Ammon Bundy is a great example of how mistakes long ago can come back to haunt in the present.
It was a long time ago, back when Ammon was just another goat roper in his dad's melon patch.
There was a different administration in charge, and appointments to Interior, Fish and Wildlife, BLM, were something to be doled out to interest groups who helped to elect that officeholder more interested in interns than sagebrush. It was back when millions of dollars of PR funds were misappreciated (fancy word for stolen) for Euro junkets, big bonuses handed out by the director to buddies, funding for anti trapping groups, and an interest in working together with advocacy groups like the CBD, Defenders of Wildlife, and whoever else had a staff attorney and enough boosters to show up at a meeting.
In this case there was an unusual alliance of interests, big developers who wanted condos and shopping malls in the desert outside vegas, and environmentalists who wanted to rid eastern Nevada of rancher and secure it for any critter they could make endangered. Developers have political clout, and lots of money for lobbyists, developers measure money in billions.
Babbitt was sec of Interior. Meetings were held, some public, and some behind closed doors, it was the way of the world back then, no open meetings laws. You know how it is, you take a little you gotta give a little.
Developers got some huge chunks of land that included plenty of desert tortoise habitat. Environmentalists got a brand spanking new tortoise research facility, employment for anyone loosely associated with tortoises at said facility where they were going to re home displaced tortoises, which if you'll allow me I will now call turtles, and best of all the BLM allotments, which run to god knows how many acres per cow in that dry habitat, would now be off limits to cattle. No grazing allotments, no ranches, jobs for everyone, and the only one's screwed were ranchers who were barely clinging on anyway.
Most everyone moved on. Such is the way of the federal government and forces beyond your control. Win some lose some. Buck up and get a job or better yet sell the original homestead to developers and cut it up into ranchettes for Californians on retirement.
Old man Bundy being one of the biggest ranchers and having good water hung on and invented cockamamie reasons not to obey the thing about not grazing cattle.
Meanwhile down the road a decade and a half the housing bubble burst burst in Vegas, the funding for the Turtle sanctuary evaporated, and it closed along with all of the turtles that everyone had delivered after keeping them as pets in terrariums for years and giving them viruses from other souvenirs. And we're left with an anti government evangelical.
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