Word: carvers
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...Carver had climbed aboard the Caterpillar to bulldoze open a weather-damaged road across a national forest. The hitch was, he wanted to do so without federal permission. Although plainly illegal, in Carver's mind it was an act of civil disobedience--a frontier Boston Tea Party--warranted by the tyranny he and his fellow citizens in Nye had long endured. But in this case, the purported tyrant was the U.S. government...
...incident immediately made Carver a leading voice in the so-called county-supremacy movement now gaining momentum throughout the West. It also triggered a major federal lawsuit seeking to assert once and for all the government's ownership of federal lands in Nye County and, by legal inference, its possession of public lands that cover one-third of the nation's ground. The Justice Department estimates that at least 35 counties, primarily in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California, have declared authority over federal lands within their boundaries. Other estimates put the number far higher. The National Federal Lands Conference...
What matters most is the unrest that prompted the lawsuit in the first place. The message carried by Carver embodies a warning that every presidential hopeful would do well to heed. Something has come unfastened in the West, and everybody has guns. "By circling the wagons, they see it's just them against the world," says the Cato Institute's Hess. He fears, he says, that the owner of some marginal ranch pushed to the brink by changing rules may turn desperate. "Someone's going to carry a gun, someone's going to shoot, someone's going to bomb...
Some of Dick Carver's critics have tried to link him to militias and white supremacists, but it is a mistake to dismiss him as a just another extremist crackpot. The forces powering the Nye County rebellion are those resculpting the political and social landscape of America at large. They just happened to have converged with their greatest intensity in the West, where private and public interests clash directly and daily, typically over such visceral issues as land and water. The angry rebels range from ranchers fed up with bureaucrats' telling them when and where to graze their cattle...
...MOVEMENT IS NO MERE rekindling of the '70s' Sagebrush Rebellion, although it does share the same goal of increasing local control over federal lands. Carver, who carries his Constitution in his shirt pocket even while baling hay, is a product of the same antifederalist ferment that produced such widely divergent events as the Oklahoma City bombing and Ross Perot's recent proposal to launch a new political party. Nye's particular brand of rebellion is driven too by an intense feeling that the combined forces of federal law, environmental activism and urban growth may have doomed a mythic frontier life...