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Show 20 three other states followed, enacting similar legislation to proclaim state control of federal land. The rebellion that ensued was a protest againsl the growing number of environmental regulations and the perception that the federal government was restricting land use in tcnns of grazing, mining, and other uses in favor of preservation. The rebels saw 1he land policies of the 1960s and 1970s as a "concerted effort to exclude development activity from the public \ands.',49 Ranchers, farmers, miners, other public-land users, and Western political leaders continually banled with the federal government during these decades. At one point a group of protesters in Southern Utah, led by local government officials, bulldozed a road into a BLM wilderness study area, in violation of federal law. These protests were evidence of the belief in the West that environmental concerns had taken priority over economic development and the livelihoods of those who ranched, mined, or fanned. The protes1s were also against federal regulation in favor of local control. In fact, political scientist R. McGreggor Cawley argued that the political climate of the 1970s - the feeling of bureaucrats taking away local control and states' rights in the West - gave salience to the arguments of the Sagebrush Rebellion, allowing a wider following than only ranchers and mincrs. 50 While the ideological debate of the Sagebrush Rebellion never reached a conclusion, Cawley argued that the uprising transfonned the political dialogue around land use. He asserted that the current political push for "wise use" on public lands "is an 41 lbid., 42. $!) Ibid., 12-14. |
