Terror and Prejudice in the Public Land Seizure Movement

Valley of The Gods, some of the public lands Utah legislators want to seize from the federal government | Photo: Bob Wick, BLM

Commentary: Utah's conservative politicians have been advocating the state seize federal lands for years. This year, the Utah legislature and governor have been pushing Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes to sue the federal government to hand over the 30 million acres of federal land within the state. The lawsuit has already cost the state $2 million, even though it hasnt yet been filed. It may never be filed. As of last Friday, Reyes hadn't made up his mind. If hes leaning toward dropping the matter, he just got some serious backup. A recent report by the Conference of Western Attorneys General, obtained by the Associated Press and publicized last week, suggests that the proposed lawsuit is based on shoddy legal arguments, misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution, and disregard for decades of Supreme Court decisions regarding public lands.

That report almost certainly won't sway advocates of devolving federal lands to the states, part of a decades-old movement whose members have their own private understanding of western history and federal law. You've probably heard of two recent campaigns by members of that movement: the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and the 2014 confrontation over illegally grazed cattle from the Cliven Bundy ranch in Nevada.

But to really understand the movement propelling Utah's attempted lawsuit, it's useful to consider an act of domestic terrorism that happened 21 years ago on American soil, which you've probably never heard of.

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The Attorneys General's report doesn't contain much in the way of surprises: it's a thorough debunking of assertions about the constitution and federal case law made by people who want to get the feds out of the land protection business. Those anti-environmental activists claim the Constitution grants no authority to the federal government to own land in perpetuity, and that those public lands are rightfully the property of the states, which could sell those lands to private parties and thereby accomplish two things: 1) generate revenues for the state by selling the land, and 2) allow unrestricted exploitation of the land's resources for private profit.

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While the report doesn't offer a slam dunk rebuttal to those claims - the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the legality of the federal government owning land in perpetuity - it is an exhaustive, authoritative counter to the claims of public land opponents, including the Utah legislature. The fact that the report is offered by the lead attorneys for the very states that would, theoretically, benefit from devolving federal lands to the states is especially devastating.

The sad thing: the people pushing for that devolution almost certainly won't agree. Social media analysts increasingly talk about the political bubbles we create, in which we're protected from opinions contrary to our own. Public land opponents conduct their affairs in the mother of all political bubbles, protected from contrary arguments, established caselaw, American history, and in too many cases, compassion for the people they disagree with, and for those people's families. And there's no better example of the latter than the terrorist attacks on a U.S. Forest Service ranger in 1995 in Nevada.

On March 30, 1995, someone placed a pipe bomb at the Carson City, Nevada office of Toiyabe National Forest district ranger Guy Pence. It exploded before Pence arrived for work the next day. No one was injured. A few weeks later, a bomb of substantially similar design exploded under Pence's van, parked in the driveway at his home. Pence wasn't home, but his wife and one of his kids were. They escaped injury by a stroke of luck: neither were sitting on the living room couch showered with broken glass and debris by the explosion.

Guy Pence, working on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response in Louisiana in 2010 | Photo: USFWS

No one has ever been charged with the 1995 bombings, though investigators did not lack for persons of interest. Pence, by enforcing federal law managing grazing and mining in the Toiyabe, had incurred the wrath of any number of people accustomed to using public lands as their own personal fiefdoms. Always present in the west, the numbers of people opposed to any federal management of public lands exploitation grew dramatically during the 1970s' Sagebrush Rebellion, an explicitly anti-environmental movement that started in reaction to proposed Wilderness designations. Rural Nevada was and is rife with Sagebrush Rebels. Many, perhaps most, are essentially decent people. But their ranks include a number of activists allied with some of the worst elements of American society.

The Sagebrush Rebellion's main gripe in the 70s was a federal review of large, unroaded areas of public land, which were to be considered for wilderness designation. The so-called Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) process eventually recommended that 15 million acres of national forests be designated as Wilderness, and described an additional 10 million acres (and change) that merited further consideration for the same protection.

Wilderness designation blocks many forms of resource exploitation the Sagebrush Rebels held dear - though, notably, it doesn't prevent livestock grazing. Between the RARE programs and a 1976 law, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), which formally abolished the Homestead Acts allowing private citizens to c

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