Wyoming legalizes Industrial Hemp. . . well not really but sort of.

 One of the zillions of hair products the female residents of the house bring in here.  The manufacturer states the product is "enriched with 100% pure natural hemp seed oil".  I personally think they're missing a sure bet by not adopting the vernacular of the young in which the word "dope" has replaced "cool", as then they could say "Hempz. . . it's dope!"  Others do not find this suggestion to be amusing, however.

This post was originally going to be posted several Fridays ago.  Fridays are the days I try to post farming topics, if I have any (and more often than not, I don't), but I had one there already at the time I was gong to post it. So, in part, I decided not to post this one as it makes no sense to have two on the same day, and this blog has been getting way too many posts recently anyhow.  So I delayed. So long, in fact, that "4/20", the big dope celebration, actually came and reminded me that I needed to finish the post.

But maybe its actually more of a law post?

Additionally, however, something I thought might happen did, and given that I didn't want two cannabis related posts back to back. This isn't the Marijuana Pros and Cons Blog.  I posted an historical item about the criminalization of marijuana in Colorado in 1917 and, while I hesitated to do so, I put in a bit of an editorial at the end.  I figured if a person starts self censoring their own blog, they probably ought not to post the item at all, or maybe just ought not to post at all.

Indeed, while I have (clearly) an opinion on the legalization of marijuana, my opinion is probably a lot more subtle than most people who have an opinion on this topic may be, which is in fact often the case about many of these social/legal issues (although not all of them). As I tend to approach topics like this from (often) a different angle than other folks, my opinion is often derived in a different manner, and this is one such example.  When I posted the centennial of Colorado having first criminalized cannabis I knew that I'd get negative feedback, particularly as I posted it to the Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit.  Indeed, what surprises me is not that I got negative feedback, but that by and large it was so polite and that there was so little of it.  That really surprised me.

Indeed, on the Subreddit, the "reddit Karma" awarded for the post was way high, and that really surprised me.

So, as this post also has some editorializing on it, and came to have more, I pulled it as I don't want this topic overemphasized.

So, starting back up, one of the bills that passed the last legislature legalized, sort of, the growing of industrial hemp in Wyoming.

 Hemp rope factor in the Philippines.  Prior to World War Two the Philippines supplied most of the hemp rope used in the United States.

I say sort of as a state can't really legalize it.  It's a controlled substance, illegal to freely grow since 1970, so in actuality the Federal government must authorize it by application.  But, under a Federal law that allows for that to be done, under certain defined circumstances, it can be done, providing that the state allows for it, which Wyoming now does.  There's more than a little irony to this because, as we learned yesterday in the post about Colorado criminalizing cannabis in 1917, cannabis is still generally illegal in the United States in all its forms, even though individual states are taking their individual laws off the books.  A legal requirement that a permit be obtained for industrial hemp tells you about all you'd need to know on that as if the type you plant to make rope is illegal.  What's the case is that the Federal government simply isn't enforcing the law in regard to marijuana since some point during the last Presidential administration. That doesn't mean that this current one won't start enforcing it again.  People who would dismiss that by saying "oh, you can't go back" probably ought to look at the history of go backs in this general area and on the current Administrations willingness to do things that only late people said "oh, he can't. . . "  And both the history of marijuana, alcohol and tobacco certainly demonstrates that public feelings and the law can swing back and forth considerably.

Absinthe anyone?

Anyhow, ironically, industrial hemp growers are required to do what marijuana growers don't do, get permission of the Federal government first.  That irony, of course, is supported by the fact that you can get permission to grow industrial hemp, but you can't get it to grow recreational marijuana.

This bill was backed by some agricultural entities and individuals and (perhaps not too surprisingly for a topic involving cannabis) it has an element of delusion to it.  The backers tend to argue that its going to spur along agriculture.  It can't hurt agriculture, but I doubt it'll result in a real boom fora variety of reasons.  Maybe it'll help some individual planters who are willing to jump through the hoops to grow it.  Chances are that as it gets rolling other states are much more likely to become centers of hemp growing than we are, but it can't hurt some areas economically either.  All in all, anyway a person looks at it, it's not going to become a truly big US agricultural product as long as its basically illegal to grow.

Hemp for Victory, a World War Two era film from when the United States Department of Agriculture encouraged hemp planting after the Japanese occupied the Philippines.

