The West as "Dependent" of the Federal Government

Question for Discussion: What were the major
factors that caused the West to become a
"dependent" of the Federal Government since
the 1940s?

Reading: Athearn, "Colonialism: An Enduring Dependency"; Wilkinson, "The Lords of Yesterday";
Williams, "Biting the Hand that Feeds"

Video: Forest Service: Chapter 6--Recreational Use

The Lords of Yesterday

U.S. MapMaker: Select Various Maps
to study (Great Source of Maps)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
U.S. Dept. of Interior Facts on Use
of Public Lands and Resources in
the West (in-class)
Athearn, Colonialism: An Enduring Dilemma
(in-class)
Wilkinson, The Five Lords of Yesterday
(in-class)
Wilkinson's Goals for the Future
of the West (in-class)
Wilkinson, The Lords of Yesterday (in-class)
Williams, Biting the Hand that Feeds (in-class)
Western Resource Industries supported
by the Federal Government (in-class)
Map of the American West today
State Map of the 20th Century American West
Population per Square Mile in the West
The West from Space at Night

Western Resource Extraction Industries supported by the Federal Government

Mining in the West
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West
The General Mining Act of 1872 (in-class)
Who Owns the West: Mining in the West
Mining on Federal Lands
The General Mining Act has left
a legacy of Riches and Ruin (in-class)
Public Lands, Toxic Treasure:
Worst Mine Clean-ups (in-class)
A Century of Mining in the West has
left the West deeply Scarred (in-class)
Areas with Abandoned Mines in the West (in-class)

The Forest Service and Logging
The National Forest Service
Map of the National Forest (in-class)
Recreational Use of the National Forests
1925-1990 (in-class)
Visitors to National Forests and the
Money they Spend (in-class)
National Forest Visitor Use Study (2003)
Timber Sales on Public Land (in-class)
Logging our Legacies: the National Forests
(in-class)
Myths and Facts about Public Land Logging

The BLM and Public Lands Grazing
U.S. Bureau of Land Management
The Extent of Public Lands Grazing (in-class)
Grazing Permits on Public Land (in-class)
Public Lands Grazing Statistics
Taxpayers lose over $120 million a year on
Public Lands Grazing (in-class)

The Bureau of Reclamation and Damming in the West
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Dams in the West (in-class)
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Data Web (in-class)
Irrigation in the American West
Irrigation and Water Use

The Federal Government and
Water Use in the West
An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain:
New Water Projects in the West (in-class)
Managing Water in the West (in-class)
10 Water Laws in the West (in-class)
Dams in the West (in-class)
Water and Population in the American West
(in-class)

National Parks and Wilderness Areas
U.S. Department of Interior Quick Facts:
(See Recreational and Cultural Opportunities
for Annual Visits to National Parks (in-class)
Federal Recreation, Camping, and Tour
Information
Wilderness Areas in the United States (in-class)
The National Park Service
Wilderness Management in the U.S. (in-class)
Wilderness Fast Facts (in-class)

CNN: Election Results Map 2008
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
U.S. MapMaker: Select Various Maps
to study (Great Source of Maps)
Mission of the Department of Interior (in-class)
U.S. Dept. of Interior Facts on Use
of Public Lands and Resources in
the West (in-class)
U.S. Department of Interior Quick Facts (in-class)
Athearn, Colonialism: An Enduring Dilemma
(in-class)
Wilkinson, The Five Lords of Yesterday
(in-class)
Wilkinson's Goals for the Future
of the West (in-class)
Wilkinson, Exploitng the West with the
Lords of Yesterday (in-class)
Williams, Biting the Hand that Feeds (in-class)
The Federal Government and Water Use
in the West (in-class)
National Parks and Wilderness Areas in the West
(in-class)
The Forest Service and Logging in the West
(in-class)
Mining in the West (in-class)
The BLM and Public Lands Grazing (in-class)
The Bureau of Reclamation and the
Damming of the West (in-class)

Wilkinson,The Lords of Yesterday

The Lords of Yesterday and their
dominance of the Modern West (summary)

"These natural resources are governed by what I have come to think of as the "lords of yesterday, which are laws, policies, and ideas, not people....[They] are the controlling legal rules, usually coupled with extravagant subsidies, simply do not square with the economic trends, scientific knowledge, and social values in the modern West....These outmoded ideas pervade land and resource decision making in the West."
.....Charles Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian

Five Lords of Yesterday

1. 1872 Hardrock Mining Law--which allows mining on the public land at no expense and even allows mining companies to buy land at $5.00 an acre if they have begun successful mining operations. Miners pay no
royalties on their operations, unlike coal, oil, and gas
companies who pay 10 to 12 percent royalties on the
profits they make from drilling for oil and gas.

