To Serve Mankindby
Vin Suprynowicz Over the past six years, Nevada’s U.S. senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, have successfully pushed public lands bills which facilitated the sale of tens of thousands of acres formerly managed by the federal government in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties – basically, southeastern Nevada. Although the federal government could show no title for those lands – no bill of sale approved by the state Legislature as required under Article I Section 8 – they have successfully been sold back onto the private tax rolls, allowing additional room for growth in Southern Nevada. So far so good. On the down side, the bills also designated more than 1.7 million new, additional Nevada acres as federally “protected” wilderness, stymieing the objective of a net reduction in the 90 percent of Nevada still controlled from afar by the bureaucrats of the Potomac. Now, similar plans are afoot in northwestern Nevada, where environmentalists are pushing a proposal to newly label as “wilderness” nearly 700,000 acres in Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties. But this time, northern Nevadans appear to have seen them coming. Meeting halls were packed with opponents during several public discussions in March and April. More than 700 people crowded into Smith Valley High School in Lyon County – most to oppose any new wilderness. County commissions in all three counties have OK’d resolutions opposing any new wilderness designations. “Basically, the commission has said we don’t want wilderness, we don’t need wilderness,” explains Mineral County Commissioner Jerrie Tipton, adding that she and others are worried changes could affect mining, outdoor recreation and military training, all important to the local economies. Lyon County Commissioner Phyllis Hunewill called the latest proposal a “slap in the face” after efforts to agree on designation of a much smaller new “wilderness.” “There’s a fear here over what government is going to do to us and not for us,” Jim Sanford, a 50-year resident of Yerington and the former publisher of the Mason Valley News, explained to the Reno Gazette-Journal. “The feeling here is we don’t trust them.” In a March letter to Reid, four state legislators noted opposition to the new wilderness area is overwhelming. “With this we urge you, our congressional representative, to either have the proposal scaled backed or eliminated,” read the letter, signed by Republican Assemblymen James Settelmeyer of Gardnerville and three others. Mr. Settelmeyer, a rancher who has had grazing permits near wilderness areas, said he has significant concerns about problems with new ones, including the ability to successfully access the posted land to fight wildfires. “I respectfully request you do not move forward with legislation until such time as Mineral and Lyon counties choose to support the effort,” wrote Gov. Jim Gibbons in a March 12 letter to Reid, Ensign and U.S. Rep. Dean Heller. The targeted land is composed of beautiful slices of rural Nevada that provide critical habitat for wildlife, justifying “special protection,” supporters say. “What wilderness does is keep a part of Nevada’s wild heritage there,” explains Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness. “It’s a place for wildlife to go, it’s a place for people to get away.” Actually, while the solitude of the whistling wind can have its charms, Ms. Netherton sounds like she’s preparing to sell someone a stuffed jackalope. Much of these tracts are stinking desert, jackrabbit habitat for which the prime economic uses have always been – likely always will be – mining and grazing. And few people can “get away” into an arid designated wilderness without risking the fate of the Donner Party, because motor vehicle access is blocked, as is the ability to hunt for food. “Wilderness” rangers don’t blaze new roads and hiking trails – they block off the old ones. John Wallin, director of the Nevada Wilderness Project, laments that the opposition is premature, unnecessary and “fear-based.” He said critics have misrepresented the level of government control on activities such as grazing and mining that can occur within a wilderness. Really? We’re supposed to believe gun-toting government rangers and the eco-theocrats they serve are going to say, “Oh, you think you’ve found a chromium deposit on this newly sequestered wilderness land? Some mercury, some manganese, some uranium? Well, get in there with your bulldozers and do some digging, good buddy, and let us know what you find”? That they’re so anxious to see the cattle industry and the ranching way of life sustained that they’re going to issue new low-cost permits to allow cattle to graze away the fire-hazard dried brush and grasses from additional millions of acres here in the West? Where, Mr. Wallin? Where have you and your buddies arranged for new allotments to be leased for grazing in the past 20 years? The one-way street has all been the other way, hasn’t it, shutting cattle and ranchers off more and more of the public land, which far from blooming in their absence turns back into a sterile cleaned-out wilderness without ranchers to thin the predators and maintain the ponds and springs, without large grazing animals to churn the seeds into the soil and create a fertile habitat for riparian birds – doesn’t it? The residents of the northern counties are smart to raise a ruckus now, loud and long, rather than being lulled into complacency by assurances that “This is all tentative, nothing has been decided yet.” Because if they wait till the day before the signs go up, what will they be told, then? “Afraid you’re a bit too late. This was all decided years ago. If you had objections you should have shown up at that ‘public hearing’ we held at our offices in Maryland way back in 2008; we posted notices all over Georgetown and Chevy Chase – don’t know how you could have missed ’em.” “I reject what the Nevada Wilderness Project has put before us,” explains Rep. Heller, who contends he will not back any lands bill that lacks local support. “We are not going to force a lands bill down the throats of any county,” vows Sen. Ensign. “If they don’t want a lands bill, we won’t do a lands bill.” Good. “We’ll get them on board, or we won’t do it,” says Sen. Reid, apparently in agreement. Based on past performance, however, the advocates of the “Keep Out” signs will now try to divide and conquer – taking aside first the ranchers, then the hunters, then the rockhounds, promising something to each, insisting some new, “compromise” wilderness designation won’t really bar their access to the lands.
April 22, 2008 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz
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