The Western Watersheds Project’s Assault on Family Ranchers
Another Earth Day has come and gone. Earth Day has become a holy day of obligation for America’s secular religion, the environmentalist movement.
But hidden behind the facade of planting trees or discussing the virtues of “paper or plastic” is a well-financed global group of dedicated radicals who are bent on changing the way we live whether we like it or not. They are funded by a vast network of wealthy individuals, trust funds, and foundations who selectively give money to organizations they can control like puppets on a string (think George Soros).
One such organization has dedicated its entire existence to the warped dream of one man who says that his ultimate goal in life is to destroy families and a way of life with absolutely no regard for the economic or human cost.
Meet Jon Marvel and the Western Watersheds Project.
This is an organization that talks a big game about saving the environment but in truth has never lifted a finger or raised a dollar to mitigate the environmental issues they claim to care so much about.
This is an organization that bills itself, according to its mission statement, as a group dedicated “to protect and restore western watersheds and wildlife through public education, public policy initiatives and litigation”
That last word “litigation” is the key, because in truth they are nothing more than a group of professional plaintiffs who have filed hundreds of lawsuits against the government and individuals to accomplish their goals. Between 2000 and 2009 they have filed 91 lawsuits and 31 appeals in Idaho alone and hundreds more throughout the West..
And this is an organization that has been funded in part with the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people to the tune of $1.2 million in Idaho Federal District courts alone by the abuse of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which others have written about on these pages.
The Western Watersheds Project is headquartered in that playground of the rich and famous, Sun Valley, Idaho. The organizaton’s neighbors include Teresa Heinz Kerry and her husband John Kerry as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Most of this anger directed at farmers comes from envy and hate. Many are city slickers and take their meals for granted. The Russians have a lot of land. They ran crop production using central planning and control. It took 10,000 pages of reports to cover a 10,000 acre collective farm. Having done this, they still had to import grain from us. I expect the leftists will interfere with food production, energy and poor Americans using litigation and punitive taxation. It will take a rational President to get this stopped.
The WWF and the Sierra Club really have no benefit to society.
Lets See, I will assume that the government has gone completely mad in funding an organization whose sole job is to sue the government. Since we are being taxed to death, all grants to organizations that have sued the government have to be stopped. Marvel claims that the ranchers are getting a subsidy. Marvel needs to understand that the ranchers and everyone else in this nation are the government. We are the owners of the land, not the bureaucrats in Washington. The prairies survived millions of buffalo grazing and migrating. They will survive the cattle and sheep grazing.
Great article. There are no aspects of our lives that the socialists do not want to control under the banner of “environmentalism”. These sorts of organizations need to be fought at every level. Socialism/communism needs to be squashed like a cigarette butt. Ranchers, farmers and hunters are wonderful stewards of the land and wildlife.
This is the same mentality that allowed century old almond orchards in California’s Central Valley to be turned into firewood in order to save a two inch fish that may or may not be a critical species. To paraphrase, environmentalists love humankind, it’s people they can’t stand.
I once wrote a book on property rights, and had occasion to read up on the history of the public lands. Below is is an oped that I wrote in 1997: {http://jamesvdelong.com/articles/property/escalante.html}. My conclusion:
“In the end, yes, wilderness devotees also have a claim to some share of the National Commons. But this constituency, overwhelmingly rich, urban, male, white, young, and fit, does not qualify as ‘the American people,’ and can hardly claim a right to exclude everyone else. In the end, their efforts look a lot like another tradition of the Old West, the land grab, in which someone with raw power simply took a portion of the public lands for himself, driving others off with barbed wire and pistols. The methods change. The morals remain the same.”
Here is the whole thing; unfortunately, it is still relevant.
April 30, 1997
ESCALATING THE WAR OVER ESCALANTE
by James V. DeLong
Just before the election, President Clinton went to the Grand Canyon in Arizona to designate 1.7 million acres of the Escalante area of Utah as a National Monument.
Staying out of Utah showed solid instinct for politics, since the citizens there were not pleased with the decision. The votes he was harvesting were several time zones away in the cities of the two coasts, where people like the abstract idea like of wilderness in the West and assume that they personally will bear none of the consequences.
