Overview

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 in the American West, the federal government owns and oversees vast patches of land, complicating the narrative of western individualism and private property rights. As a consequence, anti-federal government sentiment 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-ranging from legal action to armed confrontations-against federal land management in the American West over the last forty years. He traces the successive waves of conservative insurgency against federal land 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 regional revolts waged by westerners with material interests in federal lands to a national rebellion against the federal administrative state. Cumulatively, Skillen explains how ranchers, miners, and other traditional users of federal lands became powerful symbols of conservative America and inseparably linked to issues of property rights, gun rights, and religious expression. Not just a book about property rights battles over Western lands, This Land is My Land reveals how the evolving land-based conflicts in the West since the 1980s reshaped the conservative coalition in America-a development that ultimately helped lead to the election of President Donald J. Trump in 2016.

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9780197500729

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This Land Is My Land is a sharply written, fair-minded examination of radical, anti-government conservatism in the American West. It explains the sometimes befuddling antics of Cliven Bundy and his family. More importantly, it explains why those antics received so much attention and amplification by the institutions and media of the American right. -Jefferson Decker, Rutgers University and author of The Other Rights Revolution Dr. Skillen has thoroughly captured the complexities, politics, and passions of federal land management issues. Throughout my 36-year Forest Service career, I dealt with these issues as a field practitioner, a community leader, and finally as an agency leader in Washington, DC. I commend this book for giving important, insightful context to today's and tomorrow's federal land issues. -Joel D. Holtrop, US Forest Service, Deputy Chief, retired There has always been hostility in the American West towards the federal government and especially the agencies charged with the complexity of managing the federal public lands for all Americans. Many of us out here are familiar, perhaps too familiar, with incidents like the Bundy rebellions. Western rebellion today has bled into other nonwestern rebellions against our government, against those who are different, against the very things that mitigate against a divided nation. James Skillen has provided, in This Land is My Land, a way to navigate the complexity of what is going on at this time in America. As important, there are guideposts pointing towards thinking about how we might overcome some of that divisiveness, allowing us to work more closely together on our public lands and elsewhere. -John Freemuth, Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for Environment and Public Lands, and University Distinguished Professor, Boise State University This Land is My Land provides some much-needed clarity to understanding what happened at Bunkerville and Malheur in the mid-2010s and demonstrates why we need to pay attention. In clear and compelling prose, James Skillen takes readers on a journey from the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late-1970s and 1980s, through the War for the West in the 1990s and the Patriot Rebellion in the second decade of the twenty-first century. He deploys well-researched and expertly-sourced historical context and a clarity of thought that brings these unsettling events into focus. Historians of public lands and the American West, scholars of conservative politics and the environment, and readers who still have questions about events at Bunkerville and Malheur will find this a highly-satisfying contribution and a touchstone for future conversations. -Leisl Carr Childers, Assistant Professor, Colorado State University

Author Information

James R. Skillen is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin University. He teaches at the intersection of environmental history, law, and science, including regular field courses on federal lands in California, Nevada, and Oregon. He is author of The Nation's Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West and Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife.

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