SMITH, NEVADA
In this tiny farm town, which lacks a
stoplight or even a store, the gathering of more than 700 people on
April 2 was unprecedented. And they weren’t at the high school gym
to watch the Bulldogs play Class A basketball; they were there to
tell officials just what they thought about a proposal to turn
their mountains into wilderness.
It
was a peaceful if not entirely well-mannered crowd, with most
wildly cheering those who railed against wilderness, and jeering
the three lone proponents. Shouts of “go back to Santa Cruz” and
“we’re the public, stupid” peppered the warm evening.
Over and over, angry citizens came to the microphone to proclaim
that no outsiders were going to tell them to keep their trucks and
ORVs out of the hills they considered their heritage. Jim Sanford,
former publisher of the local paper, summed up the mood: “I don’t
think this group here tonight is interested in compromise.”
But without compromise, there would be no public-lands
bills like the ones approved over the past six years for three
other Nevada counties, bills that called for the sale of thousands
of acres of federal land and — in conjunction with a 1998 law
generated billions of dollars for everything from school funding to
park development. Pushed by Nevada Sens. Harry Reid, D, and John
Ensign, R, the bills sought to eliminate the management headaches
and local resentments that are rife in a fast-growing state where
more than four of every five acres is federal property.
The bills also designated major new wilderness areas. In Congress,
the rough political calculus for such bills is this: If locals get
to benefit from the sale of land owned by all Americans, the
broader public receives additional wilderness in return. That
seemed fair enough to folks in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine
counties, where a total of 164,000 acres of federal land was
identified for auction and about 1.7 million acres were added to
the wilderness system. And the state’s congressional delegation had
every reason to expect success in other counties.
But in
western Nevada this winter, that calculus was faulty. In quick
succession, three counties — Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda —
rebuffed efforts to craft compromise bills for lands within their
boundaries. Fear and misunderstanding fueled a revolt against what
locals perceived as a land grab. And now that the state’s
anti-wilderness forces are energized, their efforts may derail what
until recently seemed like a collaborative way to both meet local
needs and protect wild lands.
The federal
government owns more than 86 percent of Nevada, more than
it owns in any other state. In some counties, the dearth of private
property has limited growth, inflated property values and
complicated land management. While counties with large federal
holdings do get annual PILT funds (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) from
the government, the payments are often a fraction of the taxes
they’d receive if the land were privately owned. Esmeralda County,
for example, gets only about $60,000 a year through PILT, even
though 98 percent of it is federally owned.
The first
attempt at redress was the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land
Management Act, which called for the sale of thousands of acres of
BLM land near Las Vegas in Clark County. Thus far, about $2.7
billion has been generated from those lands sales, and some of that
revenue has also been made available to other Nevada counties
through public-lands bills.
The Clark, Lincoln and White
Pine lands bills were designed with local input to meet local
needs. For example, the White Pine County bill created 550,000
acres of wilderness and identified 45,000 acres of BLM land for
auction. Funds from those land sales will go to the state education
fund, local law enforcement and fire protection, and to the BLM. In
addition, the bill transferred thousands of acres of BLM land to
the county and state for commercial and park projects and funded a
study of off-road vehicle trail expansion.
With such
successes under their belts, in 2007 Sens. Reid and Ensign and Rep.
Dean Heller, R-Nev., set their sights on Lyon, Mineral and
Esmeralda counties, again hoping to craft bills that combined
wilderness designation with public-land sales and other locally
beneficial provisions. Senate staffers began meeting with
wilderness proponents, some ranchers and a few local leaders in the
three counties. But most residents and many local officials were
unaware of the process until early 2008, shortly before the bills
were to be drafted. They felt blindsided by the news that such
legislation was being considered for their areas and that they had
only a few months to be involved.
“We just found out
about this in February,” says Mineral County Commissioner Richard
Bryant, who says he and others were “dumbfounded” when they learned
that almost 500,000 acres of federal land in the county were being
considered for wilderness designation.
At a May 21
meeting, the commissioners lambasted Sen. Reid’s staff for not
involving the counties earlier in the process. The commissioners
couldn’t endorse any lands bill this year, they said; they needed
time to determine what wilderness would mean for activities such as
mining, geothermal development, grazing and recreation.
Lyon County residents say they were similarly surprised. Most first
heard about the bill in late January, after local ranchers
announced that they had met with congressional staff and
representatives of the Nevada Wilderness Project to discuss how
wilderness designation might affect their ranching operations.
Marianne Leinassar, whose family has run sheep in the
area since 1858, says the ranchers had assumed that the wilderness
would cover about 88,000 acres in the Bald Mountain area — renamed
Wovoka by local wilderness proponents — because it had been the
focus of past discussions about possible wilderness.
But
at a Jan. 25 meeting, the ranchers saw maps from the Nevada
Wilderness Project indicating that up to about 690,000 acres were
being considered for wilderness designation in Lyon and in
neighboring Mineral County. “We were all taken aback,” Leinassar
recalls, as they realized the size of the potential wilderness.
“This was huge.”