2. The BLM allows grazing on over 170 million acres of public land at fees set at a fraction of their market value.

3.The Forest Service still encourages private logging in the public forests, building logging roads and making logging the primary use of the National Forests. The Forest Service pays more for the roads and logging efforts than they get back in logging fees.

4. The Bureau of Reclamation encourages and supports the massive use of water for agriculture in the West, which has led to massive dam building and irrigation efforts that are paid for by the general public to the benefit of agricultural interests.

5. Prior appropriation doctrine which allows senior water users to capture and exploit water rights at the expense of junior water users. These water rights -- first in time, first in right -- cannot be taken away unless the government pays full compensation.

.....Charles Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian (1993)

Athearn, Colonialism: An Enduring Dilemma

"Those who lived in the depression-ridden East already had expressed concern about supporting poor relatives out West, and now, at a time when belt tightening at home was called for, they were to have even greater complaints when New Dealers began to hand out money with a lavish hand to these sufferers of the sagebrush. Once again, said those from older sections of America, the country cousins were getting a larger proportionate slice of the federal pie."

"Westerners did not object to generous helpings at the family table. Not yet. For the moment they were perfectly happy to see the New Deal bail them out. When criticized as deadbeats, they pointed out that they could hardly support themselves entirely, because much of their land was owned by the government and therefore was beyond their power to tax. Here was a refrain to be heard for generations to come. By the 1930s the government had given away or sold about all the land it ever would. A lot of the West was left under federal control, and it remains so today."

"Now, in the thirties, government offices, often manned by outside political appointees, were doling out the largess. Local politicians, who did not have that kind of money, could not compete for votes on even terms, so they began to complain about remote control and to moan over the enslavement of a once-free people."

"By the end of World War II the western states were openly denouncing the degree to which federal control had fastened itself upon their part of the land. Early in 1945, governors and other western representatives, meeting at Reno, Nevada , spoke out against this encroachment by the central government and formally demanded the return of their "rights and functions lost to the federal government during the war." It was a public admission that the West simply had moved from one form of colonialism to another."

"The political side of that conservatism emphasized increasingly the cry that it was not the business masters who posed the greatest threat from outside; rather, the bureaucratic overlords from the nation's capital were manipulating the sovereign's western satrapies. Part of this attitude derived from frontier days, when men were supposed to have moved west to get more breathing room and to find freedom from restraint. Settlers who came out, took up free land, demanded protection against the Indians, and complained when the rural-free-delivery (RFD) carrier couldn't make it through the mud always reserved the right to be "agin the guvmint. " It helped to preserve the fiction of their independence."

"What really generated the commotion over the use of western lands was the increased amount of economic activity in the postwar West, a transition that perhaps suggested the noisy birth pangs of the very independence that the area presumably was seeking. By the 1960s that growth was enough to excite westerners with its promise, while at the same time it alarmed a nationwide group of environmentalists, who began to push for wilderness areas. Lyndon B. Johnson 's signature on the Wilderness Act of 3 September 1964 signified the extent of that group 's strength, and it brought new cries from some westerners that the Old West was about to be turned into a preserve for bird watchers."

"During the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, when Americans were feeling a political irritation and a social nervousness, the complexities and contradictions in western attitudes toward the outside only deepened. For most of the region these were good years that promised to become even better. In such times, a leading news magazine noted, colonials were becoming leery of taking money from Washington on the ground that it merely would lead to tightened control over resources they wanted developed. The swelling conservation movement tended to stiffen the resolve of those who were trying to reduce the role of government regulation."

"As one critic pointed out, the region argued that it could not live with the federal government, yet it gave every indication that it could not live without it. Its businessmen always endorsed cuts in federal spending while assuring the congressional delegation that their particular neighborhood had nothing it could sacrifice to the budgetary ax. "

"Therefore, those who regarded the central government 's ownership and control of vast western regions as being a barrier to future development, not to mention a blot on the much-cherished notion of private enterprise, continued the arguments of yesteryear that the land was to be used, not hoarded. An opposing view held that a great body of westerners owed their living, not to mention their spiritual and physical well-being, to the fact that their government not only stood between them and the "developers" but also contributed to the West in a very positive way."

