OP ED

Cliven Bundy was wrong, but he raised the right issue

Dan Wells
AZ I See It
Moonlight reflects on the Virgin River as one of Cliven Bundy's cows drinks water in Bunkerville, Nev., in April 2014. The BLM seized hundreds of head of cattle from the rancher over his refusal to pay an estimated $1 million in grazing fees over 20 years. They have since backed down and returned his cattle.
  • Cliven Bundy chose the wrong method to fight the feds%2C but his battle revealed a broken system
  • Land management agencies are paralyzed by emotions%2C politics and the threat of lawsuits
  • It%27s time for a true discussion on how we can manage multiple uses on federal land

To many, the silhouette of a saguaro, some mesquite trees and a cowboy atop his horse riding into a bright orange sunset describes our Western landscape. With that beauty and treasure comes conflict. Good, bad or indifferent, everyone has an opinion of how we should manage public lands.

The public-lands debate came to a head not far from home in Bunkerville, Nev. A tense standoff between federal officials and a ranch family has sparked a firestorm of debate across the United States. The debate has raged for years and, for the first time, has made its way to the front page of the newspaper and national news networks for many of the wrong reasons.

Eventually, the protesters will go home, the federal government will find a way to get its money, and the conflict will become a distant memory. However, for those of us who live and work on public lands, the debate will rage on, the bureaucratic red tape will thicken, and pressures from interests groups to save individual species of plants and animals will slowly drive us off the land, leaving many of our public lands in poor condition and prone to massive wildfires and infectious insects, like the bark beetle.

The Nevada conflict has highlighted the broken system that we have allowed to grow on our public lands. The federal government owns 42 percent of the lands in Arizona in some form, be it the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Parks) or the Department of Agriculture (U.S. Forest Service).

Our public lands are to be managed for multiple uses, which include harvesting timber, minerals and forage, while balancing the needs of recreationists and ensuring a healthy watershed and ecosystem for a variety of species. This is a difficult job for anyone.

However, this philosophy is driven by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. Since that time, environmental groups have used the judicial branch to interpret the law, creating restrictive regulations and further drawing out processes prohibiting any type of management on our public lands.

No longer do experience and true science drive land management in the West. Instead it is imprudent management driven by emotions, politics and the threat of lawsuits. It has taken us decades to reach this point but it is not too late to correct our path and impact the future of our public lands for the better.

At one time, our public lands were productive, creating food and fiber for this country while generating revenue through fees for grazing and cutting trees, supporting our rural community's infrastructure and schools. Today, these rural counties, with very little private land to tax, are forced to spar with others in the congressional budget process to receive their payment in lieu of taxes for all the land the federal government owns in our Western states.

Two Mexican spotted owls are seen in the Huachuca Mountains near Sierra Vista. They are an endangered species.

In addition, federal policies, like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, have been degraded by court decisions, causing lengthy processes and the inability to actually implement meaningful projects on the ground. In fact, the U.S. Forest Service released a document in 2002, "Process Predicament," that discussed the overwhelming burden of regulations and processes that actually threatened our public lands.

In 1995, Arizona lost its last log mill, and thousands of people were let go as the management for a single species trumped any federal land-management policies and the economic viability of many rural communities. At the same time, livestock numbers on public lands have fallen by 30 percent.

The tools we have to manage our public lands are being threatened, and some are no longer economically viable because federal land-managing agencies are paralyzed by processes and are constantly under the threat of lawsuits. This broken system has led to massive wildfires, unhealthy watersheds and wasted resources to literally study our public lands to death and to pay for frivolous lawsuits.

What do we do to change the management of our public lands to meet the needs of today and provide for our future? We are the most powerful country in the world, with a great amount of natural resources, but we have to change our way of thinking on how we manage them.

Timber and forage on our public lands are renewable, and it is important that we actively manage these resources to avoid massive wildfires and unhealthy watersheds that feed metropolitan Arizona. At the moment, we are slowly choking our forest while allowing the overgrown ponderosa pines to take every drop of water before it hits the river. We cannot stand idle and allow decades of zero management by federal land agencies threaten the livelihoods of Arizona citizens.

Dan Bell

Cliven Bundy may not have chosen the best method of taking on the federal government, but the conflict highlighted a broken land-management system that has focused on single-species management and is not afraid to use unnecessary amounts of force to fulfill its misguided mission. Managing land for multiple use is a federal law, but environmental groups, court decisions and Congress have fouled it up.

We have to have a serious discussion about how we are to manage our federal lands for true multiple use. Today it is a federal offense to harass an endangered species but it seems it has become a federal policy to harass those of us who utilize public lands.

Dan Bell, a public-lands rancher, is president of the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association.