Battle Over Western Lands is Far Bigger Than the Bundy Controversy

The recent face-off between the

Bundy family and its supporters on the one hand, and the Bureau of
Land Management and its enablers on the other, is hardly the
first word in the tussle between westerners and the federal
government over control of land. The battle has probably been
inevitable since western settlers ceded control of the lion’s share
of the open spaces around them to distant Washington, D.C. in
return for admission to the union. Now, those spaces aren’t quite
so open, and their inhabitants are more assertive—and see
themselves (often with good reason) as better stewards of their
turf than distant officials who seem to pride themselves on
inefficiency and lousy accounting practices.

So, why the fuss? As the Congressional Research Service points out in a 2012
report, “more than 60% of the land in Alaska is federally
owned. … Nearly half of the land in the 11 coterminous western
states is federally owned. … In the rest of the country, the
federal government owns 4% of the lands.”

Nevada, home of the Bundy standoff, is 81 percent federal land.
Even in the open West, that can be confining.

This massive absentee ownership, concentrated in half of the
country, created conflicts from day one. Debates raged over use of
that land, access to resources, taxes, and whether such vast areas
should be held by government authorities in general, and distant
officials in particular.

At the Christian Science Monitor,
Brad Knickerbocker writes:

In Salt Lake City Friday, representatives from Utah, Idaho, New
Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington met for a
“Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands.”

“Those of us who live in the rural areas know how to take care
of lands,” Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder said at a news
conference. “We have to start managing these lands. It’s the right
thing to do for our people, for our environment, for our economy
and for our freedoms.”

In other words, today’s revival of the “Sagebrush Rebellion” is
as much about political philosophy as it is about great stretches
of the largely-arid territory west of the 100^th meridian
splitting the Dakotas and running down through Texas.

Without a doubt, Utah
takes the lead in the effort by westerners to assert local
control over land and its resources. Last year, state lawmakers
passed the Transfer of
Public Lands Act, essentially demanding that the federal
government surrender the two-thirds of the state controlled by
Washington, D.C. Utahns explicitly did so as part of a
Financial Ready Utah (PDF) movement that says “the current
fiscal trajectory of the federal government is unsustainable” and
foresees a day when state residents will have to pay all of their
own bills.

Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) told Reason
Foundation’s Leonard Gilroy:

In the 2011 session—when we realized that over $5 billion of our
state revenue comes from a federal government that’s broke—that’s
when we started to flesh out how serious those numbers were.
Something on the order of 40% of our state revenue comes from an
unsustainable source in our federal governing partner. We looked at
the magnitude of this risk and started to think about how we could
broaden our revenue base and get to a point of economic
self-reliance.

Controlling the land and resources is a big step in that
direction.

The “Legislative Summit on
the Transfer of Public Lands,” gathering representatives from
nine western states in Salt Lake City, was organized by Ivory and
borrows its terminology from that Utah move, showing that concerns
about reducing financial reliance on the feds and gaining local
control are spreading. Planning for the conference predates the
Bundy standoff and the gathering addresses broader issues—but it
certainly got a nudge from headlines and tense video of federal
agents facing off with locals over land use.

So, what started as a simmering problem over the control of land
and resources has only been fueled by the growing prosperity and
sophistication of westerners. They see little reason to leave their
fate in the hands of a stumbling federal government that can’t
balance its books.

The Bundy controversy is almost a blast from the past, adding an
old-timey veneer—maybe an obscuring one—to a conflict that remains
very current and pressing for westerners.