"As De Voto had suggested, the pervasiveness of the New Deal across that thinly populated and yet undeveloped West later may have led to cries of a new servitude, but in truth, this penetration of the West rescued much of that region from the further ravages of economic colonialism by reversing the wasteful exploitation of resources with a program of rehabilitation, repair, and rebuilding. It offered alternative sources of credit, inexpensive electricity, which had never before been available to rural residents, badly needed water from expanded reclamation developments, and an impressive re-forestation program by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It not only made life better for thousands of individual westerners...."

"Then, when businessmen of both regions again began to court one another after the war, the programs and controls of the government seemed to threaten both the image of opportunity and another sacred element of the mystique-independence."

"Westerners have taken advantage of eastern investment and, above all, government aid; but in the manner of ungrateful children, they have tried to bite the hand that fed them. True to their history, they have ignored the benefits and lashed out at their benefactors. As adolescents in the national family, they wanted the freedom to roam, but they still have turned up at mealtime and have always been around when the allowances were handed out. To them, Big Daddy in Washington remained the tight-fisted tyrant who unaccountably expected some kind of responsibility from the offspring."

Wilkinson, Exploiting the West
with the Lords of Yesterday

"The relationship between modern civilization and western lands is laced with crosscuts and ironies. This politically conservative region with deep strains of localism is mostly owned by the federal government; federal lands comprise 50 percent of the eleven western states (the Pacific Coast east to the Montana-Wyoming-Colorado-New Mexico tier of states) and 90 percent of Alaska."

"These are not just my, or any single group's, ideas but rather are broadly stated precepts--a mix of national policies, local prerogatives, market economics, social concerns, and environmental protection--held by most people concerned with the American West. The shared set of values encompasses these ideas:

See Wilkinson's Goals for the Future of the West

1. Sustainable development should be employed so that resources will be available in sufficient quantity and quality for future generations.

2. Roughly equal respect should be given to the traditional extractive uses and to the more recently conceived non-consumptive uses.
Wildlife, recreation, and wilderness are "resources"-- they, too, are a supply of something valuable.

3. Resource development should be conducted in a relatively level, consistent way in order to promote and preserve healthy, stable, and lasting communities.

4. Federal and state governments usually ought to receive a fair return when their resources are developed.

5. Government subsidies should be given to private industry only sparingly and under compelling, well-documented circumstances.

Stated even more broadly, a consensus exists that western resources generally ought to be developed but that development ought to be balanced and prudent, with precautions taken to ensure sustainability, to protect health, to recognize environmental values, to fulfill community values, and to provide a fair return to the public. "

Exploiting the West for Profit

"These principles have broad acceptance, but development in the West does not proceed in accordance with them. Rather, west-wide, natural resource policy is dominated by the lords of yesterday, a battery of nineteenth-century laws, policies, and ideas that arose under wholly different social and economic conditions but that remain in effect due to inertia, powerful lobbying forces, and lack of public awareness."

"The first lord of yesterday is the Hardrock Mining Law of 1872., which dedicates more than half of all public lands to mining as the preferred use. Individual miners--or, much more often, mining corporations--can enter federal lands and extract hardrock minerals (gold, silver, copper, uranium, and many others) entirely free of charge. Further, this extraordinary law allows successful mining operations to obtain title to the land overlying the deposit; miners can receive as many 20-acre parcels as they wish, providing only that they discover valuable minerals under each. The hardrock statute, born of the California gold rush, is the vehicle for an array of health and environmental hazards, fraudulent practices, and land use problems arising from the some 1.1 million hardrock mining claims that blanket the western public lands."

"The second and third lords involve the public rangelands and forest-lands. In the nineteenth century, the federal government began the practice of allowing free and unregulated grazing of cows and sheep on the public domain. There is now a modicum of control on the 170 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands where private grazing is allowed, but grazing fees are set at a fraction of their market value, and poor grazing practices have devastated western rangeland and the rivers that receive millions of tons of eroded soil annually. In the national forests, the Forest Service continues to push into remote, roadless areas such as the Jersey-Jack, still following its turn-of-the-century policy of treating logging as the dominant use of the forests...."

