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This new federal activism coincided with growing interest in desert lands from hikers, hunters and recreational-vehicle buffs, especially those who had fled expensive and overbuilt locales like San Francisco and Los Angeles in favor of Las Vegas and Reno, turning both into boomtowns. "The public wants access," says Cato's Hess. "They want to see wild country that looks wild; they want to see wildlife--and a lot of it; they want to see clear water, not muddy; and they don't want to see cow turds everywhere."
These days any effort by the BLM to reassign a grazing permit is likely to draw comment from hunting groups, environmentalists and off-road drivers, when 10 years ago only ranchers would have bothered, says Bob Neary, who until his retirement from the BLM last month was acting area manager of 6 million acres in Nye and neighboring Esmeralda County. In August a new set of federal rules took effect, known as Rangeland Reform '94 (named for the year the regulations were first published). Heavily promoted by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the package gives environmentalists and other nonranchers far more say in decisions about grazing allotments. It galvanized opposition to the Clinton Administration and turned Babbitt into a king-size political liability. "It got all the sleeping dogs awake," says the BLM's Angle. Babbitt, through a spokesperson, declined comment, citing the pending litigation.
Ranchers take particular offense at the fact that now the BLM and the Forest Service are offering other animals a seat in the great rangeland diner. The Forest Service has cut back the number of cattle allowed on some allotments in order to support new herds of elk introduced onto the range. And for the first time the BLM has reserved land for wild horses, the kind Carver's father once captured and killed and ground into feed for his trout.
On a day-to-day basis, federal land managers wield immense power over the lives and fortunes of all ranchers who depend on public land. Contrary to popular perception nurtured by such TV series as Bonanza and Dallas, many ranches in the West and Southwest are small, barely solvent operations whose owners, like Carver, often make ends meet by moonlighting at some other occupation. Their fiscal equilibrium is easily upset by orders from federal land managers to reduce the number of cattle on their allotments or to shift them to other lands. "Some of those operations are so marginal," says Neary, "if they have to leave the range or go somewhere else, they'll be out of business."
It is the bureaucratic ease with which such make-or-break decisions get made that most rankles the citizens of Nye. "I've told the Forest Service and the BLM, 'Don't be coming to me to render assistance if you take people's property without due process,'" says Sheriff Wade Lieseke Jr., who has run the county's 117-person force since 1990. "A forest ranger can take your cattle just by signing a piece of paper? A forest ranger? Give me a break."