The President was flanked by Robert Redford, movie star and strong wilderness advocate. Redford is also a Utah land baron, with almost ten square miles in his Sundance Resort. The Utah legislature noted his presence, and its House retaliated with a resolution to study the possible designation of part of his land as wilderness. The effort is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and the Christian Science Monitor quotes its sponsor as admitting that his primary goal is to make a moral point: “So many people want to set aside land for environmental purposes, but they want someone else to make the sacrifice. The resolution allows [him] to put his money where his mouth is.”
Redford is not amused, or converted. He defends the monument designation as giving Escalante “back to those who own it: The American people.” As for the idea that Sundance would make a nice wilderness, Redford’s people dismiss it with the comment that the resort contributes a lot of taxes and jobs to the community.
Who’s Owns This Land?
Redford’s response is perfect because it frames the issues so neatly. Just who does own this land, anyway? And how do we reconcile ownership, wilderness preservation, and economics? Environmentalists may find these questions easy, but in fact they are hard, with a lot of history behind them. In the early 19th Century, almost the entire nation was public land. Until the Civil War this domain was steadily sold off to private parties, the timber was cleared, and settlement marched on. During the 1860′s, things changed. Congress decided that 160 acres was a good size for a farm, and that the public domain west of the Mississippi should go to homesteaders in blocks of that size. This worked, sort of, for the territory up to the 100th meridian (about two-thirds of the way through Kansas), where enough rain fell to make farming possible. West of this line, the Homestead Act was a disaster. You could not make a living on 160 acres or on 20 times that much, and few people were foolish enough to try. But the government had no mechanism for selling off the land in blocks that made economic sense, and as a result the land could not be disposed of at all.
A “National Commons”
After half a century of turmoil, the West emerged with a bastardized system of land tenure, quite different from the system of private property that prevails in the East. The federal government retained ownership of half the land of the ten western states, including 62% of Utah. To make up for its refusal to sell its land in viable pieces, the government guaranteed the people of the region, and of the U.S. generally, reasonable access to use the public domain for productive purposes, including grazing, mining, and timbering to feed the industrial revolution of the East. The preservationists got a share, in the form of national parks and other reservations, and over the years recreational users have asserted a growing claim. As a matter of history, the public domain does not belong to a baron called the federal government which has the right to do whatever it wants on its own property. The public lands are a National Commons to which all of us, but especially the people of the region, have a claim, and it is supposed to be administered by the federal government as a trustee, with fair regard for the economic patterns that this history imposed on the West.
The portion of the Commons called Escalante is worthless for farming and has little timber. It is not much good for grazing. Some of the scenery is spectacular, but most of it is mediocre and for the most part it is not pleasant hiking country. The one thing it has is fossil fuels, in the form of coal and oil. The current battle, since the basic monument designation is now a fact, is whether exploitation of coal and oil resources should proceed. The energy companies are actually by standers in this fight. Conoco, which has the oil leases, would much prefer to drill — it is, after all, in the oil business, and the fields are potentially huge — but if this is forbidden the company will get paid off. The legal term of art is that the government must recognize “valid existing rights,” which means the oil leases cannot be terminated without payment.
The Real Stakeholders
The real stakeholders in the fight include the school children of Utah, since several sections of every township were given to the state to use the revenues to support schools. They need Conoco’s royalty payments. Other stakeholders include all of us who use oil. It is a little hard to go out and drill your own well and refine your own gasoline, so if you want your share of this National Commons you must rely on an oil company as your intermediary. They also include the residents of Utah, who have long relied on jobs generated by economic activity on federal land. All of these groups claim that oil, at least, can be extracted with little environmental effect. The energy resources are not in the scenic part, and, in any event, modern techniques substantially diminish the footprint of oil production. Many landowners in many places, including the Audubon Society in Louisiana, are happily combining environmental protection with oil revenues. Thus there is no irreconcilable conflict between environmental protection and energy extraction, except to the most hard-shell wilderness purist.
In the end, yes, wilderness devotees also have a claim to some share of the National Commons. But this constituency, overwhelmingly rich, urban, male, white, young, and fit, does not qualify as “the American people,” and can hardly claim a right to exclude everyone else. In the end, their efforts look a lot like another tradition of the Old West, the land grab, in which someone with raw power simply took a portion of the public lands for himself, driving others off with barbed wire and pistols. The methods change. The morals remain the same.
Here’s a great map of the United States showing energy reserves:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/state/
Roll your mouse over the blue category boxes at the top to get a good idea of where the coal reserves are.
