(6 of 10)
Proud of his self-sufficiency, Carver wastes nothing. He and his wife live in a low, raw-wood house surrounded by stacks of wood, dour sheds and fragments of ancient vehicles--a crane, a road grader and balloon-fendered pickups. His father raised trout for the state, but only one of the seven trout ponds remains, mirror-still against a shoreline of mechanical debris. Carver cobbles a living from ranching, welding, serving the county and driving his three bulldozers for paying customers. On the night before a midmorning interview, he was up until 4 a.m., harvesting barley with a 1956 John Deere tractor he maintains himself. "Out here," he says, "you can't just run down to the corner to have your car repaired."
He credits another rancher with setting him on the road to rebellion. Soon after his election as county commissioner in 1988 (he got drunk one night at an Elks dance and committed himself to running), Carver paid a call on Wayne Hage, owner of the Pine Creek Ranch in Monitor Valley, a vast paradise of amber grass and cornflower blue water just over the Toquima Range from Carver's ranch. Hage had battled the Forest Service for more than a decade, charging its officials with so closely managing his access to public land that the agency eventually drove him out of business. The Forest Service counters that Hage abused his land and repeatedly broke agency rules. The dispute, now legend in Nye and embellished with wild tales of forest rangers armed with AK-47s holding Hage at gunpoint, resulted in the confiscation of 104 head of his cattle. He later filed a still pending $28 million claim against the government for driving him out of business. Hage recalls telling Carver, "If the county commissioners don't take action now, there isn't going to be an economy a few years down the road."
Until the mid-1970s, relations between ranchers and the agencies had been cordial. If a rancher wanted a grazing permit, federal approval was virtually automatic. According to federal policy at the time, the best use of federal rangelands was to graze livestock, and only ranchers could acquire permits, which were offered at bargain prices. Grazing is still a bargain. Last year the BLM and the Forest Service set their grazing fee at $1.61 per adult cow per month, a fraction of the fees charged by private landowners--less, too, says Johanna Wald of the Natural Resources Defense Council, than the monthly cost of feeding a cat. Ranchers themselves often leased their federal allotments to other ranchers for several times the original fee.
As the environmental movement began gaining political clout in the late 1970s, however, the cushy relationship between ranchers and rangers began to erode. By the late 1980s, partly because of new legislation and partly under pressure from federal courts, federal land managers began acting like environmentalists, aggressively regulating how and when ranchers could use their allotments.