Caroline Tracey
Sympathy for the Oregon Militia: Dispossession and Environmentalism in the Rural West
As a child, on long rides in the backseat of my mother’s car, I scrambled to write down the phone numbers on “Land for Sale” signs sticking up from agricultural lands on the outskirts of Denver. Perhaps they could be convinced not to sell out! To this day there’s little I love more than open spaces. So the massive amounts of public land in Colorado (36% of the state), and in the West at large (47% of the region), are a point of pride for me, something I always imagined to be a universal good, a means by which the government protected us from ourselves.[1] And while I couldn’t tell you much about ranching, I could tell you that land with cows scattered across it, grazing, looked a lot better than the seas of rooftops spreading all over the West.
This perception of public land as a universal, unquestionable good formed part of the basis of the argument that unfolded during the winter 2016 occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. Onlookers critiqued the occupation on social media and in op-eds, saying that the land already belongs to the occupiers: it’s public land!
But that rallying cry—from apartment-dwellers (like me) who like hiking, Democrats who support biggish government and environmental regulation, and anyone who appreciates the vistas on their Great American Road Trip—ignores the fact that the history of public lands in this country is not neutral. Neither is environmentalism. It falls on those of us who are non-conservative, non-rancher lovers of open space to be sympathetic to rural people, their livelihoods, and their land ethics.
The Malheur occupation began with the October 7, 2015, re-sentencing for arson of ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond, by all accounts generous fixtures in their local Harney County, Oregon, community.[2] The father-and-son team had set a fire—a common (if controversial) range management tool—during a county burn ban. They faced punishment under the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law the New Yorker once called “surely one of the worst statutes ever passed by Congress.”[3] When the Hammonds pleaded guilty, the federal judge who presided over their trial offered them relatively generous sentences of three months and one year in prison, respectively. That is, until the US Attorney for the District of Oregon successfully had the judgment vacated on the grounds that the sentences were shorter than the statutory mandatory minimum. Even though the Hammonds had already served their time and gone home, they were re-sentenced to five years imprisonment.
On November 11, 2015, Ammon Bundy—son of Cliven, the Nevada rancher infamous for a 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over grazing fees—posted a video on YouTube calling on ranchers and other “Constitutionalists” to take up the Hammonds’ cause. On January 2, 2016, after a peaceful protest by locals in a Safeway parking lot, militants began arriving at the Malheur refuge. But the Hammonds wanted nothing to do with them, and signs reading “Bundys go home!” appeared around town.[4]
The Hammonds turned themselves in on January 4, 2016. Meanwhile, the militants pulled up sections of the wildlife refuge’s perimeter fence and made escalating demands, sparking debate within the local community. The first militant was arrested on January 15, but the occupation continued for forty-one days more. Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan, and five other defendants were acquitted in Oregon this past October of conspiracy to impede federal employees from discharging their duties and weapons charges.[5]
The militiamen were, on the majority, not ranchers. They appear to be narcissistic, masculinist, and violent individuals. Their antics stole attention from the response of the southeastern Oregon community, whose point of view deserves more consideration. At a January 6, 2016, meeting at the Harney County Fairgrounds, many locals said that while they didn’t agree with the tactics of the armed occupiers of the refuge, they did agree with their message.[6] “Ranchers and other longtime residents,” Oregon Public Radio reported, “said they felt their concerns, including land use issues and employment after the decline of the timber industry in Oregon, haven’t been talked about on a national scale until the armed men took over the federal building.”
The Malheur Wildlife Refuge was originally Native American, specifically Paiute, land. Indeed, all of our public lands were initially Native American territory, made vacant by the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act, which created western reservations and required Native Americans to relocate to them.
But reservations are not the only instances of public lands governance as a means of colonial control. In Arizona in the 1930s and ‘40s, using thin, now debunked, scientific footing to claim overgrazing, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Soil Erosion Service (later the Soil Conservation Service, now the National Resources Conservation Service) forcibly removed half of the Navajo nation’s sheep from the reservation.[7] The overgrazing had not occurred because of the Navajo increasing their stocking rates, as bureaucrats claimed, but rather because the government had reduced the land available to the shepherds. The sheep removal took away the Navajo’s cultural lifeblood as well as the livelihood of many; additionally, sheep husbandry and wool were often Navajo women’s only sources of income, leaving them disproportionately affected.
