Book Report: American Zion

10. Betsy Gaines Quammen, American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West (2019) (2/21/21)

This book, which grew out of a PhD dissertation on the relationship between Mormonism and public-land feuds, is jam-packed with history, current events, policy, personal anecdotes, myths, and facts. In that regard, it's a bit of a mess, veering from one subject to another. But that said, it's all fascinating, if also at times frustrating. 

The first of three parts, "The Cowboy and the Prophet," recounts the founding of the Church of Latter-day Saints by Joseph Smith and his journey, taken up by Brigham Young after Smith's murder, from New York State to Ohio, then Missouri and Illinois, and ultimately to Utah: Deseret, or Zion. The self-contained, can-do culture of these resourceful, devout, discriminated-against people is one key component of the public-land saga.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith were contemporaries, born two years apart. . . . Both were driven to understand the divine, and they instilled their ideas within two distinct cultures that continue, even today, to clash over public lands. To Smith, land became sacred through human industry. When the Mormons reached the Great Basin, sacralizing a landscape was achieved by planting, irrigating, running cows. . . . God's blessings were manifest in the fruit-laden branches of trees growing in a carefully tended Mormon orchard, or in a trail blasted into rocks. To Emerson, by contrast, lands without the imprint of humans were divine. Holy places could be found in the jut of a mountain, the chop of a river, and the polished face of a sun-dappled stone.

Add to that the Mormon belief that the U.S. Constitution was, in fact, divinely conveyed and that they are its rightful protectors.

Part two, "American Zion," goes into the history of ranching and federal land management in southern Utah and neighboring Nevada, the area that Cliven Bundy and his clan come from. Bundy, famously, stopped paying the pittance of a fee for using public lands to graze his cattle stock in 1993, after the federal government demanded that he cease grazing (an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise) and ultimately, in 1998, canceled his lease agreement—which made his cattle operations on nearby public lands a breach of law. Things came to a head in 2014 when federal officials attempted to round up Bundy's animals—and militiamen from all over the country showed up in protest. Two years later, Bundy et al. took over the Malheur National Wildlife Sanctuary in southeastern Oregon, ostensibly in support of local ranchers. Their claim: the federal government "cannot" own land; all so-called public land should be "returned" to the people who use it—the ranchers, the miners, the loggers.

Threaded through all this are accounts of the Paiute Indians, an array of tribes and bands who peacefully occupied the region before the Mormons arrived and claimed it as their own. When Bundy invokes "tradition" and the way "things have always been done," he conveniently overlooks these natives of the land.

Part three, "We the People," brings together Bundy ("We the people" is one of his key phrases) and the right-wing libertarians—not just militias, but also elected representatives, legislators and sheriffs, who believe strongly in states' rights and "posse comitatus," or local power—and pits them against environmentalists and those who advocate a greater social good. Even BLM managers prove ineffective, either cowed by the force of arms they are met with or feeling a certain sympathy for these scrappy fighters. 

It's complicated, and what I've summarized here only scratches the surface. Quammen goes deep, letting the actors themselves tell much of the story. "The West can be explained through a series of myths," she writes, and these myths inform the on-the-ground stories she relates, 

from the myth of the cowboy to the myth of Zion. The Bundys embrace both of these as well as constitutional, prophetic, and conspiracy myths. Edward Abbey perpetuated the myth of wilderness as solitary—a land without humans. But lands are in fact filled with people and have been long before European colonization. There is also a myth that longstanding convention is better than change. This idea is embodied in such slogans as "make American great again," demanding that the practices of yesteryear continue unabated no matter the political, ecological, cultural, or economic consequences. . . . [Rural westerners believe] that government overreach and extreme environmentalism, not shifting economics, tapped-out resources, and habitat destruction, are diminishing opportunities in the West. In truth, those factors are changing opportunities, yes. But not diminishing them.

She ends by invoking Aldo Leopold, who, in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, wrote that

an ecological ethic, in the sense of one human individual's behavior among other creatures, means limiting "freedom of action in the struggle for existence." A philosophical ethic, he continued, derives from the "differentiation of social from anti-social conduct." He saw these as two definitions of one thing. "The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to society; democracy to integrate social organization to the individual." We need to live in ways that allow others to live securely. But, he added, "There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.". . . Thanks to him and others, nowadays we do recognize—some of us recognize—that lands and their inhabitants, apart from their utility to humanity, must be appreciated and safeguarded. Because even in this, we are sustained.
     The Bundys disagree. They have defied and rejected these principles—Golden Rule, land ethic, stewardship, or conservation—in their fight to possess and use American public land. They have insisted upon being anarchic atop fragile landscapes harboring vulnerable species, and they have done it in a most anti-social way. They have bullied the public and federal agents, broken laws, and brought guns to their fight. And they have browbeat those who haven't fully embraced their level of lawlessness. . . . The Bundys want no regulation on lands they believe, in spite of everything, that they reign over.

And so far, they are winning. But fortunately, they are also in the minority among western ranchers, many of whom see the writing on the wall and are shifting their efforts to more sustainable enterprises, or to collaboration with neighboring organizations. The frontier is dead, and has been for a long time. Life must always continue to adjust.