The US has 27% of the world’s coal, Russia is second at 17%, and China third at 12%. The US has enough coal to burn in clean modern electricity plants to last somewhere between 100 and 260 years. That’s enough time to build the modern, even safer nuclear power plants we need, as France has already done.
Here in Colorado, the latest insanity is absentee millionaire mega-ranch owners trying to rewrite maritime law to privatize rivers running through their property. The family ranch owners are helping to fight this. Even though they could benefit from such a rewrite, they have the integrity to fight power-grabs like this.
It’s not just Idaho or Colorado, EPA and the Sierra Club are trying the same sorts of things in Kansas.
See my PJM piece on it from a few weeks ago: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/preserve-an-ecosystem-or-preserve-an-epa-rule/
This is just stupid stuff, but all to typical of environmentalists. It’s not about the environment, it’s about power, pure and simple.
Ditto, Wyoming.
I’m convinced that they are not interested in the environment, only in the funds to be obtained from lawsuits via the environment whatever act. Eliminate the paycheck, you eliminate the lawsuits. Think about it, if they lose the lawsuit, they get paid and then file another lawsuit. If they win, they get paid and then move on to the next “cause” in order to file a lawsuit.
Nothing more than a money making business. I have to admire the American Inginutiy, but without government corruption/involvment, the issue wouldn’t exist.
In listening to the utter hypocrisy of the left and the combination of Malthusian doom-prophesying and desire to return to a plantation culture where they are the unchallenged masters of all they think they deserve, I have come to realize that the only reason that the left hasn’t funded the creation and release of of some sort of plague that eliminates most of mankind (other than just enough people to serve as their slaves) is that they haven’t figured out how to do it while having a 100% effective vaccine to protect themselves.
In short…it’s only a matter time until they do something they think will get rid of us that they don’t want around cluttering up their view of the world.
What’s the difference between an environmentalist and a developer?
The environmentalist already has a house in the woods. (Or in this case, on the plains)
Now that these guys have their big houses in the wilderness, they want to lock the door so that nobody else can ruin their views.
Patrick is right on.
There is a range war going on aimed at kicking ranchers off their lands.
http://tucsoncitizen.com/view-from-baja-arizona/2010/05/28/no-home-on-the-range/
I call BS. If ranchers want to run cows and sheep on their own land and trash it, that’s their business. Public lands are PUBLIC. We don’t owe a small group of people cut-rate grazing rights to ruin our land.
Most of these people are living in a past that never was. Without cheap grazing rights and a wife working in town, they’d never make it. 100 years of running livestock on semiarid rock and sagebrush hasn’t worked yet–no matter how many times you claim it’s viable.
If it weren’t for minerals Wyoming would have the vibrant economy of Haiti.
You show yourself for a total fool, Dienekes, and an ignorant one, too. You don’t know squat about leasing or the cattle business. You saw these people are living in the past, and you’re wrong about that too. The western way of life survived the rustification of the northeast, northwest, and Californication of the west and continues to be a vibrant way of life today.
Well Dienekes, that’s the whole point of PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS isn’t it?
Haiti would do well to give their people more of them along with capitalism.
And why is it any of your business, or the government’s for that matter, how a family configures themselves? It is NONE of you business unless they are acting illegally or harming others. You see the combination of the ranching and a second income along with their lifestyles works for those people. My fear is that we are inching towards a command and control economy run by a bunch or socialists when we won’t have the rights of citizens to choose our own futures.
Dienekes – You’re dead wrong. It’s just like the article said, if these lands are so baldly damaged why do they continue to produce the forage and clean, clear water they do? Ranching is a business just like any other, and some ranchers flourish while others fail. Good ranchers take care of the land, and in turn it takes care of us. Our familiy has made a living ranching for going on six generations without town income, thank you. And while we may cherish our past, we also use available technology and progressive knowledge so that we will remain viable into the future. If you don’t want to see your food supply have to be imported from every third-world nation on the planet maybe you should try to understand modern agriculture, and that needs to include public land grazing.
I just found this link and want to than the authors so much. I am one of the beleaguered Wyoming residents that face continual lawsuits to protect wolves far beyond the original agreements. The latest relisting is blaming the state of Wyoming sticking by their plan to consider wolves a predator in certain part of the state, as the reason to relist the other 2 states. Never mind that the Wyoming plan was considered scientifically sound by 10 of 11 wolf biologists some years ago, they refuse to allow control of the wolves. Now we have had folks attacked and one killed by severely underweight grizzlies that can no longer compete with wolves inside of Yellowstone.
