Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Roots of rebellion: A forum

A year ago, High Country News Senior Editor Ray Ring and contributor Marshall Swearingen sent out about 100 requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, seeking incident reports on threats and violence targeting employees of the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest service. They discovered tens of thousands of pages indicating that threats and violence toward agency employees are fairly common, although seldom reported in the media. On Oct. 8, Tay Wiles and Paul Larmer of HCN sat down with four public-land experts to discuss the issue. We asked what inspires these kinds of incidents, why they persist and where we can go from here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and a shorter version appeared in our recent print edition.
BOB ABBEY – Former director of the Bureau of Land Management.
PHIL LYMAN – County commissioner in San Juan County, Utah.
JOHN FREEMUTH – Boise State University professor of political science and public policy and administration.
JEFF RUCH – Executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which provides legal support for government employees working on environmental and public health issues...
Wiles: Let’s talk about the origins of these types of confrontations between federal land managers and individual public-land users in the West. Could you talk about the creation of the public lands and how it’s relevant to where we are today?
Freemuth: You can take public-land history back in some ways to Western concern over the establishment of the forest system. People forget that actually several presidents created the current forest system, when they were given that power that was then removed. But people pushed back 110 years ago about that sort of conservation policy. From then on, there have been things that stir up Western anger. The Sagebrush Rebellion was hardly the first time. But usually it had something to do with something like the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA. What’s interesting this time is, I don’t see anything particularly in a big policy sense that the federal land agencies have done that would cause Western anger. I could see it in the past, but this time this seems to be driven as much from ideological think tanks from the East rather than bad Western land policy per se.
Ruch: Phil, are you being driven by ideological think tanks from the East?
Lyman: Well, I wanted to get a little clarification on the ideological think tanks from the East. That kind of struck me, too. I would have thought you’d said maybe ideological think tanks from the West.
Freemuth: Well, we know Mountain States Legal Foundation has always been involved. But I’ve noticed this time that with some of the stuff that’s come up in states like Utah, Arizona, Idaho, these sort of various demands to quote “return the federal lands,” which is historically and legally probably wrong, but these resolutions were sort of passed in various state legislatures and they were all inspired by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nationwide think tank based in Arlington, Virginia). I’m not diminishing legitimate Western concerns about federal land management, but … it seemed like this current “we want the federal lands” sort of movement didn’t come from any, that I saw, horribly bad federal land event — more that it’s part of our politics today, where these ideas were coming from elsewhere and Westerners adopted them.
Larmer: The West has been built on the back of a lot of a lot of federal dollars. But (then there were) the regulations that happened in the ’60s and ’70s, NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) and the Endangered Species Act. Then FLPMA in the ’70s. These were all direct laws that tightened the conservation focus on these lands. So I guess you’re confirming that indeed that was part of it, but you’re not seeing it now.
Freemuth: Yeah, I could totally understand why Westerners, especially, felt that regarding the BLM lands that they had quote a “promise” that those lands would eventually be disposed of. And then when FLPMA was passed, it made it clear that the federal BLM lands would remain under federal management. I think that sort of set off the Sagebrush Rebellion. I just simply contrast that with our current era, and I never saw an event like that which made Westerners angry.
Wiles: So, sticking with the historical perspective for a moment here. Bob Abbey, would you comment: Are there any other key moments in our nation’s history and the history of the West that lead to where we are right now on these issues?
Abbey: Controversy between citizens in the Western states and the federal government really isn’t anything new. The West has depended on and resented Washington, D.C., involvement in its activities since the first settlers. … My first exposure to the Sagebrush Rebellion was in the early 1980s. The emotions were really set off by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976, where for the first time in many years or probably forever, many state legislators as well as members of the public in Western states were told through the passage of this law that it would be the intent of federal government to retain most of these public lands. If you look at the passage of FLPMA and the cumulative effects of all the other environmental laws that were also being passed in the 1970s, I believe it was a combination of all these things coming together that put the emotions at a fever pitch.
Tactics back in the ’80s were very similar to what we’re seeing today. They ranged from legal challenges of federal authority to outright defiance of federal law. During that period back then, we saw state legislatures pass laws laying claim to millions of acres of federal land within their borders. (Public) concerns ranged from administrative processes that contained too much red tape to stubborn and inefficient bureaucracies and needless interference in daily activities. Many of those citizens were accustomed to being able to do without any permit or authorizations.
Ruch: But these laws are 40 and 50 years old. (What) is going on recently is sort of a combination of a healthy dollop of political opportunism, but more importantly a thick crust of resource scarcity. BLM has been avoiding really enforcing these laws particularly in recent years to the point where the Cliven Bundy situation is just outrageous as to how lax it is. The agencies bend over backwards not to enforce the law. And to some extent, some of these tensions are, in our view, self-imposed from BLM not doing its job.
Abbey: I think (these laws) have been enforced. I don’t think they’ve been enforced consistently from office to office or state to state. … But I also agree that the political rhetoric today does lead to animosity and increased tension, and there is a belief because of that rhetoric that it’s OK to do certain things outside the law and some people believe that they’re going to get away with it.
Ruch: The last cycle was in the ’90s, and it was capped by the Oklahoma City bombing. That’s what cooled the rhetoric. But you had a similar involvement by public officials encouraging acts of defiance and characterizing federal employees, range cons and other people like that, from the same towns, as “jackbooted thugs” and making comparisons to Nazi Germany.  
Freemuth: You do find that there have always been incidents for as long as those agencies existed, if not longer. The rhetoric might be worse than it’s ever been today. And I’d like to hear from other people, especially from Phil: Are on-the-ground managers making more decisions that concern you, or is it occasionally a bad decision gets people upset but you’re alright dealing with more or less the local land managers on the ground? ... Has that changed, in your opinion?
Lyman: My perspective is maybe it’s unique being in the West, I don’t know. I’ve seen a change in the BLM and with the Forest Service and the approach they take. For example, the Forest Service now, when they close the road, they say, “It’s part of our 1991 travel plan.” People say, “If it was passed in ’91, why are you doing it now?” “Well, we just hadn’t gotten around to it until now.” And that gets people frustrated. It’s an emotional issue. At the local level, we get along well with most of our local BLM. We get to know them, their families. But I’m speaking from my office in Blanding, Utah, which was the site of the raids in 2009, with the 140 federal agents (investigating the theft of Native American artifacts from public land), pulling people out of their homes in shackles early in the morning and they say they were breaking the law, but that kind of stuff is not good for relationships. That show of force frightens people.



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