Island Press Field Notes

Did you catch Lucy Moore's blog post about the Bundy brothers last week? Since the late 1980s, Lucy has worked as a mediator, facilitator, trainer and consultant, specializing in natural resource and public policy disputes.

I was late for an appointment, sitting in traffic on one of the major arteries out of Washington DC. It was miserable, barely moving traffic of the kind that makes you whimper with frustration as yet another green light turns yellow, then red, as you inch along

While you might imagine that artificial Christmas trees may be traced back only as far as the glory days of plastic in the 1950s, people actually began making fake holiday trees in the mid-nineteenth century. The practice began in Germany, where extensive deforestation compelled folks to make “trees” out of goose feathers that were dyed green.

So, the Bundys are at it again. Two years ago Cliven Bundy and his gang took up arms against the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada claiming the feds had no right to charge a private citizen grazing fees on public lands. “Public” apparently means “help yourself” in their dictionary. I don’t know if Cliven considers that stand-off a success, but he got a ton of publicity, and my understanding is that his cattle are still grazing – or trespassing, depending on your point of view – on federal land. The conflict lives on in court, where it has been for a couple of decades.