Be that as it may, its undeniable that industrial hemp in general seems to be experiencing a comeback.  Heck, cannabis in general is, obviously.  Hemp's real use is for rope fiber, although I understand that there are other uses for it.  Apparently its one of the zillions of things, along with milk and what not, that's good for your hair.  But, shoot, if I was in the grocery store tomorrow and saw bottled rabbit as a hair care product that wouldn't surprise me.

 Future hair care label?  Hmm. . . . 

But I digress.

It's interesting to view the debate on industrial hemp as, like the debate on marijuana, there are those who hold real conspiratorial views on the topic, as in the "big X is keeping it from being grown because they make product Y.  With marijuana its "Big Pharma is keeping it from being grown as they don't want competition. . . "  Heck, I have no doubt if it were legal at the Federal level Big Tobacco would move in on it if Big Pharma didn't. They're not keeping it illegal.  And whatever the similar argument is for hemp its not part of some giant conspiracy.

 Why am I skeptical that "big" anything can't step right in, wherever big money is?  Because IBM didn't step in to make computers. . . . oh wait. . . .

What it might just be is over caution or error.  It became controlled when marijuana was and for the same reasons. There was not a big plot.  Indeed, the US wasn't the only nation to take the same path on it.  They're all part of the same plant family and they all contain the same substances.  It's just that, apparently, the intoxicating substance in industrial hemp is there at a very low level.

Governor Mead allowed this law to pass into effect without his signature, one of two laws that he did that with this past legislative session. As a former US Attorney he may not have wanted to be associated with a bill that is associated, necessarily, by marijuana.  I can't blame him.  While I think this bill is harmless I don't think marijuana is harmless at all.  Now, last time I said something like that I drew the "citations" complaint, and there's some merit to that.  It's easy to state something, but if you don't follow it up that's just an unsupported opinion.  Of course, I did actually give my reasons based on personal observation, and that is support, but I'll go into more depth here.  I also know that other people have other views, and I sure welcome them to state their views (politely, which everyone has so far) in the comments if they choose (on the comments, as I "approve" the comments to keep out the spam I get every day, there's a delay in your comment appearing, sometimes for hours and hours as I don't check this site constantly).

I know that backers of legalizing marijuana in Wyoming are rejoicing a little due to this bill, and I can understand that.  The US does seem to be riding the crest of a wave of state repeals on this topic (which doesn't do anything about the Federal provisions, mind you) but a lot of the debate on this is poorly thought out.  The arguments all suffer from a lack of data or erroneous data.  We've dealt with the "its all a conspiracy" argument already, but the "it's harmless" or "less harmful than tobacco" or "less harmful than alcohol" arguments are poor arguments.  That's sort of like saying that a percussion grenade is less harmful than a fragmentation grenade.

Chinese soldier during World War Two armed with a German concussion grenade (wearing a German stahlhelm and carrying a German Standard Model Mauser).  Hey, it's not a fragmentation grenade, so its safe, right?

World War Two era fragmentation grenade, only those will kill you, right?

The truth of the matter is that all of those arguments, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, are easily disposed of.  Having said that, a lot of this debate strongly recalls the debate on cigarette smoking for those old enough to recall it.  Now, everyone knows that tobacco use causes cancer and a host of other problems, but if your memory stretches back to the 1970s you can recall when there were those who adamantly denied that.  As marijuana is riding a crest of acceptance, most people like me aren't really going to be listened to really.

Let's start with the topic of health anyhow.

Marijuana has been shown to have brain altering effects on its users.  Brain altering.  And anyone who has been around heavy or habitual marijuana users can certainly testify that they're not always all right, no matter what they might think.  Chronic users over time develop characteristics that, for generations, have gotten them labeled as "pot heads" for a reason.  Say what you want about tobacco, but whatever it does, it doesn't do that.  We'll address alcohol in terms of comparisons in a moment.

The tweedy image pipe smokers sort of have of themselves.  One of the things associated with pipe smoking, which has a lower lung cancer rate than cigarettes, is that pipe smokers tend to have higher than normal rates of lip cancer.