Under Spanish rule, forest lands in northern New Mexico were made into large, common-property land grants for shepherding, forestry, and agriculture that the United States agreed to recognize when it took over the region in 1848. Yet, between private speculation and the creation and governance of the Carson and Santa Fe National Forests, millions of acres were removed from those communal holdings.[8] By the 1960s, the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes had begun aggressive activism against the United States Forest Service (USFS), which they called an “army of occupation.” As geographer Jake Kosek records in his book Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico, the Alianza asserted, and many locals maintain to this day, that by controlling the forests and preventing local Hispano residents (descendants of Spanish and Mestizo settlers) from herding sheep, hunting, cutting firewood, and engaging in other uses of the forest, the USFS enforces poverty in the region, and operates as a racist presence of white bureaucrats policing brown people. These opponents of the USFS point to a history in which Hispanos have been denied sheep permits in favor of Anglo cattle raising, whole stands of forest have been clear-cut on the grounds of “scientific management,” and DDT has been sprayed over millions of forest acres and nearby villages—a history of the USFS governing not just land in northern New Mexico, but economies, communities, and bodies.
This is not an attempt to equate white cattle ranchers like the Hammonds with the Navajo or Hispanos in any way, but rather to point out that the notion of public lands agencies’ neutrality is a bias of those who benefit from them.
Another point at which it becomes clear that administering public lands is anything but neutral is when these lands are made the opposite of public. The Department of Defense (DoD) owns 14.4 million acres in the United States, most of which was either withdrawn from the BLM or seized from private landowners, frequently ranchers, through eminent domain. Once land belongs to the DoD it is inaccessible to the conservationist scrutiny to which other agencies’ land—including BLM and USFS land leased for grazing—is subject. From the Nevada Test Site to the White Sands Missile Range to Dugway Proving Ground, western rangelands have been seized for warfare and effectively erased from the map, both stripping ranchers of land they relied upon and further threatening the welfare of humans and livestock with DoD activity. In March 1968, for instance, during several routine open-air tests of the odorless, colorless nerve agent VX at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground, sheep across a thirty-mile radius became dazed, staggering and falling to the ground in exhaustion while their necks twitched with spasms. Some died within a day. Within five days upwards of 6,000 had.[9]
Defense played a role in starting the Malheur occupation as well: the Hammonds’ arson conviction fell under a provision of a federal law punishing terrorism. Conjuring sympathy for the militia, we might imagine that the militants and patriot organizations who got involved in the occupation did so out of shock that ranchers could be sent to jail, as terrorists, in the course of their job. And yet many who otherwise worry about the escalating security complex in this country have spun the conflict in terms of birdwatching.
Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit posted regular missives about the Malheur occupation on her Facebook page. In one, she called the occupants “enemies of mine and thine.” In another, she wrote, “I want this to be seen as an environmental story, or part of the unending Western antienvironmental story of entitlement that thinks it owns what it can reach and that destroys much of what it touches.”
I, too, want this to be an environmental story. But Solnit’s tack seems to me drawn from an outdated (and fallacious) binary that places “bad” cattle ranching (and the BLM as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining,” as the old platitude goes) against “good” environmentalism, conservation, wilderness, and wildlife refuges.
Our current era is one in which an ecological approach to land and the environment dominates the consciousness of urban and empowered Americans, and in which all agencies’ lands have unprecedented recreation demands—recreation being the one acceptable remaining land use. But the public lands agencies were created to serve a variety of purposes and goals. National parks were intended as places for recreation, while forest reserves were to be technocratically managed for yield—hence the USFS’ position within the Department of Agriculture. Grazing lands, those now under the jurisdiction of the BLM, were the influence of stockmen from the start.
The public domain came about as the United States purchased land for westward expansion: all territorial acquisitions initially entered the public domain. In the Midwest, the government was able to quickly dispose of the lands for homesteading. But in the arid West, where farming was not possible, the lands remained under government control. For a period of “Open Range,” they were free for the using. There was no exclusive use, there were no permits. But communal land ownership in a capitalist economy encouraged overstocking and overgrazing: if all the grass got eaten up in a certain area, stockmen could simply move on. What ensued was a level of desertification from which the West has never recovered.
In 1900, the forest reserves (now the National Forests) established the first permit system for grazing. While ranchers were opposed to the fees (and, like Bundy’s Constitutionalists, called them unconstitutional—the Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality), in general they supported the system, because it instituted order and stability where there had been chaos.
