The Ideological Roots of the Oregon Standoff

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IT is tempting to dismiss the antigovernment gunmen who took control of an animal refuge in Oregon on Jan. 2 as fanatics working at the fringes of American politics. But if the methods used by the rancher Ammon Bundy to seize the federal property were radical, the ideological roots of the operation were somewhat more mainstream.

By storming the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and vowing to return it — by force of arms, if necessary — to the people of Harney County, Mr. Bundy and his men were echoing the teachings, if not the tactics, of the Wise Use movement: a conservative land-use doctrine that has been a part of the national discourse for nearly 30 years.

A successor to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s (itself a successor to the anti-national parks Boomers project of the early 1900s), Wise Use answers the question of who should own the West by granting moral primacy to natural resource companies and to logging and ranching families like the Bundys, some of which have worked the land since the pioneer expansion.

Though composed of many activists and scores of organizations, Wise Use found its voice in the late 1980s when a timber industry adviser named Ron Arnold published “The Wise Use Agenda.” The manifesto offered an expansive plan to gut environmental regulation, increase private ownership of public land and compel the federal government to open its holdings to mining, oil and logging companies and to the unrestricted use of off-road vehicles.

Mr. Arnold adopted the phrase “wise use” from Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the United States Forest Service (who said that “conservation is the wise use of resources”). In 1988 he held a conference, bringing together the likes of Exxon and the National Cattlemen’s Association, with the goal of seeding the West with grass-roots groups that could wrest control of federal land and give a local flavor to his Reaganite aims.

“Arnold sent organizers into distressed rural communities to set up front groups with environmentally friendly sounding names that whipped up hostility against the government,” said Tarso Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, a research group that studies right-wing movements. What resulted, Mr. Ramos said, was a “coalition of natural-resource companies, property developers and conservative activists working with a network of community organizations.”

This coalition achieved success in pushing its agenda. By the early 1990s, politicians friendly to the Wise Use cause had introduced or passed legislation in nearly 30 states giving local governments and citizens expanded powers to lay claim to federal land. Among those politicians was Representative Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an Idaho Republican, who became notorious for mocking the Endangered Species Act by holding what she called “endangered salmon bakes.” There was also Gale A. Norton, the interior secretary under President George W. Bush, who once worked as a lawyer for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has billed itself as “the litigation arm of Wise Use.”

“The Wise Use crowd got very close to the centers of power,” Mr. Ramos said.

It also got close to the militia movement, experts say. In 1994, the National Federal Lands Conference, a Wise Use group that maintained that county governments should control federal land, published an article in its newsletter that bore the title “Why There Is a Need for the Militia in America.” Around the same time, Wise Use rallies often featured pamphlets from groups like the Militia of Montana, said David Helvarg, the author of the “War Against the Greens.” Nor was it a coincidence, said James McCarthy, a professor of geography at Clark University, that militia members in camouflage fatigues conducted armed exercises in the very federal forests in New Mexico that the Wise Use movement was trying at the time to pry away from Washington’s control.

“There were many people who were active simultaneously in the Wise Use and militia movements and who saw them as different manifestations of the same larger cause,” Mr. McCarthy said. “However, it is also true that many Wise Use activists were uncomfortable with the militia coming into their fold.”

In an email titled, “Wise Use and property rights activists v. Wackos,” Mr. Arnold denied that his movement was connected to men like Ammon Bundy, who stood down the government two years ago in a similar engagement over cattle-grazing rights at his father’s ranch in Nevada. “I don’t see any Wise Use-ish ‘doctrine’ in anything that’s been called ‘patriot militia,’” Mr. Arnold wrote.

And yet the question stands as to why vigilantes with AR-15 rifles have repeatedly confronted the government on behalf of local landowners in the West — a classic Wise Use principle, if not a Wise Use tactic. This spring, gunmen from the Oath Keepers militia group helped the owners of an Oregon gold mine chase away federal agents who were trying to enforce a stop-work order. A few months later, another Oath Keeper tactical team stopped the government from shutting down a mine in a national forest in Montana.

Part of the answer is that, in a region where the ground itself is largely owned by agencies in Washington, the Wise Use and militia movements share “the same seething resentment at federal overreach,” said Jeffrey St. Clair, a journalist who has written about environmental politics in the West for 30 years. If the Wise Use movement did not condone or support militias, it created an intellectual framework for militia operations and has, on occasion, lent the groups ideological ballast. “In some way,” Mr. St. Clair said, “the patriot movement is glomming onto the Wise Use movement as something that has a political presence and a real-world power” that the patriot movement “has never had.”

After the Bush years, the Wise Use movement lost much of its vibrancy, and even Mr. Arnold acknowledged that it is little known today. But the relationship between activists in suits and angry men with guns continues. Last year, Michele Fiore, a Republican assemblywoman in Nevada, introduced a bill to prohibit the federal government from owning or managing land in Nevada without the state’s consent. Ms. Fiore, as it happens, is also a strong supporter of the Bundys. A month after her bill was introduced, she debated Chris Hayes on MSNBC, live from the standoff at the Bundy family ranch.

To Mr. Ramos, the researcher, ties like these can be awkward at best.

“The Bundys and other militia groups are rife with Wise Use rhetoric about federal land,” he said. “It’s a situation where business-oriented people see utility in rising militancy — until it spins out of control and creates huge liabilities for them.”