With the confusion over Bundy, a book by Dennis McLane is suddenly very relevant-
Below is a history of grazing and the BLM the public needs to know.
When Bundy cattle trespass situation came to a head this month, there was great media interest and a mass of confusion too. Now the situation is clearing a bit. More reflective and more accurate stories and opinions are being written. However, there is still a lot of confusion and a fair amount of it is deliberate.
Americans have a vast heritage of public lands and most love it but very few know its history and more than a few of the ways it is managed.
The U.S. public lands-
The Federal Government owns almost 30 percent of the land area of the United States. This is close to 650-million acres. These public lands include National Parks and National Mounments, National Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, the BLM lands, the military lands and the Indian Reservations. We leave discussion of the latter two aside, but the first four categories are lands that are held for all America, not a particular group, region, state, city or county.
There are federal lands in all states, but the preponderance of them are in the western U.S., west of the Missouri River. The best known to the general public are the national parks and monuments (401 units, 84.4 million acres). Most folks know the larger national forest system (55 national forests, almost 190 million acres). Then there are the national wildlife refuges (560 refuges, about 150-million acres).
The BLM-
The agency managing the most land, however, is the lesser known U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with 247-million acres). It is some of the lands managed by this agency to which Cliven Bundy has variously been said to own, to have rights to, or to actually be owned by the state of Nevada. These most abundant lands are entirely in the Western United States and are usually at lower elevations than the national parks or forests.
Aside from the original 13 states, the history of the public lands was at first attempts to dispose of them, overlapped later by reservation and retention of some of them, e.g., Yellowstone National Park in 1872; and finally the current period of near total retention of lands and federal management of these remaining lands.
While some of the federal lands are private lands that were purchased or gifted to the government, close to 100% of the BLM lands have been federal land since they were acquired by the United States in purchase (such as the Louisiana Purchase) and conquest (the Mexican Cession). These have never been private lands or state lands. Up until the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 they were generally called the “public domain,” and were an unmanaged commons. There were many ways to privatize them such as the railroad land grants and the well known Homestead Act (now repealed). By the 1930s, the amount of privatization had greatly dwindled and the remaining public domain was largely an overgrazed, giant vacant lot in the West.
The Taylor Grazing Act-
The public domain was a commons. Everyone was responsible for it, meaning in practice no one was. The result was a classic tragedy of the commons. The public domain was on its way to abolishment with coming of the “Taylor Grazing Act of 1934″ sponsored by Colorado’s Edward Taylor, a rancher and congressman. Its purpose was to “stop injury to the public lands by preventing over-grazing and soil deterioration; to provide for orderly use, improvement and development; to stabilize the livestock industry dependent upon the Public Range and for other purposes.”
A U.S. Grazing Director was hired and with a small crew, 80-million acres of land was divided into grazing allotments for which a permit would now needed to graze. To get a permit, the “permittee” needed to have some base (private property) where the cattle, sheep, or goats could be kept part of the year. This served to eliminate the transient roaming herds of livestock whose owner had no land but searched year round on the range for something for the livestock to eat. The U.S. Grazing Service came into being to administer the law, and a fee per head of livestock was installed — the grazing fee. It was not much then and just a token today, but it has to be paid.
The grazing permits had “terms and conditions” specifying the details of how, when and where the grazing was to be. Over time these terms have become more detailed. A grazing permit is renewed every ten years. Cliven Bundy tore up his new permit in 1992 because he said he didn’t like the new terms. The Bunkerville grazing allotment which Bundy had used was then abolished. Now he runs cattle with no permit on these government lands larger than the old Bunkerville allotment and in numbers that exceed the original terms. This is why he is trespassing on the public lands.
The origin of the BLM-
The Grazing Service lasted about a decade. In 1946 there was a big dispute between the House and the Senate over grazing fees. The result was no appropriation for the Grazing Service. So it was paralyzed. Finally, in 1946 President Truman used his executive authority to cobble together a new agency, the BLM, to replace the old Grazing Service. The BLM had more authority than the Service because it was the remains of the Grazing Service added to the Department of Interior’s General Land Office, one of the oldest agencies of government. This gave the BLM jurisdiction also over public land minerals (worth far more than the grazing), land transfers and disposals, and other matters. The BLM finally got a rational, comprehensive, mission in 1976 with the passage of the “Federal Land Policy and Management Act” (FLPMA, flip ma). The Homestead Act and other land disposal laws were repealed by FLPMA, and the policy became to keep all the remaining public lands and manage them for “multiple uses” (many uses and users) and “sustained yield” — make sure the grass grows back, etc.
The BLM remained relatively obscure despite its new legal mandate and was not funded very well for management (except for minerals). Nonetheless, they do have law enforcement, and recently a major (and probably the only) book (564 pages) on this has been written. It is by Dennis McLane, of Boise, Idaho. “Seldom Was Heard an Encouraging Word, A History of Bureau of Land Management Law Enforcement.” Dennis McLane has a Guest Opinion in the Idaho Statesman about Bundy. “BLM prevented from doing its lawful work in Nevada standoff.” It is possible McLane knows more about this than Sean Hannity of Fox News. The BLM is said to have received the federal lands “no one wanted,” but today there can be a struggle over almost every acre as they have been discovered more and more for mining, recreation, wilderness, water, wildlife, and energy as well as grazing.
We hope to write more about the history of America’s public lands because the public’s lack of knowledge plays into the hands of political and media manipulators.