[Brad from Tennessee]

If solar power plants are going to be built each plant requires environmental mitigation—an area of equal acreage sharing similar biodiversity as the proposed plant site, acquired by the power plant developers and dedicated as public land. In wetter regions when a developer wants to fill a swamp he must buy another swamp or create another swamp and deed it to the state or federal government. This is called wetlands mitigation where I live.

[Valpal1]

Part of it is nimby-ism, but part of it is simple geography. Look at a map and see that the Gold Butte area is between the fingers of Lake Mead and already greatly surrounded by locked up park land and wilderness area, so development for other usage would already be highly problematic in complying with ESA and other regulations.

But it’s perfect to designate as offsite mitigation for development elsewhere. And they’ll probably designate it as an offset over and over again, every time they need to mitigate development someplace else. Just pay your mitigation fees to the BLM and get your official certificate of indulgence.

What brought this to a head was Enviral NGOs like the Center for Biological Diversity threatening to sue the BLM to remove the cows.

These outfits like the CBD and the Sierra Club have wanted the ranchers off the range since the 70’s. It’s not a coincidence that this dispute started in the 90’s under a Democratic Administration and blew up again under the next Democratic Administration.

It has all the usual suspects in power politics; cronyism, nepotism, corruption, regulatory capture by environmental NGOs, etc.

This triangulation of corrupt influences has sparked more than one Sagebrush Rebellion. It doesn’t happen in the eastern half of the US because the FedGov holds almost no public lands “in trust for the American people” like it does out west.

When over half your state area is controlled by the FedGov, you see a lot of this corruption and bullying of the locals because it’s so much harder to fight back against the US government than it is to pack a county commission hearing or a city council meeting.

It’s much easier to hold local government to account than it is the FedGov and their sprawling agencies. If this land was state controlled, the local officials would tell the out of state envirals to GFY and there would be no made up conflict between the cows and tortoises.

[Dick Bachert]

The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) -- nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands are used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and Indian reservations, or are leased to the private sector for commercial exploitation (e.g. forestry, mining, agriculture). They are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The above map details the percentage of state territory owned by the federal government.