Restaking the claim - occupying national forests

American Forests, July-August, 1995 by Herbert E. McLean

Public forests are primary targets in a growing push for "home rule" in the West

A county commissioner in remote Nye County, Nevada, climbs aboard a D-7 bulldozer and reopens 400 feet of closed road within Toiyabe National Forest, as a Fourth of July crowd watches with admiration. In the process, he nearly mows down two Forest Service special agents - sent to prevent the illegal action - standing in front of the 'dozer.

On Tongass National Forest in Alaska, two Tlingit native youths, banished by tribal leaders to a "remote island" after robbing and beating a pizza delivery man, illegally occupy land and use firearms.

Eight men are convicted of planting enough explosives in Quartzite Falls, on Arizona's Tonto National Forest, to blast the once-Class 6 rapids to benign status - apparently to facilitate rafting (and boost revenues therefrom) through the pristine Salt River Canyon Wilderness.

Folks with high passions and different designs upon the land are increasingly entering our national forests. They're testing the Forest Service's time-honored slogan, "Land of Many Uses," to the limit in what appears to be a growing push for "home rule."

Today's point man in that movement is Nevada county commissioner/bulldozer operator Richard Carver, whose room and dad opened a modest restaurant and bar deep in the Nevada desert in 1938. His claim: States, not the federal government, own all forestlands, including the Toiyabe National Forest, and local counties like Nye have authority to manage them. He persuasively waves a copy of the U.S. Constitution to sell his point, while vehemently denying even the existence of a national forest.

Leaders of the so-called States' Rights Home Rule Movement, which is gathering steam in the West, gather crowds of sometimes several hundred in outlying communities in a mode similar to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 80s. Espousing a nonviolent approach while urging civil disobedience and calling all environmental laws "unconstitutional," leaders clamor for a return of power "to the people," usually meaning county governments.

"We're bringing the reds to their knees," Carver proclaimed to American Forests this spring.

Last July after the bulldozing incident, and under the local banner of the Nevada Plan for Public Lands, Commissioner Carver filed criminal charges against a Forest Service law-enforcement special agent who, with an agency district ranger, had come to protect a nearby slice of the Toiyabe Forest where Carver was preparing to open a closed road. The charge: "impersonating a peace officer."

With a bomb exploding at a ranger station in Carson City, Nevada, this spring (no injuries but plenty of structural damage), a second bomb exploding in an outhouse in neighboring Humboldt National Forest, and a bomb threat received at Toiyabe Forest headquarters near Reno early in April, tensions were high, but Carver was claiming no responsibility.

He told American Forests that the Forest Service planted the Carson City bombs, but offered no evidence.

"They want to make us look stupid, but we got some pretty good publicity out of it," Carver reported.

The Forest Service - adopting a non-confrontational mode, though it fervently hoped to defuse a potential time-bomb out West - has filed suit to get a fresh legal opinion on just who owns our national forests, quoting chapter and verse on federal statutes already in place. And though several small Nevada newspapers are carrying the home-rule banner, larger metropolitan dailies are treading lightly or calling for a return to reason.

"For the Nye County commissioners to seize a national forest makes as much sense as having the city of New York seize the Statue of Liberty," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently editorialized.

Meanwhile, most Forest Service employees out West aren't carrying sidearms, as they might have in decades past, but rather wallet-size "crisis cards" telling them what to do if they're arrested by local authorities. Threatening, resisting, or interfering with a Forest Service employee is a federal crime, the card tells them summarily. The FBI will investigate.

Following the catastrophic bombing assault on lives and federal property in Oklahoma in mid-April, it's a good bet that any threats or gestures portending violence - bulldozers included - will be dealt with considerably more resolutely than in the past. And that kind of law enforcement may require a lot more than an instruction card in a federal employee's hip pocket.

In Alaska, those "banished" youths, who have been living in two spartan, separated cabins on Tongass National Forest, are apparently now being used in support of larger causes: to test Tlingit native claims of primordial land use, and thus ownership, in Southeast Alaska.

"Our fathers and forefathers...have lived on and occupied Kuiu Island until the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," a tribal judge is reported as saying.

The boys' use of firearms and occupancy of land without a Forest Service permit seriously concern the Forest Service, which has been working for years to build good relations with local native tribes. A number of such groups received large tracts under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.