Sticking with tobacco for a moment, we don't know if its long term effects are as bad as tobacco's in other ways, but there's no reason to believe that the respiratory ailments associated with tobacco are any less likely to be associated with marijuana.  Humans aren't evolved to take smoke into the lungs or heat on the lips. They aren't.  There's no reason to believe that marijuana would somehow be uniquely benign in these regards, as these things are associated simply with smoke and heat, not the substances contained in the smoke.

We just don't really know the answer about cancer, but then we didn't really know about that until over a decade after cigarette smoking replaced cigar and pipe smoking during World War One, by which time it had become so ingrained in society that convincing people of that, including physicians, took decades.  So far there's suggestions that it may be associated with lung cancer but there are suggestions it isn't either.  We can't say that it is and it might not be.  Of course, by the time we really know if it is, it'll be a bit late for those folks, if that occurs.

Yes, that's the brand name. . .from 1912. . . and the truth as well.  And yes, this advertisement is exceedingly creepy.  A person has to wonder if anyone was inspired to buy this brand of cigarettes by this advertisement.

Which takes us into the situation of comparative substances which is so common in this debate.  We've touched on the health impacts of marijuana and inevitably brought up the comparison to tobacco, as that's a common comparison, usually in the form of "its not as bad as".  That might be true in terms of health or not.  It sort of balances out whether you think a brain altering substance is better than one that causes cancer.

Hmmmm.

They're both addictive, no matter what proponents of marijuana might state. This usually gets into the "its not as additive as" argument, but I don't see a real reason to go there.  Neither of them are as additive as meth, for example, which doesn't mean they're free of risks.

Some will claim that marijuana is not as addictive as alcohol. That seems extremely unlikely for reasons of evolutionary biology, but before we go there, let's take on the topic of comparison with alcohol and start there.

Alcohol has a lot of health problems associated with it.  They're so well known and accepted today that there's hardly any point in repeating them, but like tobacco or marijuana, the full extent of the problems haven't always been fully acknowledged.  Having said that, they're so apparent that they've never really been denied either.  All of which makes the claim, such as that made by Sir Richard Bransom, the other day, that in ten or so years marijuana will be as common as wine, well, disturbing.

Health problems associated with alcohol are a major medical problem in our society.  No doubt about it.

And behavioral problems associated with alcohol are as well.   All kinds of acts of violence, as well as accidents, have alcohol in them as major factors.

I don't really get the comparison proponents of marijuana make with alcohol.  Alcohol is legal, yes, but it's far from problem free.

There's no good evidence that marijuana won't be just as problematic as alcohol if widely legal, and there's already been problems with accidents and the like down in Colorado.  But that's largely besides the point and fails to demonstrate the opposite point.  That suggests not so much that marijuana should be legal as alcohol illegal.

Gasp!  Did I just say something about Prohibition. . . but we all know. . .

What?  What do we think we know about prohibition?

 

Temperance poster, 1846.

Well, we know that we already tried that.  That's what we know.

The argument on Prohibition always is that it was a failure, but in terms of public health it really wasn't.  It was a success. What was a failure was getting people to accept the illegality of a substance that's been consumed by human beings so long (including myself, I'd note) that it appears that we are evolved to be adapted to some degree to alcohol and its consumption is massively ingrained in most human societies (but not all).

Human adaptation to alcohol doesn't appear to have developed due to recreational use, but rather because the water could kill you.  Distilled beverages are a much more recent item, and for most of our history as a species drinking a lot of low alcohol beer would probably have gotten you kicked out of the village as a dangerous glutton, much like eating all the bread.  Other people are going to need that stuff.  But, for most of early human history, alcohol was probably something like flat (carbonation free) Guinness Stout.  It's stout alright, as in heavy.  It isn't stout because of its alcohol content, however.  It's about as "light" as light beer.  Bread in a bottle, basically.

Which does not mean, by any means, that it can't damage your health or that there are not piles of social problems of all kinds associated with it.  Indeed, both are true in massive degrees.  The one thing that's different about alcohol compared to marijuana is that the origin of its consumption, and the extremely long human interaction with it, means that most people do not consume it expressly to become intoxicated.  Tobacco, it should be noted, isn't consumed in order to become intoxicated either, but it's different in that it has no health benefits at all.

Now, I haven't mentioned health benefits of anything, but I should, as somebody will.  All the health benefits of these substances are somewhat exaggerated, in my view, but they are there, except for tobacco.  We'll start with alcohol.

