Boise, Idaho — The Storm Over Rangelands property rights conference got underway sharply last Saturday, with protestors outside the city center shouting “Public lands in public hands!” and “Biodiversity not bullies!” The gathering was organized in response to the occupation at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by militiamen, though it was planned before FBI agents arrested 11 individuals last week.
Put on by National Federal Lands Conference, a Utah-based group, the meeting was made up largely of western ranchers, including some from near Malheur, who believe public land should no longer be under federal control.
Indeed, the main argument of the day was that public land is not technically public. The keynote speaker, Angus McIntosh, an adjunct professor of agriculture at Texas A&M (he taught two online courses last fall), walked the crowd through two-hours-worth of litigation, dating back to the 1860s, in an effort to prove his point: Ranchers, he said, actually own the land they currently pay to graze on.
According to McIntosh, just as the early homesteaders gained ownership of their land by “improving” (i.e. working) it, ranchers own their land because they too have “improved” it, with roads (including cattle trails) and irrigation. “Grazing fees aren’t rent,” he said, “They’re like the license on your truck.” You’re obligated to pay for a license, in other words, but that doesn’t mean that the government owns your Ford.
McIntosh told the audience that “the manure hit the fan for ranchers” with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976. The act halted the handover of public land to private citizens, and instead determined to keep it under federal control and put more emphasis on conservation.
Before earning his Ph.D., McIntosh served 16 years with the USDA, including time as a rangeland-management specialist. But these days, he speaks out against the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and federal government generally. “For the last 40 years [since the passage of FLPMA], they have been operating under this idea that they can get you to sign away all your rights,” he told the crowd, which applauded loudly when he left the podium.
The Salt Lake Tribune reached out to legal experts for their opinion on McIntosh’s arguments. “A rancher who grazes animals on public lands is a permittee, not an owner of the privilege,” Thad Box, retired dean of Utah State University’s College of Natural Resources, told the Tribune in an email. “If they renounce their privilege, their grazing allotment could, and should, be canceled and assigned to someone else.” John Leshy, a professor at University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, called McIntosh’s points complete “bullshit.”
Before the presentations, John Pratt, a southern Utah rancher who helped organize the meeting, and was at Malheur during the first days of the occupation, mentioned LaVoy Finicum in his opening remarks. Finicum was killed outside Malheur by the FBI last week when the bureau intercepted a car full of militiamen. “Whether you agree or disagree, that was a good man. I’ll stand by that to the end,” Pratt said.