Old Rocks
Diamond Member
How The Bundy Standoff Could Screw Over Ranchers
Local residents are tired of the ongoing game of tug-of-war over the land now referred to as the Harney Basin. This latest dispute has rekindled the tensions over land use that have marked the region ever since cattle barons first settled on Paiute Indian soil in the mid-1800s.
Just a few years ago, however, stakeholders including ranchers, environmentalists, and federal agents unveiled an agreed-upon conservation plan for the wildlife refuge sitting in the heart of the basin. It had taken three years to negotiate, but the result — which took into consideration ranchers’ livelihoods, ecological concerns, and local economic sustainability — became a beacon of hope in the region, as well as in other rural communities wrought with similar conflict.
Now, Ammon Bundy’s headline-grabbing occupation is imperiling that accord.
A Short History of Deep-Seated Conflict
The Great Basin is a high-desert region of 200,000 square miles between the Sierra Nevadas in California and the greater Rocky Mountains in Utah, running from southern Oregon all the way to northern Baja, Mexico. Water is fickle and scarce in this area of the country, rendering the landscape fragile and throwing communal usage and management issues into far starker relief than most westerners face. That makes the type of collaboration that the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s (TRCP) Joel Webster tries to engineer between naturalists and businessmen much harder.
“It’s the driest place in North America, or one of them. It’s an ecosystem on edge. There’s not a lot of grass to share like there is in north-central Montana, where the grass grows up to your thighs,” Webster, who runs the Partnership’s Center for Western Lands in Missoula, said in an interview. “So you’ve got all the different stakeholder groups, and the pie is a lot smaller. That’s where some of this conflict comes from.”
This is why Bundy and the whack-a-loons are targeting the area, because a cooperative agreement is being hammered out between all parties. That is against the ideology of the lunatics like the Bundys that state that all government is evil, and that they should be given a free ride on the land owned by all the citizens of the US. So they are doing their best to destroy that agreement.
Local residents are tired of the ongoing game of tug-of-war over the land now referred to as the Harney Basin. This latest dispute has rekindled the tensions over land use that have marked the region ever since cattle barons first settled on Paiute Indian soil in the mid-1800s.
Just a few years ago, however, stakeholders including ranchers, environmentalists, and federal agents unveiled an agreed-upon conservation plan for the wildlife refuge sitting in the heart of the basin. It had taken three years to negotiate, but the result — which took into consideration ranchers’ livelihoods, ecological concerns, and local economic sustainability — became a beacon of hope in the region, as well as in other rural communities wrought with similar conflict.
Now, Ammon Bundy’s headline-grabbing occupation is imperiling that accord.
A Short History of Deep-Seated Conflict
The Great Basin is a high-desert region of 200,000 square miles between the Sierra Nevadas in California and the greater Rocky Mountains in Utah, running from southern Oregon all the way to northern Baja, Mexico. Water is fickle and scarce in this area of the country, rendering the landscape fragile and throwing communal usage and management issues into far starker relief than most westerners face. That makes the type of collaboration that the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s (TRCP) Joel Webster tries to engineer between naturalists and businessmen much harder.
“It’s the driest place in North America, or one of them. It’s an ecosystem on edge. There’s not a lot of grass to share like there is in north-central Montana, where the grass grows up to your thighs,” Webster, who runs the Partnership’s Center for Western Lands in Missoula, said in an interview. “So you’ve got all the different stakeholder groups, and the pie is a lot smaller. That’s where some of this conflict comes from.”
This is why Bundy and the whack-a-loons are targeting the area, because a cooperative agreement is being hammered out between all parties. That is against the ideology of the lunatics like the Bundys that state that all government is evil, and that they should be given a free ride on the land owned by all the citizens of the US. So they are doing their best to destroy that agreement.
