"This account of the armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, explores the full context of the 2016 public land occupation, including the response of local and federal officials and the grassroots community reactions and resistence"--
Among American conservatives, the right to own property free from the meddling hand of the state is one of the most sacred rights of all. But the in the American West, the federal government owns and oversees vast patches of land, complicating the narrative of western individualism and privateproperty rights. Hence anti-federal government sentiment, often in the name of private property rights, has animated conservative politics in the West for decades upon decades.In This Land Is My Land, James R. Skillen tells the story of conservative rebellion against federal land management in the America West over the last forty years, which has ranged from legal action to armed confrontations. He traces the most recent waves of conservative rebellion against federalland authority - the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982), the War for the West (1991-2000), and the Patriot Rebellion (2009-2016) - and shows how they evolved from a regional rebellion waged by westerners with material interests in federal lands to a national rebellion against the federal administrativestate. Cumulatively, Skillen's account explains how the civil religion and constitutional nationalism in which ranchers, miners, and other traditional federal land users became powerful symbols of conservative American and how federal land issues became inseparably linked to property rights, gunrights, and religious express.Not just a book about property rights battles over western lands, This Land is My Land reveals how evolving rebellions in the west provide insight for understanding the conservative coalition that elected President Donald J. Trump in 2016.
- Offers the first true textbook on the field of collaborative governance, presenting a solid grounding in relevant theory while also focusing on case studies, process design, and practical tools. - Draws on case studies not only from natural resource and environmental conflict resolution, but also those involving collaborative, community-based project implementation and cases that focus on human services and social equity. - Provides tools for students and practitioners of collaborative governance—as well as public administrators and other possible participants in collaborative governance processes—to discern when collaborative governance is appropriate in politically complex, real-world settings - Offers a roadmap for students, practitioners, and process participants to help them design—and effectively participate in—productive, efficient, and fair collaborative governance processes - Explores constitutional democracy and the ways in which collaborative governance can be used as a tool in building a more just, fair, and functional society.
Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
"A deep, fascinating dive into a uniquely American brand of religious zealotry that poses a grave threat to our national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and other public lands. It also happens to be a delight to read." —JON KRAKAUER American Zion is the story of the Bundy family, famous for their armed conflicts in the West. With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage. BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN is a historian and conservationist. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focusing on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. After college in Colorado, caretaking for a bed and breakfast in Mosier, Oregon, and serving breakfasts at a cafe in Kanab, Utah, Betsy has settled in Bozeman, Montana, where she now lives with her husband, writer David Quammen, three huge dogs, an overweight cat, and a pretty big python named Boots.
Throughout American history, “public lands” have been the subject of controversy, from homesteaders settling the American west to ranchers who use the open range to promote free enterprise, to wilderness activists who see these lands as wild places. This book shows how these controversies intersect with critical issues of American history.
"In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont provides context for those events by examining the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism--a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored. Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that local people's sense of commons environmentalism required access to the forests that they viewed as semipublic places for hunting, fishing, and working. Policies that removed large tracts from use were perceived as 'enclosure' and resisted. Incorporating deep archival work and years of interviews and conversations with Appalachian residents, Blue Ridge Commons reveals a tradition of people building robust forest protection movements on their own terms."--p. [4] of cover.
This beautifully illustrated book includes simple rhymes that teaches children that we are all more similar than different from one another; that everyone is someone.
This volume engages with the alarming convergence of far right thinking and the ecological crisis in contemporary society. Growing out of the first international conference on political ecologies of the far right, the volume gathers crucial insights from authorities in the field as well as promising early career researchers. With cases ranging from ethnographical accounts of fossil fuel populist protest, historical analysis of the evangelical support for fossil fuels to interrogations of the settler colonial identities and material conditions defended by far right actors around the world, the book provides scholars, students and activists with ways to understand and counter these developments.