The Controversial Issue Of Federal Ownership Of Public Land

The topic of federal ownership of public lands has long been a controversial topic in the Western United States, and is only becoming more of an issue in the 21st century. The federal government owns 47% of the land in the West, compared to only 4% in the rest of the states in the country – excluding Alaska and Hawaii (12). In some states, such as Oregon, Utah, and Nevada, the majority of the land is controlled by the federal government. There have been a handful of incidents where anti-government groups have challenged the federal government’s authority over public lands. All of these conflicts involve public-land owners and users asserting that the deferral government lacks the authority to own and manage federal lands. The federal government

Ammon Bundy is the son of anti-government protestor Cliven D. Bundy, who is known for being the central figure in the Bundy Standoff with Federal Bureau of Land Management officials over unpaid grazing fees on federally owned public land in 2014. The Bundy Standoff origins go back twenty years earlier when Cliven Bundy had stopped paying his grazing fees in the early 1990s. His claim was that the federal government had no authority over the land that his ancestors settled in the 1880s (Blumm & Jamin, 2017). Cliven Bundy’s cattle grazing fees eventually reached 1.2 million dollars and the federal government began slowly seizing his cattle. The conflict escalated in 2014 when footage of a Bureau of Land Management agent struck Ammon Bundy 3 times with a stun gun went viral on the internet. Social media spread the video around and eventually hundreds of armed militants came to Cliven Bundy’s ranch to help defend him and his cattle from court orders. This resulted in a standoff of over 400 armed protestors driving back about 50 BLM agents in order to retrieve some of the Bundy’s repossessed cattle. The BLM had to retreat in fear of an armed conflict, but would later take judicial actions against the Bundys and their followers. The Bundy Standoff is the first federal confrontation Ammon

“Ammon seized the opportunity provided by the Ninth Circuit’s decision to advocate the Bundian interpretation of the Constitution and its public-land ramifications” (Blumm & Jamin, 2017, p. 16). Bundy and his followers loudly challenged federal ownership of land as unconstitutional, and they helped spread news of their actions and ideologies by using social media. With the recent rise of social media in the last decade, its ability to attract scores of anti-government protestors in short amounts of time makes the Malheur occupation the biggest challenge to the federal government’s power over public land yet. After the six-week long insurgency, about 26 occupants were arrested and one was killed in a confrontation with law enforcement after a car