within its own borders.

[malaise]

12. Yep they want another Waco real bad

or maybe Oklahoma City.

Has Hannity called McVeigh a hero yet?

[Paladin]

14. I've got a feeling Hannity is going to regret all that on-air goading.

Like I said, I don't think a militia-sparked incident of violence is a matter of whether anymore---it's a matter of when.