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The new rebelliousness has created a breeding ground for violence, especially in the austere rural settlements that bracket the Continental Divide. Pipe bombs have been found in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. An unknown assailant fired shots at a Forest Service biologist in California. Federal agents recently arrested a man after he tried to buy explosives that he allegedly planned to use in blowing up an irs office in Austin, Texas. And in Carson City, Nevada, last August, a bomb destroyed the family van of a forest ranger while it was parked in his driveway. The explosion was the second this year in which ranger Guy Pence, who once supervised Forest Service lands in Nye County, was the apparent target. Now no one can park in the visitors' spaces next to the agency's office in Sparks. Soon after the bombing, Senator Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat whose support is centered in Las Vegas and Reno, decried the spreading ethos of defiance: "It is as if a sickness has swept our country." Whatever the diagnosis may be, nowhere are the symptoms more profound than in Nye.
Some of Dick Carver's critics have tried to link him to militias and white supremacists, but it is a mistake to dismiss him as a just another extremist crackpot. The forces powering the Nye County rebellion are those resculpting the political and social landscape of America at large. They just happened to have converged with their greatest intensity in the West, where private and public interests clash directly and daily, typically over such visceral issues as land and water. The angry rebels range from ranchers fed up with bureaucrats' telling them when and where to graze their cattle to developers denied crucial water rights. "We're talking about things that go right down to the heart," says Nebraska Governor Ben Nelson, a Democrat and chairman of the Western Governors' Association. Although a moderate, he confesses that he too gets fed up with federally mandated burdens like those imposed by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, which requires even struggling communities to spend heavily to upgrade their water systems. "When you're a Governor," he says, "and you see what this does to your communities, you really do want to strike your desk and say, 'No more!'"
THE NEW MOVEMENT IS NO MERE rekindling of the '70s' Sagebrush Rebellion, although it does share the same goal of increasing local control over federal lands. Carver, who carries his Constitution in his shirt pocket even while baling hay, is a product of the same antifederalist ferment that produced such widely divergent events as the Oklahoma City bombing and Ross Perot's recent proposal to launch a new political party. Nye's particular brand of rebellion is driven too by an intense feeling that the combined forces of federal law, environmental activism and urban growth may have doomed a mythic frontier life-style. Says Karl Hess Jr., a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank: "What they really want is to build walls against the future."