Who really has rights to Nevada land?

The midday sun hangs high in the Amargosa Valley sky as Cuban exile turned Las Vegas pastor Victor Fuentes treks along a path near his 40-acre property. The meandering trail follows a narrow spring-fed stream, alternating between patches of parched dirt and thick clumps of salt grass. The stream, Fuentes says, used to be his. “We needed that water to practice our faith,” he says. Ten years after coming to this wide-open vista, he can still remember how it looked the first time he saw it. Green. Alive with flowers and trees. Peaceful ­— the type of place he fled Cuba for. He bought it with donations from the churchgoers, named it “Patch of Heaven” and invited church summer camps to the property for campfire cookouts and singalongs as well as Bible studies and river baptisms. “In nature, that’s how we were created,” Fuentes says. “When God wants to talk to you, he wants no distractions. This was a refuge for humans.” But the place Fuentes is describing doesn’t exist anymore. After half an hour’s walk, Fuentes arrives at an earthen berm that rises from the banks of the cattail-clogged stream, bending the water’s flow away from Fuentes’ property. On his side of the berm, a sloping wash lined with the husks of withered plants is carved into the dusty terrain. On the other is the federal government, which says it needed to divert the water to protect a fragile ecosystem home to 26 endangered species, including the 3-inch-long Ash Meadows speckled dace, a grayish-green fish found only here, in a network of spring-fed creeks surrounded by the Mojave Desert. In that one stream, all of Nevada’s complicated and contradictory relationships to public land is reflected. And the legal conflict between Fuentes and the government hinges on fundamental questions. What are the limits of religious rights? Should the federal government or private citizens decide how land should be used? How do we allocate water when there isn’t enough to go around? In 2012, Fuentes filed suit against the federal government, alleging an unjust taking of private property by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which manages the 36-square-mile Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge that surrounds his land on all sides. The suit also seeks compensation for flood damages and claims Fuentes’ First Amendment religious protections were violated...more