 

Alcohol, in moderation, has been discovered to have some health benefits, aside from the original one that the process used to derive a drinkable beverage generally meant that you ended up with something less likely to kill you, at least immediately, than the local water.  These generally are:

• It reduces your risk of developing and dying from heart disease, and that's a good thing.
• It might (we don't really know yet) reduce your risk of ischemic stroke.
• It might reduce your risk of developing certain types of dementia, apparently (or increase it, if you consume in excess).
• It might reduce your risk of diabetes

All of these, it should be noted, apply only if you drink in moderation.

Let's emphasize that again.  Only in moderation.

Moderation. Get it?

 

Not a moderate drinker.  No health benefits here.

The key on this is that all of these benefits rapidly diminish if you drink to excess. And what is moderate is not really quite known.  The Mayo Clinic defines it as follows:

Moderate alcohol use for healthy adults means up to one drink a day for women of all ages and men older than age 65, and up to two drinks a day for men age 65 and younger.

They define a drink as follows:

• Beer: 12 fluid ounces (355 milliliters)
• Wine: 5 fluid ounces (148 milliliters)
• Distilled spirits (80 proof): 1.5 fluid ounces (44 milliliters)

Quite a few people who think they are moderate drinkers actually aren't. If, for example, you're drinking two bottles of Super Duper Heavy Duty Maximum Alcohol IPA, for example, you're exceeding this amount.  Or, if you fill two magnum sized glasses of wine to the brim every day. . . not moderate.

I suppose we could put in here the Chesterton Rule:

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

By the way, it's probably just me, but I'm always surprised by the inclusion of "distilled spirits" in this list, for a reason I'll note below, but probably as I just don't like most of them.  But I'll slip in here Belloc's Rule:

I made up this rule for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he should never drink what has been made and sold since the Reformation—I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead—if he could get it—liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin.

This he promised to do, and all went well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes.

Anyhow, there are real health benefits to alcohol, but there are really large detriments as well.  It doesn't surprise me, I should note, that there are benefits, due to the very long human association with the substances, even though those have not overcome the detriments.  Evolutionary biology at work, I suspect.

And, before I move on, I'd note that both Chesterton and Belloc have some real worlds of wisdom in their approach to drinking.  I've known a couple of people who would have drinks of hard alcohol every day to "take the edge off".  In other words, they were numbing themselves down due to high stress occupations. That will reoccur below, but if you need to "take the edge off" every day, you need to dull the edge that's cutting you some other way.  And if you have a psychological dependency of alcohol, as opposed to a physical one, that's not good either.  A good thing to give up for Lent.

Let's turn to tobacco.  Health benefits?  Get real.

There actually, oddly enough, are some, but they are so outweighed by the negatives that claiming any health benefits from tobacco is an exercise in stupidity, quite frankly.  Having noted that, tobacco consumption is associated with a decreased risk of Parkinson's Disease, Ulcerative colitis and a few other things.  And it "calms the nerves", which is a frequent thing cited to by people who smoke, including people who give it up and take it back up yo-yo fashion.  But the risk associated with it greatly outweigh any benefits.  People who compare marijuana to tobacco ought to keep that in mind.

On smoking, one thing I would note is that the delivery system of cigarettes has really boosted lung cancer. Any smoking, any, is dangerous but cigarettes, which first became truly common during World War One, are the worst.  Cigar smokers and pipe smokers have lower incidents of lung cancer, which doesn't mean they don't have cancer.  And of course those who chew tobacco has scary incidents of oral cancer.

Well, then, what about the oft cited health "benefits" of marijuana. Do they outweigh, for example, messing up your brain morphology?

Man, they'd have to be pretty massive benefits in order to do that, but what is claimed?

Well here they are:

• It can be used to treat glaucoma.  Keep in mind that tobacco can help prevent Parkinson's, however, and unless you actually have glaucoma, it does nothing.  I.e, it doesn't prevent it.
• At least according to one study (so this is a might) it might reverse the carcinogenic impact of tobacco use.  Might.  It does seem to prevent some forms of cancer from spreading.
• It can help control epileptic seizures.
• It decreases the severe symptoms of Downs Syndrome.  This one actually doesn't surprise me.
• It decreases anxiety, which is a self evident "benefit" and often the most cited.
• THC, the chemical in marijuana that produces its effects, slows the progress of Alzheimers, maybe.  Or maybe not.
• It eases pain. Again, a self evident one here.
• It lessens the impacts of some sorts of treatments for other diseases, as in some forms of cancer treatments and treatment for Hepitis C.
• It might have the impact of helping people who have brain related ailments or injuries. Alzheimer's is addressed above but it might also help with strokes, to prevent their reoccurance, and concussions.