3X Ranch and Tex Expatriate: Would you mind contacting me directly at mmobrien at gmail.com ?
I would like to paraphraze your comments in something I am writing, and wanted to provide credit where credit is due. Well spoken! Thanks, Mark
“. . . the streams run clear with water, and the cycle of life continues as the land yields its nutrients to produce more meat for our tables?”
It doesn’t. Tax dollars have to go to restore the creeks damaged by the cows including costly fencing projects. Facts. Try some.
First, only 3 per cent of the beef produced on public lands is sold to the Ameeican people. That means 97 per cent is exported. Cattle produced in other regions in the country where people either own their own farms or lease grazing land from private owners at much higher rates than $1.35 for a cow and calf per month. Hundreds of thousands of American furniture craftsman, textile workers, newspaper writers, tobacco farmers, auto-makers, and others have been forced to retrain or take other positions. Just because you want to ranch, doesn’t mean tax payees owe you a subsidized living. Ranchers using public lands talk like they think they are entitled to the land. Those potters in Vermont and salmon fishermen in Alaska have paid taxes on public lands just like the ranchers have. However, unlike the ranchers who pay around $20.00 to raise a couple of cows to sell to market for over $1,000 profit, tax payers in other parts of the country aren’t benefitting financially from their investment.
You make a lot of generalizations about people who would like to see the cattle industry lose it’s death grip on public lands. Had the BLM been following the laws it is supposed to be following instead of manipulating them in every way possible for ranchers, perhaps I and others would have more sympathy for your position. But, as it is, ranchers are asking American citizens to pay for a product they want to produce but that is totally unnecessary to enhance the lives of the Americsn people. Most of us do not buy your beef (no pun intended).
well miss know it all you are a little massed up in the brain because all of your facts are wrong and I can prove that. $20.00 to raise a couple cattle bs! and well over a thousand profit wow get it straight! wow people these days so stupid think!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and what about feed ranch hands to do the work and vacsines and stuff! think!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Christie – well said – you have the guts to respond to all these vest “rancher” who were the first land grabbers.
Christie do the world a favor and put a bullet in your head!
Really? Is this how you think? Put a bullet in my head? For what? Because I disagree with you that the United States tax payer owes you a living. Public lands ranchers pay 17.5 million dollars in grazing fees, and the American tax payer pays for 135 million dollars in public lands subsidies through the BLM and FS. I’ve got news for you. In most places where people are recipients of welfare through the federal government, there may be nine to ten people in a one or two bedroom apartment sleeping on the floor. The children go to school to get federally subsidized breakfasts and lunches because there is no food at home in the evenings, weekends, or summer vacations. Some of these parents are the working poor and their children are forbidden to go outside when they come home from school because neighborhood conflicts can turn violent.
Public lands ranchers, on the other hand, can step outside their doors, look up at the mountains or across at the streams, and have a sense that to a point, they control their own destiny. Other Americans on government subsidies are not so fortunate. Not only that, the public lands ranchers have a government agency that serves as their intermediary to Congress. Why are public lands ranchers better than families that live in the projects of urban Atlanta or the coal fields of Appalachia?
yes Christie a bullet in the brain would do the world a favor but let me tell you I raze cattle on my ranch with my family and all of out beef is shipped to Montana for slaughter and distribution IN THE US.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not china or any other place ! got it is it that hard? stupid people these days…
A bullet in my head? What about all the good I could do while my cranium is still unscathed? Maybe I could hold your mother’s sister’s mother-in-laws hand in a hospice or teach your distant cousin how to write a research paper? Do you value a human life so little that you would wish someone to end their own life because they object to you receiving benefits that are not available to others who would also like to keep a lifestyle that no longer serves the interests of the tax payer?
Why? Because I dare to challenge your sense of entitlement? Do you raze cattle or raise them? If your beef is sold in the U. S., you are part of the three or four percent of public lands ranchers than serves the American public. I do not make up these statistics. I live in the East where you must either own or pay much higher rates to lease. I have friends who lease private land. In fact, some of the land that has belonged to my family is now privately leased for cattle production.
Your comments to me are very revealing, and I do not think that the American public would much care for the idea that they are supporting people whose answer to every problem is a bullet in the brain.