Environmentalists: Bunkerville rancher Bundy is freeloading

Environmentalists say Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy, whose skirmish with the federal government has gained him icon status with states’ rights and free speech advocates as well as other disgruntled ranchers, doesn’t “own” the public land where hundreds of his cattle roam in the Gold Butte area nor does he have the “right” to let them graze there. “He needs to abide by the law,” said Ken Cole, National Environmental Policy Act coordinator for the Western Watersheds Project. The project is a nonprofit organization that advocates protection of wildlife and watersheds through education, public policy initiatives and litigation. “Clearly the (Bureau of Land Management) owns this land. The federal government has never doled it out to him or his predecessors and has maintained authority over it since it was Mexican land. Before that, it was Native American land,” he said. Cole co-authored an April 14 article about Bundy with Western Watersheds Project director Ralph Maughan for The Wildlife News, the project’s publication. Titled “Cliven Bundy Has No Claim to Federal Land and Grazing,” the article notes that when Nevada became a state in 1864, “its citizens gave up all claims to unappropriated federal land.” “It’s not his land,” Cole and Maughan conclude. “The simple truth of the matter is that Bundy is a freeloading, welfare rancher who has an inflated sense of entitlement.” The article doesn’t mention historical footnotes to the state constitution that document the repeal of the so-called “disclaimer clause” in 1996, when 56 percent of Nevada voters ratified striking the part that gave dominion over the lands to the federal government. But the Legislature’s calling for federal consent of the amendment has not been recognized by Congress or the courts. Cole and Maughan go on to cite the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, “the granddaddy of the U.S. laws governing grazing on federal land,” that was authored by Edward T. Taylor, a rancher and congressman from Colorado. “The issuance of a grazing permit does not confer any right to graze or right to own the land,” they wrote. “The Secretary (of the Interior) is free reasonably to determine just how, and the extent to which, ‘grazing privileges’ shall be safeguarded in light of the Act’s basic purposes. “Of course, those purposes include ‘stabiliz(ing) the livestock industry,’ but they also include ‘stop(ping) injury to the public grazing lands by preventing overgrazing and soil deterioration’ and ‘provid(ing) for … orderly use, improvement, and development’ of the public range. He has no ‘right’ to graze it.”...more