So there pretty clearly are some benefits.

Do they outweigh the risks?

Well, that's where you get into "medical marijuana".  Medical marijuana may in fact be a real thing, but it only is if you have one of the conditions mentioned above.

Indeed, while marijuana may be useful in the circumstances mentioned above (and some of those are just "mays", most of those are things you "have".  Lots of drugs are useful if you have something, but are destructive if you don't.  Prescription drug abuse, I'd note, is a huge problem in the US even though all the drugs that are so abused have legitimate uses.  I'd also note that alcohol, while we rarely think of it that way, has its own medicinal uses although in modern times that's mostly limited by being used to "suspend" some other drug in a solution.  Even tobacco was once thought to have medicinal uses, although I'll forgo listing them given as Americans have a terrible anti-scientific streak that causes them to tend to take up poorly supported folk medicines and I don't want to inspire that in any fashion.

But I'll concede there are some.

One of the features, I'd note, of quite a few of these is that THC messes with your brain chemistry and morphology.  While that may be a good thing for some of these things, it's also the essence of the drug and what makes it popular really. And its what makes it so dangerous.  And its what makes it distinctly different from alcohol and tobacco. They have an impact on you in regards to your thinking, but you don't consume them to become intoxicated.  Marijuana is consumed, by recreational users, which is most of them, for that reason alone.

And that's massively different.

You can sit in a bar and drink a couple of beers and not be intoxicated. If they are low alcohol beers, now called "session beers",  like the British used to in particular favor, there won't be much of an impact at all as they are so low alcohol.  Beers like Guinness Stout (yes, I know its Irish, not English) are so low alcohol that they're in the light beer category that way, basically.  And alcohol can be consumed safely with dinner and meals, as it always has been.  That doesn't mean it can't be abused, but it is different.

And tobacco, no matter how bad it is for you, and it is, generally never is consumed to the intoxication level and if it is, you'll end up in the hospital.

Marijuana, however, and this is the reason I think most thinking people who oppose it oppose it, is consumed for the very purpose of intoxication and pretty much solely for that purpose. That makes it, I suppose,  like hard alcohol for people "on a drunk". No matter what they may say about it; (I'm taking the edge off . . . I'm just needing to relax), getting high is the only point.

That provides the moral objection to it.  It also probably provides the moral objection of past eras to alcohol, but the cited one is so confused that rarely come through.

To define the moral objection to it, those who take a serious and thoughtful moral view opposed to marijuana and other drugs state that it's morally wrong to take a substance whose only goal and primary effect it to deprive you of your ability to make rational conscious decisions.   That is, if it impairs your thinking, it's wrong.

Marijuana backers would note right away that this bring up the topic of alcohol, and it indeed does.  Here, however, the difference is that alcohol can impair your thinking.  Marijuana does impair your thinking.

Some might argue that's engaging in sophistry, but it isn't. The fact of the matter is that there are millions of people who drink alcohol every day and whom are not getting drunk and do not want to get drunk.  Indeed there a large number of people in the world who have beer or wine every day at a level where they never get drunk and do not want to get drunk.  And to finish that thought, while hard alcohols such as whiskeys really do fit into a different category, because their distillation is aimed at boosting the alcohol in the drink, there are those who have a drink every day in that category but limit it to an amount that will not impair them.  Indeed, I once knew a man who had been a teetotaler who took up having a mixed drink every day, just one, because he was convinced of hte health benefits of it.

Early 20th Century advertisement for Wiedemann's beer.  Weidemann's is a brewer that's still in existence in Newport Kentucky. Their ad pitched to a ugy who just wanted a can of beer, and that appears to be about it.  Hmmm. . . heavy mustache. . . cowboy hat. . can of beer. . . greying stubble, is that me?