They extended their support by asking for a leasing system on the public domain lands. Every year, from 1901 to 1916, a bill was introduced to establish such a system. But, partially because of opposition from those stockmen who wanted public rangelands to be transferred to private hands, these efforts failed until 1933, when Edward Taylor (D-Colorado) managed to pass the Taylor Grazing Act, which created the Division of Grazing, later to become the BLM. One of the reasons the act succeeded was that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior promised stockmen that they would have influence in the new division, that there would be no large bureaucracy, and that fees would be based on the cost of implementing the program, not market value.[10]
The system had (and has) its biases. Many cattlemen supported it because they foresaw themselves benefiting from the exclusive access to the range that the permits would provide, while sheepmen, whose animals’ grazing paths are more transient, expected rightly that the system would make it more difficult for them to maintain their access. Grazing permits also required that stockmen own a “base property,” favoring large-scale producers.
While the public domain was never privatized, the change from open range to exclusive-use leases—privatization of use—was crucial from an environmental standpoint. Geographer Nathan Sayre writes that “divided access to land was the keystone of responsible ranching because it gave each rancher incentive to conserve the range,” and calls long-term tenure on the land “the structural condition on which ecological stewardship must depend.”[11]
What we American environmentalists have convinced ourselves are unassailable “goods” (conserved land, “nature,” “wilderness”) and “bads” (grazing, rural conservatism) are more complicated and connected than that binary suggests. The ecological influence of grazing, and the environmental influence of ranching, illustrate some of these complexities.
The Malheur Wildlife Refuge’s “natural landscape” looks completely different than it would have a hundred and fifty years ago. Though the refuge dates back to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, prior to that time, eastern Oregon was grazed by bison. Moreover, grasslands became good habitat for bison because of the management practices of native peoples.[12] By the end of the nineteenth century, however, bison were nearly extinct, and, as noted above, the region’s native peoples had been displaced to reservations. Yet even when the coverage of the occupation grasped the refuge’s native history, it failed to understand the degree to which “nature” and “managed lands” was a false binary.
Nature and the environment are constructed, and constantly changing, entities. There is no square mile of America, wildlife refuges included, not managed and altered to some end. Lands that are not used for agriculture or settlement are often improved for tourism with trails and parking lots, or carefully controlled to promote habitat for certain desirable species. Even officially-designated wilderness areas are overseen by many layers of legislation, and attendant staff, to guide their management.
Managed well, cattle keep grasslands vital. They can make them better carbon sinks (grass photosynthesizes faster than the shrubs that grow in ungrazed country), with more biodiversity and healthier soils. In some places, cattle have been reintroduced into conserved lands for ecological reasons. At the Nature Conservancy’s Moses Coulee Reserve, in the state of Washington, for instance, cattle were brought in to fight cheatgrass, an invasive species that was growing rampant without grazing pressure.[13]
Another reason the history of grazing on public lands is an environmental story is that without a healthy domestic cattle industry, American rangelands (whose value is already tethered to their development potential, rather than agricultural productivity) become subdivisions. This is already happening all over the West. The average age of American farmers and ranchers is fifty-eight; over the next twenty years, about seventy percent of the nation’s private farm and ranch land—a total acreage approaching the scale of the Louisiana Purchase—will change hands.[14] Ranching has slim-to-no profit margin, and the pressure to sell out is high. Those who stay in the business do so because they love working close to the land and animals. It should be old news by now that both large-scale conservation and containing sprawl in the West depends on ranchers and environmentalists working together.
The Malheur militants’ calls for privatizing the range are not new. They were not new in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the Sagebrush Rebellion sought to convince the federal government to cede public lands to the states, so that Western states would have larger tax bases and more opportunities for economic growth.[15] The demands were not new during the Wise Use movement (1988-1996), when primary producers, facing industry downturns, population growth, and new environmental priorities, mobilized around maintaining their privileged access to federal lands.[16] These calls are as old as the incorporation of the lands as public. Each new upswell of resistance reflects the resurgence of a chronic Western concern about livelihood, and about being controlled by distant powers, or, more recently, by newcomers who have imported outsider ideologies.
Perhaps these fears and the territorialism they breed is what Solnit means by “the unending Western story of entitlement.” But lately I’ve noticed that when I look at the websites of environmental organizations I think I like, to which I consider sending, and do send, money, I see people whose stories are not like mine—not people whose families have stayed put for generations, who grew up hearing stories about their home from their parents and grandparents until their memory of the place stretches back much further than their own lifetime. I see lawyers’ children from the suburbs of the East telling adventure stories; I see the phrase “fell in love with the landscape” again and again. Geographer J. Dwight Hines refers to the young and middle-aged members of the middle class as “the most profound challenge to the preexisting ways of life” in the rural West, because they are the largest, loudest, and most politically-involved newcomers. This is its own entitlement.[17]
Amidst the pangs of my own territorialism, what strikes an even deeper chord with me than environmentalist polemic is the Wallace Stegner quotation that “ranching is one of the few western occupations that have been renewable and have produced a continuing way of life.”[18] And it gives me special pause to think about the land ethic of ranchers—one developed in a single, remote place over years and generations—being erased from the West by the fundamentally consumptive activities of recreation and tourism.