"The final two lords of yesterday relate to water, which figures so prominently in the West. The Jersey-Jack area and Pyramid Lake, in other words, are typical of most western resource conflicts today because they implicate water in substantial ways. The fourth lord involves the dams and other development practices of the Pacific Northwest that have crippled the runs of Pacific salmon and steelhead. During the mid-nineteenth century, we set the stage for our policy toward salmon simply by doing nothing. Unrestricted netting and trapping, even dynamiting, were allowed. Unregulated dams on tributaries of the Columbia River--usually constructed in the name of "cheap" hydropower--destroyed spawning beds and choked off migration routes. "

"The final lord of yesterday also deals with western water. The prior appropriation doctrine first announced by the California Supreme Court in 1 855, along with associated water policies, is perhaps the area in which the law of the American West is most out of kilter. Like the Hardrock Mining Act, the essential notion behind prior appropriation is an exercise in simplicity: water developers have been allowed to tap into any western stream without charge and extract as much water as desired, so long as the water is put to a beneficial use--that is, a domestic purpose or a commercial use such as mining, farming, ranching, manufacturing, or power production. Diverters of water under this system obtain vested property rights that cannot be taken away unless the government pays full compensation. The oldest water rights are absolutely superior to those of all junior users; senior users need not share the resource, as was the law under the riparian doctrine accepted in the eastern states."

"The crucial ingredient in Webb's formulation was the laissez-faire policy of both the federal and state governments. The West held an array of natural goods that could support settlement of the region, boost the national economy, and assist mightily in establishing the young nation's place in the international trade community. The chosen means to achieve those ends was for the federal and state governments to open the gates, step back, and allow American ingenuity to take over.... Government not only allowed nearly unfettered private resource development. It also subsidized it. The opening of the American West for settlement by non-Indians during the nineteenth century is often painted as a time of heightened individualism and self-reliance, and there is no question that those human qualities mattered a great deal during that intense time. Nevertheless, settlement was promoted and supported by perhaps the most extensive program of subsidies ever adopted by any government."

"The lack of symmetry between nineteenth-century methods and modern values is compounded by a related problem, the capture by large interests of the laws and policies that comprise the lords of yesterday. It was not intended to be this way. Congress envisaged the westward expansion as a movement for the little man," for individual initiative. The Jeffersonian ideal of the small family farm was repeatedly invoked during the nineteenth century as the cornerstone of the westward movement."

"Big interests seized on the land and resource laws in a variety of ways, recounted in more detail throughout this book, and water developers, railroads and their landholding companies, timber companies, corporate ranches, agribusiness, and multinational mining companies took control of the economy of the West. Because of these forces, many of the main players in the western economy are located in urban centers, sometimes outside of the region, and have no concern for or accountability to the rural areas where the resource development occurs. As a result, the West has been imprinted with a lurching, up-and-down economy that cuts against the building of stable, lasting communities and often causes towns to stagnate after the trees, metals, or oil deposits drop in value or are mined out."

"Reform has been stalled by several factors, some obvious, some much less so. Of course, to a considerable degree proposed changes are beaten back simply by the political and financial muscle wielded by the interests that have so much to gain by perpetuating the lords of yesterday. Yet we fundamentally misperceive the nature of the problem if we look only to the extractive industries. A larger, and more subtle, force is also at work.

The western economy has settled into the comfort of a unique kind of welfare system subsidized both by direct federal and state action and by the habit of writing off the extraordinary costs imposed on the environment and on dispossessed western communities such as Dixie and the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation. "

"But there is a trickle-down effect, and the subsidies permeate broad segments of the West's populace, often whole communities. Most westerners receive cheap water and electricity. Wages from the mills, mines, farms, and ranches -- and from construction projects for dams and roads -- end up in the markets, restaurants, gas stations, and clothing stores, and in the local school and park budgets, too. Banks pin their investment strategies on the long-settled system; many of their loans depend on it. Land developers and realtors push for one-time profits from the growth spurts stimulated by building another dam, excavating a new open-pit gold mine, or pushing up the timber cut another notch."

