I can’t get too worked
up about the national election’s impact on Western land
issues.
I don’t live in a state where oil and gas
development is roaring through publicly owned lands the way
it’s doing in Wyoming and Colorado. Democrats still have
enough votes in Idaho’s Senate to stop legislation that
fundamentally changes the way we protect our birthright.
Most of all, I see Westerners beginning to develop a new consensus
on how they value the landscape we all share. The place that shapes
my perspective is Owyhee County, Idaho.
This 4.9 million
acres of rolling sagebrush, sharp and deep canyonlands and
juniper-covered mountains is one of the most remote places in the
Lower 48 states. Here, ranchers ran their cattle like it was open
range well into the 1960s.
I first came to Owyhee County
in 1996 to cover a hearing in its tiny courthouse. The Bureau of
Land Management had proposed reducing grazing on a large chunk of
the nearly 80 percent of the county owned by the federal
government.
People were fighting mad. Angry ranchers and
their families spilled out of the little courtroom to the edge of
the desolate highway in front. The county commission was focusing
opposition through its land-use committee, formed to assert what it
considered was its right to be a direct party to BLM decisions. Its
leader was consultant Fred Kelly Grant, a former Maryland
prosecutor and defense attorney, who came home to Idaho to fight
for private property rights.
Grant was arguing that
ranchers had rights on federal lands, not just permits. He expected
the federal government to recognize those rights and the value
ranchers had developed on those lands through long hours, sweat and
financial risks.
Banks and estate judges recognized those
values, and Grant and others like him expected the federal
government to as well. If not, Grant insisted, money was owed the
ranchers.
During the Clinton years, men and women who
shared Grant’s views fought the federal government all across
the West. They were labeled the Wise Use movement, and most
observers saw them as either a tool of the dying resource
industries or a mirror image of the region’s environmental
movement.
There is no doubt that these rural residents
and many in the environmental movement had very different values
and approaches to the land and government. And on either side of
the great ideological divide, most people dismissed the idea that
both sides could care equally about the wild land and wildlife
legacy they shared.
In 2000, environmentalists pressed
the Clinton administration to turn more than 2 million acres of
Owyhee County into a national monument: Clinton almost did.
That’s when Fred Grant came to a pivotal conclusion: Owyhee
County’s awesome beauty would eventually get federal
protection. It could be on Owyhee County’s terms or somebody
else’s.
Three years ago, he recommended that the
county seek federal legislation to address wilderness and grazing
issues before a future president did so unilaterally. He told
commissioners they would have to work with environmentalists to
succeed.
In October, in that same courtroom, Owyhee
County Commission Chairman Hal Tolmie and Shoshone-Paiute Tribal
Chairman Terry Gibson handed Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo a
proposal for protecting 517,194 acres of wilderness and 384 miles
of rivers protected as “wild and scenic.” Every public-lands
rancher in the county had individually signed off on wilderness
creation in his area.
Conservationists and ranchers
hugged. Then, they and motorized recreationists gave Grant a
standing ovation for his remarkable mediation of a deal that gives
ranchers additional peer review of BLM actions and a locally driven
program for landscape management.
Sen. Crapo still needs
to get it approved by Congress, a daunting task with ideologues on
both sides of the debate skeptical and hostile. But this
collaborative wilderness settlement reveals how much the debate has
shifted since the 1980s.
Ranchers who bitterly fought
environmentalists over a long line of issues for decades are
walking the halls of Congress to lobby for the largest wilderness
bill in a generation. How did this happen?
All
conservationists had to give up was the idea that the ranchers have
to go. Inez Jaca, a rancher who sat on the panel with
environmentalists and others to negotiate the deal, said the key
for both sides was finding common ground.
“So many of the
folks we always thought were in opposition to what we believe were
not,” Jaca said. “What we learned is we all wanted to preserve the
land.”
I expect there will be enough fights in the next
four years to keep an environmental reporter like me busy. But
there also may be some celebrations. This time in Idaho, Westerners
may get to celebrate together.
Rocky Barker is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a
long-time reporter for the Idaho Statesman in
Boise, Idaho, and the author of several books on Western
environmental issues.
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