In the essay “Economy and Pleasure,” Wendell Berry writes about how economy and education coalesce to betray rural areas. “The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and the community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.” What happens then? As local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, Berry argues, rural people are no longer understood, no longer valued. One result of the amnesia: rural people “don’t trust our ‘public servants’ because we know that they don’t respect us. They don’t respect us, we understand, because they don’t know us.”[19]
The coverage of the Malheur occupation threw urbanites’ and newcomers’ unwillingness to know rural people into sharp relief. On January 5, 2016, the Atlantic wrote: “The protesters may have a case to make. But the occupiers can’t rely on the sympathy of the rest of the country, which considers Uncle Sam a very different sort of neighbor.”[20] But perhaps it shouldn’t be rural people’s fault when other Americans don’t try to see their side of things.
The rural West is emptying out, while the New West is turning it into suburbs. In 2015-16, the three fastest-growing states in the country were Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.[21] Places that not long ago seemed like impenetrable backwaters now boast startups and recreation cachet. The West is being remade to the aesthetic, economic, and political taste of its newcomers. Public lands are one of the first targets of that political will.
In a country where less than three percent of the population works in agriculture, while one hundred percent expect cheap eats, it is the responsibility of urban Americans to learn to empathize with and respect those who produce food, and to responsibly steward our land in the process—to empathize with and respect not necessarily the Bundys or the militants, but farmers and ranchers as a group. If urban America wants to tell rural citizens to put down their rifles, we also need to stop yelling “crackpot” the moment a farmer or rancher—of any color—has an opinion. We have to be able to imagine that distantly-devised management plans, weekenders’ recreation priorities, and homeland security policies can be disconnected from and intrusive in the lives of rural people, just as resource extraction schemes are.
In turn, a responsibility falls on ranchers to work more sensitively with the native groups who preceded them. The most inspiring image I saw all last year was the Cowboy-Indian Alliance marching—or rather riding—in Washington DC against the Keystone XL pipeline. Picture it: white guys in cowboy hats and tribal members in full regalia, the West’s archetypal enemies, side by side on the National Mall, in alliance to protect land and water they both value dearly. Last fall, while thousands of water protectors were camped at Standing Rock, a ranching family I know in California raised ten thousand dollars in a week to send for wall tents, warm clothes, sleeping bags, and horse tack.
Coming to agreements over contemporary land use politics requires confronting the United States’ violent history and local legacies of dispossession, resisting the impulse to ignore these histories by indigenizing early white settlers, and addressing unpleasant histories at all levels, from personal relationships to politics.
Being a lover of nature and landscape does not mean throwing humans out of the picture. Rather, it means doing one’s best to understand the needs of those who live closest to the land and how those needs affect all the rest of us. It means making that effort even when we don’t yet understand where those needs are coming from.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry, Wendell. What are People For? New York: North Point Press, 1988.
Caplan, Lincoln. “The Destruction of Defendants’ Rights.” New Yorker, June 21, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/news news-desk/the-destruction-of-defendants-rights.
Hines, J. Dwight. “Rural Gentrification as Permanent Tourism: The Creation of the ‘New’ West Archipelago as Postindustrial Cultural Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2010): 28.
Klyza, Christopher McGrory. Who Controls Public Lands? Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Kosek, Jake. Understories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
McCarthy, James. “First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the Wise Use Movement.” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 7 (2002).
McGill, Andrew. “The Massive, Empty Federal Lands of the American West.” Atlantic, January 5, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/federal-land-ownership/422637/.
Nature Conservancy. “Washington: Moses Coulee & Beezley Hills.”
https://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regionsnorthamerica/unitedstates/washington/placesweprotect/moses-coulee.xml?redirect=https-301.
Parsons, Robert, Kathryn Ruhf, G.W. Stevenson, John Baker, Michael Bell, Ethan Epley, Jess Gilbert, Chandra Hinton, and Julie Keller. Research Report and Recommendations from the FarmLASTS Project. Washington DC: US Department of Agriculture, 2010. https://www.uvm.edu/farmlasts/FarmLASTSResearchReport.pdf.