"The elaborate structure, however, cannot remain in place much longer. Government treasuries are at the breaking point. The costs to the Lands and waters are coming due: growing numbers of rivers, aquifers, forests, rangelands, and farms are in decline. It is increasingly evident that the traditional reliance on the extractive industries cuts against the promising, emerging western economy based on recreation and tourism; scaled-back resource development; and, critically, light industries that are drawn by the region's lands, waters, space, and pace of life--and that are now able, through modern communications, to overcome the distance that once made location in the West impractical. Still, final change cannot come until westerners fully perceive the nature and magnitude of the current problems, look beyond their perceived short -term interests, and determine to alter the settled ways."

"As matters now stand, most of those judgments were made long ago by a distant society and are embedded in state and federal laws. The laws, now with a momentum of their own, drive development. But the essential workings of the lords of yesterday are surprisingly uncomplicated. "

"Now, of course, in spite of the obstacles of distance and aridity, we have settled the West. The task of this third era is to move beyond settlement and to achieve resource sustainability, economic stability, and social justice in a great land. To do so, we must cross a new meridian, this time not a geographic marker but a line of intellectual, social, and government commitment. This crossing involves gaining an understanding of the origins and content of old laws and policies and then juxtaposing them with the needs of modern society. That will allow us to sort out those that work and those that do not. We can then move beyond the lords of yesterday toward fundamental but measured and equitable reform. It is that exploration to which the remainder of this book is dedicated."

Williams, Biting the Hand that Feeds

The truth is the West needs a strong federal government, perhaps more than any other region in the country.

Oh, I know, that sounds almost un-American in a country that, at least for now, harbors a popular fetish to harangue anything federal. The current antifederal mongering, particularly by the Far Right, is not only wrongheaded, it is dangerous. And it threatens to upset the balance--what Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O ' Connor refers to as "the elegant balance"--between our state and federal governments.

State governments in the West cannot satisfy the basic safety, health care, transportation, or even education requirements of their own people. Failing that, they can hardly find the vitality to be the vaunted "laboratories of change" we have heard so much about.

"We also hear a lot about "devolution "--the effort to further empower state governments with authority now reserved mostly for the federal government. The idea has some basis and reason for support, but as we move toward devolution, let's be clearheaded about the intent of our founders as well as the inherent weakness of states acting alone. States and state's rightists have too often ignored the civil rights of their own citizens and, even more so, the rights of their citizens to live in relatively clean and safe environments."

No people anywhere have benefited more from that federalism than have we westerners. As we consider this new movement toward more jurisdiction and authority to the states, we should do so with caution, wisdom, and a good memory.
........Pat Williams

Managing Water in the West

During the settlement of the western United States, the federal government encouraged development in part by ensuring that the new landowners had access to as much water as they needed. This gave rise to the doctrine of prior appropriation. Wilkinson (1994) notes that prior appropriation was part of a “distinctive body of policy and law . . . based on an extraordinary combination of two ideas: that public resources should be made available for private gain free or at far below market value; and that the government, in addition to these initial subsidies, should further fuel the development by affirmatively building water projects and other public works to support the opening of the West. It was in all likelihood the greatest program of subsidies ever undertaken by any nation and it surely accomplished its intended purpose, to open the West to settlement by non-Indians.”

Zilberman (1994) views early water policy as similar to homesteading, when the “government's objective was to allocate the resource in a way that would accelerate its use”. The doctrine of prior appropriation:

distributes water based on seniority—a “first-come, first-served” system. Water users with seniority are entitled to use as much water as they want. In fact, Zilberman points out, the system offers no incentive to conserve: “The penalty for not using the water has discouraged conservation and led to large-scale use of traditional (inefficient) technologies in spite of the availability of water conservation technologies.”

allows only certain extractive, “beneficial” uses, such as irrigation. Considerations that favor keeping water in rivers and streams, such as fish, wildlife, aesthetics, and Indian claims, are excluded.

gives water away for free. Users' only costs come from transporting the water.

governs distribution of about 60% of agricultural surface water in California.

But now values are changing, giving more importance to preserving wildlife habitat, aesthetics, recreation, and water quality—all of which create pressure to leave water in rivers instead of using it. As urban populations grow, using water for irrigation is gradually becoming a lower priority. Wilkinson observes, “A new western economy is emerging—based on recreation, scaled-back extractive industries, and light industries that want to settle in this wondrous place—and this new economic mix is far outstripping the old.” The mid-1980s marked the beginning of a new level of public concern for the environment, as people became aware of the possibility of global warming, ozone depletion, the plight of the spotted owl, and plummeting salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. New ideas such as sustainability and ecosystem management started to become part of our approach to resource management.