What Westerners would love to ask the candidates Thus we have an abundance of federal land. I ran some numbers with U.S. General Services Administration data from 2004, omitting Alaska, Hawaii and the District of Columbia. In the West, the proportion of federal land ranges from 29.9 percent in Montana to 84.5 percent in Nevada. In the rest of the country, the range is from 0.4 percent in Rhode Island and Connecticut to 13.4 in New Hampshire. To put it another way, of the 624,995 square miles of federal land in the Lower 48, 88 percent are in the 11 Western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. This plays out in a lot of ways, from the Sagebrush Rebellion to EarthFirst. Our major industries, from tourism to resource extraction and agriculture, are all connected to our abundance of federal land. That’s why I long to see a presidential forum that features questions like these....