Sayre, Nathan F. Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
Sherow, Thomas. The Grasslands of the United States: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2007.
Sherwood, Courtney and Kirk Johnson. “Bundy Brothers Acquitted in Takeover of Oregon Wildlife Refuge.” New York Times, October 27, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/bundy-brothers-acquitted-in-takeover-of-oregon-wildlife-refuge.html?_r=0.
Sottile, Leah. “Jury acquits Ammon Bundy, six others for standoff at Oregon wildlife refuge.” Washington Post, October 27, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/27/jury-acquits-leaders-of-armed-takeover-of-the-oregon-wildlife-refuge-of-federal-conspiracy-charges/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.b2b6d3380fd2.
Stegner, Wallace. Quoted in Paul F. Starrs, Let the Cowboy Ride. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
“Toxicology: Sheep & the Army.” Time, April 5, 1968. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900098,00.html.
United States Census Bureau. “Utah is Nation’s Fastest-Growing State, Census Bureau Reports.” December 20, 2016. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-214.html.
Vincent, Carol Hardy, Laura A. Hanson, and Carl N. Argueta. Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (CRS Report No. R42346). Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2017. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
———. The Roots of Dependency. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Wilson, Conrad and Ryan Hass. “Harney County Sheriff: Who Wants The Bundys To Go?” Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 26, 2016. http://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/harney-county-residents-speak-out-on-occupation/.
Zaitz, Les. “Oregon ranchers’ fight with feds sparks militias’ interest.” Oregonian (Portland, OR), December 31, 2015. http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2015/12/ranchers_fight_with_feds_spark.html.
Footnotes
[1] Carol Hardy Vincent, Laura A. Hanson, and Carl N. Argueta, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (CRS Report No. R42346) (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2017), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf.
[2] Les Zaitz, “Oregon ranchers’ fight with feds sparks militias’ interest,” Oregonian (Portland, OR), December 31, 2015, http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2015/12/ranchers_fight_with_feds_spark.html.
[3] Lincoln Caplan, “The Destruction of Defendants’ Rights,” New Yorker, June 21, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-destruction-of-defendants-rights.
[4] Leah Sottile, “Jury acquits Ammon Bundy, six others for standoff at Oregon wildlife refuge,” Washington Post, October 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/27/jury-acquits-leaders-of-armed-takeover-of-the-oregon-wildlife-refuge-of-federal-conspiracy-charges/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.b2b6d3380fd2.
[5] Courtney Sherwood and Kirk Johnson, “Bundy Brothers Acquitted in Takeover of Oregon Wildlife Refuge,” New York Times, October 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/bundy-brothers-acquitted-in-takeover-of-oregon-wildlife-refuge.html?_r=0.
[6] Conrad Wilson and Ryan Hass, “ Harney County Sheriff: Who Wants The Bundys To Go?,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 26, 2016, http://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/harney-county-residents-speak-out-on-occupation/.
[7] Richard White, The Roots of Dependency (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
[8] Jake Kosek, Understories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
[9] “Toxicology: Sheep & the Army,” Time, April 5, 1968, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900098,00.html.
[10] Christopher McGrory Klyza, Who Controls Public Lands? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
[11] Nathan F. Sayre, Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).
[12] Thomas Sherow, The Grasslands of the United States: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2007).
[13] “Washington: Moses Coulee & Beezley Hills,” Nature Conservancy, https://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/washington/placesweprotect/moses-coulee.xml?redirect=https-301.
[14] Robert Parsons et al., Research Report and Recommendations from the FarmLASTS Project (Washington DC: US Department of Agriculture, 2010), https://www.uvm.edu/farmlasts/FarmLASTSResearchReport.pdf.
[15] Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
[16] James McCarthy, “First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the Wise Use Movement,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 7 (2002).
[17] J. Dwight Hines, “Rural Gentrification as Permanent Tourism: The Creation of the ‘New’ West Archipelago as Postindustrial Cultural Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2010): 28.
[18] Quoted in Paul F. Starrs, Let the Cowboy Ride (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
[19] Wendell Berry, What are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1988).
[20] Andrew McGill, “The Massive, Empty Federal Lands of the American West,” Atlantic, January 5, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/federal-land-ownership/422637/.
[21] “Utah is Nation’s Fastest-Growing State, Census Bureau Reports,” United States Census Bureau, December 20, 2016, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-214.html.