The news that
hundreds of thousands of acres might become wilderness
and that a bill to that effect could be drafted by summer spread
like dust in a fast spring wind. Many didn’t know what wilderness
designation meant, so anything seemed possible; there was talk of
fences, even razor wire stretched across the landscape — vast
areas placed off limits, with mines closed, flight paths diverted,
firefighting hobbled, and military training curtailed during
wartime. Rumors of conspiracy and speculation about what Reid was
really up to ran wild. “They were like a tornado generating their
own storm,” Steve Pellegrini, a retired teacher and wilderness
advocate, says of his neighbors.
Within weeks of the Jan. 25 meeting, locals formed the Coalition
for Public Access. By March, membership reached 1,000, then 1,500,
most from Lyon County. Residents in Mineral County also started
their own chapter. “This has united just about everybody in all of
our surrounding communities who are normally … on separate sides
of the fence on water issues, on grazing issues, things like that,”
says Emery Thran, the group’s chairman. “This affected a lot of
people.” Residents saw wilderness not as a way to protect the
natural qualities of the land, he says, but as a federal assault on
what they most value.
In a place where many families
arrived in the area more than 100 years ago, those values often
involve a personal sense of history. Dr. Robin Titus practices
medicine out of a one-physician clinic set amid an ocean of alfalfa
fields. From her small office window, she can see the mountains her
great grandfather mined. Some of her ancestors are buried there.
And though she is an avid outdoors-woman, the idea that “outside”
interests might affect local use of the nearby mountains rankles
her deeply. “Somebody from out of town is trying to do something
that affects the way we live here,” she says. “People will tend to
fight over that.”
But wilderness supporters say many
locals simply misunderstood the status of the proposal, as well as
what a wilderness designation would mean. The Nevada Wilderness
Project had not finalized its plans when it presented its maps to
ranchers at that January meeting, says Cameron Johnson, northern
Nevada outreach director for the group. He says it had identified
roughly 690,000 acres in Lyon and Mineral County as possible
wilderness, but had yet to make specific recommendations about
which areas were most suitable for designation. Contrary to rumor,
he says, his organization would have recommended accommodating
traditional uses, including all existing mines and grazing
allotments.
Thran, however, says the problem wasn’t a
lack of understanding. He blames overreaching by wilderness
proponents: If they had remained focused on the Bald
Mountain/Wovoka area, he says, the outcome might have been
different. “I don’t know if it would have raised an eyebrow around
here,” he says, of a bill containing just the 88,000-acre Wovoka
wilderness. “But now, they’ve pretty much angered our community. No
negotiations now. I’m sorry.” Titus agrees that local passions are
so inflamed that reasoned discussions on the topic are nearly
impossible. “People feel that if they give in at all, they’ll lose
it all,” she says.
Local wilderness proponents still hope
that at least the Wovoka area can receive protection through other
legislation. Pellegrini and fellow advocate Art Shipley say that
when they explain to other residents why the area is so special,
many agree it deserves protection from off-roaders. But as soon as
the word “wilderness” is mentioned, they say, people back away,
thinking that practically the entire county is included. “I wish we
didn’t have that 690,000 acres hanging over us,” Pellegrini says.
The western Nevada experience may well
hang over other potential lands bills in the state, as
newly-empowered anti-wilderness activists are determined to
continue the fight.
Peter Liakopoulos, host of the Las
Vegas talk show Rural Nevada Today, is promoting the creation of a
coalition of 14 counties to fight public-lands bills. The
BlueRibbon Coalition, an off-road advocacy group based in
Pocatello, Idaho, is backing anti-wilderness efforts in Nevada and
elsewhere, says Brian Hawthorne, the group’s public-lands policy
director. “I think what you’re seeing is a change, a realization
that you’re trading wilderness for reasonableness,” he says.
Part of what’s changing as well is that some local
officials, under pressure by the Coalition for Public Access and
others, now refuse to even talk about a lands bill because of the
likely wilderness component. Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties
passed resolutions this winter opposing any new wilderness within
their boundaries. Lyon County and Esmeralda County also passed
resolutions rejecting any lands bill that designated new
wilderness, effectively shutting off further consideration of any
lands bill.
Mineral County commissioners put lands bill
discussions in limbo earlier this spring, when they said they
weren’t ready to work with Senate staffers. Mineral County
Commissioner Jerrie Tipton still says a carefully crafted lands
bill is critical to her county’s economic future, and she, for one,
would consider some wilderness as part of the package. “(Federal
land ownership) is part of the reason we’re so damn poor,” she
says. But overcoming a tidal wave of opposition may be impossible
at this time, she says: “A year ago, I would have said that we can
work through it. Today, I don’t know.”
The only hope is
to fully engage residents in the design of the lands bill, Tipton
says. “These people (local citizens) have to be brought into it, or
it’s not going to work,” she says. “They need to have a hand in the
crafting of the vision, or we’re all going to be tarred and
feathered.”
Without local residents and governments on
board, there’s little chance that Sens. Reid and Ensign and Rep.
Heller will press forward on these bills. A modest lands bill for
Carson City (which includes the former Ormsby County) is
progressing without rancor — in part because the county contains
no chunks of federal land large enough to qualify for wilderness.
Jon Summers, Sen. Reid’s communication director, says, “We said
from the beginning we’re not going to force this down anyone’s
throat.”
The author is a freelance writer in
Northern California.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wilderness, schmilderness.
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