Long-simmering land issue boils over again in Nevada

RENO — Ben Colvin wasn't particularly surprised at how quickly and how far things went south in Bunkerville, Nev.

After all, the Goldfield, Nev., rancher knows Cliven Bundy and wouldn't expect the man to back down once he decided to take a stand. And Colvin himself is no stranger to going head-to-head with the feds when it comes to Nevada's range and battling over the right to use it.

Three weeks after armed agents of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management backed away from a tense confrontation with Bundy's gun-wielding supporters near Mesquite, Nev., Colvin and others characterize recent events as the latest — if arguably the most intense — chapter in a decades-long dispute over control of public land in Nevada and across the West.Perspectives, of course, differ. To 75-year-old Colvin, who waged and ultimately lost a lengthy legal battle with the federal government over grazing on public land, the government's goal in both Bundy's case and his own appears clear.

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"It's just an issue of control," Colvin said. "It's just (an) ... excuse to drive ranchers out of business."

"It's a disturbing breach of law and order," counters William Rowley, a history professor and Nevada Constitution expert at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It's very troubling because it shows violence can threaten law and order.

"This is not resolved by any means, and it's got to get resolved," Rowley said.

A 'rebellion' is born

The roots of the Bundy incident can be traced back nearly 40 years to the birth of the so-called "Sagebrush Rebellion," a movement in which supporters sought to put control of millions of acres of federal land into state and local hands. It was largely motivated by congressional passage in 1976 of an act firmly ceding ownership of public lands to federal land managers such as the BLM.Arguing that Nevada was not on equal footing with other states because more than 80% of its land was in federal hands, Nevada filed suit in federal court two years later, ultimately losing, Rowley said. The movement would spread to other Western states with large swaths of public land amid opposition over federal policy concerning wilderness, endangered species and similar issues critics insisted improperly restricted use of the land.

"Nevada was the first. Nevada sort of kicked it off," Rowley said.

"In the '70s, it just came together. They're mad at the federal government and there are all these regulations and they just kept getting worse," Eric Herzik, a political science professor at University of Nevada, Reno, said of widespread sentiment at the time.

The movement sort of "fizzled" as court cases were lost and after the election of Ronald Reagan — a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel — to the presidency in 1980, Rowley said. There was a general perception by many that things would change under Reagan's leadership with regard to management of federal land, but in reality, they did not.

But the concerns and issues driving the rebellion didn't change either, and over the years, new controversies would erupt at new hot spots — just as occurred this spring at Bunkerville.

New battles surface

Among them was what many consider to be the second Sagebrush Rebellion, sparked on the Fourth of July in 1994. That was when Nye County Commissioner Richard Carver, cheered by armed supporters, opened a closed Forest Service road with a bulldozer and later threatened to arrest a ranger who tried to stop him. The action drew national press attention and landed Carver on the cover of Timemagazine.

Dozens of Western counties passed ordinances contending the federal government did not in fact own the public lands it managed, an argument that once again would ultimately be shot down in court.