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Background: The Oregon Standoff and Federal Lands Acquisition
Many here are likely following the prosecution of the Hammond family in Eastern Oregon, and the subsequent occupation of the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) by out-of-state militia members. There’s plenty of background on the legal and other proceedings available, from one side or the other. What I couldn’t find is a map to give some context to the events that have ensnared the Hammonds. So I set out to find one, and the results shed some light on the Western Federal lands issue.
Here are the current boundaries of the southern portion of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon:
The town of Burns and the NWR headquarters are off-screen to the north (see the inset on the left). So just where is the Hammond ranch? Interestingly, a query to Google Maps returns a pointer to the occupied headquarters building. However, a dig into real estate listings finds Hammond Ranch Road — where I presume the Ranch is — roughly between the Benson Pond and Krumbo Reservoir shown on the map above. Here’s a Google Earth screen snap of the area:
It’s a reasonable bet that the center-pivot irrigation areas shown are the center of the Hammond ranch operation.
The red lines? That’s the interesting part. I got that by downloading the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Approved Acquisition Dataset and converting it to Google’s KML format. That’s the land they either own already, or have their eyes on. Compare the Google Earth snap to the NWR map, and you can see that the Hammond’s operation is already largely surrounded by the refuge territory, which includes almost all the surface water in the area. The acquisition map takes in the remainder of the surface water features. Note that the Hammond family was forced to grant the Federal government a right of first refusal on any sale of their property in a previous settlement.
Other than the partisan political implications, the Hammond case is drawing attention as an example of the Federal occupation of Western lands. Harney County is a good example, with 75 percent of the land under government ownership. Over half of Oregon is still owned by the Federal government (see Table 1 of this PDF), and that is actually low for Western states. While the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has slowly disposed of its holdings, the Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and US Forest Service have increased their holdings (see Table 3 at link above). Some of that growth is apparently happening through pressure or overt coercion on landowners.
How close is this story to you? You can find out. The FWS’ 2016 land acquisition budget is here. I have posted my KML conversion of the acquisition dataset as a Google Drive download. (Warning, it’s over 100 MB.) If you have Google Earth installed, you should be able to add this as a “Places” overlay. It’s a large dataset, so Google Earth will slog a bit, but once you zero in on your location, it should be fine.
Published in General
You are correct, KP, I was just trying to keep my post brief. At any rate, neither incident hardly qualifies as arson, let alone domestic terrorism unless you are an out of control bureaucrat with an agenda.
Thx everyone for this discussion. Living in the Pacific NW this current situation is pretty big news here, but, of course, most info has been from the msm perspective only with shades of the early 1980s Ranch Rajneesh stories or Ruby Ridge in Idaho.
What I hate is the way the msm is presenting this situation. The few farmers and ranchers in the refuge with their rifles for deer, marauding wolves and bear(s?), etc., are being painted as ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs’. They are 30 miles from the nearest town, and they’ve closed the schools for the entire week! It’s the start of winter, in the middle of wild and wicked country. Yet, many people on the left have urged the Feds to shoot to kill everyone in the refuge. Where were they when Ferguson and Baltimore were burning? Rampaging gangs breaking into and looting stores, attacking people, burning cars, blocking roads—the entire gamut of gang behavior. Where was the outrage about this?
The destruction continued for months, and seems to start up again at the drop of a hat. The people in the refuge haven’t been there a week, and I read today the FBI are making preparations to storm the facilities. First, they will shut off the electricity and the water, then the phones. I see they also plan to shut down the nearby cell towers—that will certainly endear the FBI to the locals! (The press will blame it on the refuge dwellers, “if they hadn’t taken over the compound, the FBI wouldn’t have turned off the towers!”)
I just hope & pray everyone gets out of this safely, but the dialogue started about government overreach continues. This needs to be addressed, and quickly, before a spark gets started somewhere that can’t be extinguished.
“JimGoneWild
A wildlife refuge is paid for by fishing and hunting tags and licenses and by excise tax on guns, ammo and fishing equipment. So when you say FED, I tend to think in terms of sportsmen owning it.’
There can be a conflation of two similar-sounding terms. Wildlife Management Areas are supported by the sorts of fees described. Wildlife Refuges are typically no hunt, no fishing, and in some cases, no public access.
Another unfortunate conflation in the media is the “arson”, (both cases of which were started on the Hammond’s own property, and which escaped in small aspects 100 acres being a small aspect in a “prescribed burn” applied to a large area), with the armed occupation of the federal building, many miles away, instigated by people from out of state and that the Hammonds have condemned.
Starting fires to manage invasive vegetation, or to try to halt the progress of a wildfire, is a normal practice. As a conservation biologist and a certified burner, this is something I have done, many times. Occasionally, a fire gets beyond your ability to control it and you have to call in outside help to get it back into control. You typically call in the local, or state forestry people for an assist. You are responsible for any damage you cause, but I have never heard of someone being charged with arson for such a thing. (continued)
Far from arson, prescribed burning is encouraged and cooperation between landowners and foresters/government land managers is prized. The critical difference is that the Hammond’s neighbors are not the Forestry Service, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s a different animal (groan), entirely.
The USFWS jumped the shark long ago, they are merely less visible to the public than the USEPA. The USFWS has become a very politicized and activist agency. They are all-in with anthropogenic Climate Change and will brook no dissent. They partner with environmental activists to send out young biologists to canvass the Land in search of plants and animals to add to the lists of protected species, and the youngsters are encouraged to trespass when convenient. These surveys are combined with modern tools, (e.g., DNA analysis), to indefinitely subdivide plants and animals into “new” and “rare” “species”. They then use the Endangered Species Act to declare lands as Critical Habitat for protected species, to justify those lands as targets for acquisition. Bear in mind, the Act was approved back when a “species” was an assemblage that was sufficiently distinct from others that a normal citizen might be able to observe that distinction. A less obvious distinction that was considered sufficient for speciation was that if two individuals from similar groups could successfully reproduce, and their offspring were also capable of reproduction, they were the same species. No longer the case with “modern” taxonomic revisionism. (continued)
To conclude this ramble, I will agree that much of the basis for this problem lies within academic biology, itself. Biology has become activist. I was “brought up”, biologically, to have respectful relationships with land owners and stake-holders. One thing I have learned in 3 decades of field biology is that often, some of the most interesting things I have observed have been on land that has been held in private ownership for generations. Young biologists now leave our universities inculcated with a belief in the private landowner as an enemy. That is not a useful subject for discussion on Ricochet.
More useful for discussion is the absolute mess that has grown out of Big Environmental Regulation by various agencies of the federal government. These federal entities have taken decades-old acts of congress and sharpened them into wedges of power that are being directed at our rural and blue-collar communities. There is no pretty way to rein these entities in, as any attempt to curb them at the federal level will be met by screams and howls from the media and the urban centers where the votes are. Politically, the solution may lie in the 10th Amendment and the taking away of jurisdictions by groups of states with common resources and sympathetic populations. I will devote some time to fleshing out just one of these areas and showing what is being done to resolve the situation, at a regional level. A future Member Post in the making.
Another image indicating Federal land ownership:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg
As for the wisdom of confronting the Feds at Malheur – here are two articles which forcefully say no, both written by people who dislike the BLM and believe injustice was done to the Hammonds.
Oregon Standoff A Terrible Plan That We Might Be Stuck With – by Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers
The Hammond Family Does NOT Want an Armed Stand Off, and Nobody Has a Right to Force One On Them – Brandon Smith of Alt-Markets.com