IPFS
The Libertarian
Vin Suprynowicz
More About: Vin Suprynowicz's Columns ArchiveA VICTORY FOR THE SHOVEL BRIGADE
Along the interstates, scarcely a county doesn’t sport its quota of distinctive white-on-brown highway signs, designating not merely national parks, but now also national trails and heritage areas, national economic development corridors, national wildlife preserves and sanctuaries. And all such map overlays trail their inevitable baggage of federal access and use restrictions.
Here in the West, where the federal government claims to manage and control the outright majority of acreage in many states including Nevada, the level of federal intrusion is far worse. Federal regulations designed to “protect” ephemeral “threatened” or “endangered” weeds or bugs have virtually halted mining and logging in many parts of the West, shutting down sawmills and turning entire towns into half-abandoned welfare camps.
(Near Monterey, California, shoreline home-building has been halted to protect the rare Smith’s Blue butterfly in places the butterfly has never actually been seen -- the Greens just figure it might want to visit there, someday.)
Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went still further, identifying thousands of miles of streams and more than 10,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs from the Pacific to the northern Rockies as critical to the survival of the native bull trout.
That means Washington bureaucrats will now be able to veto any productive activities in those areas -- from livestock grazing to road building -- if they might “pose a threat” to spawning trout.
But the Fish & Wildlife folks made an exception. The agency decided not to include a 13-mile stretch of the Jarbidge River near Elko, Nev., in the catalog of areas getting further “critical habitat protection.”
Even more surprisingly, the federals admitted why.
The bureaucrats decided to shy away from an area which has been turned into a national cause celebre by an ad hoc group of local land rights advocates known as the Jarbidge “Shovel Brigade.”
After a dirt county road along the Jarbidge Canyon washed out a decade ago, managers of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest -- a federal enclave whose very existence is justified by the fantastic claim that the federal government must protect the watersheds of “navigable waterways” (seen a rush of barge and steamboat traffic through Elko, of late?) -- refused to allow the road to be repaired, blocking all access.
Gloria Flora, supervisor of the forest, complained to Congress that the locals were showing “hostility and distrust” to her office -- not inviting wives to their quilting bees and the like -- and promptly quit.
At a Fourth of July rally in 2000, thousands of people lined the streets of Elko protesting the federal actions in blocking access to an historic county road. Hundreds of volunteers removed a boulder which the Forest Service had placed to block access to the canyon road, dubbing it the “Liberty Rock.”
Explaining its omission of the Jarbidge Canyon from the new off-limits list, the Forest Service acknowledged last month, “There is a growing body of documentation that some regulatory actions by the federal government, while well-intentioned and required by law, can under certain circumstances have unintended negative consequences for the conservation of species on nonfederal lands.”
Further restricting traditional public use of the Jarbidge Canyon “may negatively affect cooperative relationships between federal and local officials and discourage voluntary, cooperative conservation,” the Forest Service ruled on Sept. 23.
Good. Local residents stood up to be counted. They stood up against heavy-handed federal encroachments on their traditional and perfectly legal rights of access to lands the federal government has never bought or paid for. The people spoke, and a federal agency -- which blithely parades about, claiming its one-size-fits-all exclusions are supposed to benefit the very “people” who gathered by the thousands in Elko with their picket signs and shovels -- threw in the towel.
Quite wisely.
Try to travel the timber country, these days, without seeing a bumper sticker urging those who discover a threatened owl to “shoot, shovel, and shut up” -- or the mournful lamentation that there are “So many owls, so few recipes.”
These are people who, 40 years ago, would presumably have reacted with delight at the sight of some new feathered neighbor -- before such a sighting became a trigger for ruthless federal police to throw them off their lands and out of their livelihoods.
The federal government acknowledges here -- significantly -- that if its agents go so far overboard advancing the agendas of the quasi-religious nature cults that they stir up a revolt among the populace at large, the result can be just as counterproductive to the health of the critters in question, as it may prove to the long-term survival of these agencies, themselves.
One river down. Lots to go.