Indeed the point here is that most consumption of alcohol lis not aimed at getting drunk in most places.  In some "drinking cultures" there's been real horror in recent years as campaigns to reduce the old style pub drinking of low alcohol beer has seemingly y8ielded to the law of unintended consequences and produced American college style binge drinking.  I.e., countries like the United Kingdom would have been better off if they'd just left things as they were, as guys and gals sitting down to a pint of stout didn't amount ot much, where as the development of younger people sitting down to higher alcohol content (usually German) beer does, in all sorts of ways.

The Ale House Door, circa 1790.  Not exactly the same as the dispensaries in Denver in terms of image.  Probably not universally accurate even in 1790, however.

None of this means, of course, that a person can't get drunk from alcohol and that fact creates enormous public problems and boatloads of private ones.  And that's what inspired the temperance movement of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Here's where this debate tends to go off the rails, unfortunately.

A lot of this I've already addressed in a blog post entitled  Puritans, Medicos, and thirsty folks. Concepts of drinking and health.

 

Anti Saloon League convention, 1913.

As should be evident from the numerous newspapers I put up over the past year support for prohibition was widespread, but it didn't just pop up overnight.  It was not as if the nation suddenly turned against alcohol in 1919 and banned it. Far from it.

In fact the movement had been long building, and had been around at least since the middle of the 19th Century.  At least in the United States much of its origin was in reaction to alcohol being largely unregulated at that time.  Put simply, massive over drinking was a huge societal problem as were all the attendant social and medical problems that caused. This is what built support for the movement and what made it successful in the long run.

Not too surprisingly, however, it acquired in some quarter, but only in some, a religious aspect to it.  Now, alcohol is certainly not prohibited by the Christian faith traditionally by any means.  Indeed, the drinking of wine is frequently mentioned in the Bible and even though some later Protestant denominations have tried to maintain otherwise, wine was clearly present at The Last Supper (indeed, if it was the Passover meal, which is not certain, it had to be present).

The fact that the association with religion and temperance came about, however, was unfortunate as it continues to cloud the topic today.  Many Americans, rather than having a view of temperance backers of the era that reminds them of today's "Truth" ads going after the smoking industry are instead reminded of something like the scene that appears early in The Wild Bunch in which the temperance marchers are marching to Shall We Gather At The River.  Its an inaccurate view as it was hardly the case that Prohibition was brought about by a minority of the Protestant community and foisted on an unwilling nation.

It's also unfortunate as that helped fuel the very early ethnic divide over Prohibition that would go on to be a big problem.

Prohibition came on in its final push as Progressivim met World War One.  And the Progressive movement, although not remembered that way today, was highly nationalistic.  A person need only look at the speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, and the legislation of Woodrow Wilson, to see that.  Already highly nationalistic, when the war came it turned that nationalism on suspect immigrant and ghetto classes, most of which were Catholic and oddly enough some of which had a sort of drinking culture.

Two of those classes were Germans and the Irish. The Irish managed to whether the storm really well, but the impact of anti German feeling, which was considerable higher than the post 1916 suspicion about the Irish, permanently diluted the German culture in the United States to the point that its a former shadow of itself.  At any rate, those two cultures had a strong association with beer, as did some Eastern European cultures, and the Italians, who had come into the country in considerable numbers before World War One had a strong association with wine.

This fact, combined with a strong southern support for Prohibition, and the infusion of a minority Protestant view on the consumption of alcohol itself, inserted itself into the debate on Prohibition and in particular on its repeal.  This manifested itself in strange ways, with the Klu Klux Klan, for example, being strongly in favor of Prohibition, viewing alcohol as a vice of a Catholic population it didn't like.

KKK cartoon emphasizing its support for Prohibition.

This has carried on to the current debate on marijuana with some seeing it in the same terms that the cartoonized debate on Prohibition is inaccurately remembered to be.

It might further be worth noting, in the end, that Prohibition was actually a public health success. The very things that brought it about were in fact partially addressed.  While alcohol problems in society remain, to be sure, they were greatly reduced by Prohibition.  When alcohol came back in, it came back in with a great deal more regulation and control than it originally had as well.

The real lesson on Prohibition is that while people recognized the validity of the health and social arguments it raised they never really accepted that a substance that had been consumed since vast antiquity was really as bad as all that.  This gave rise to a thriving illegal market and in the end that illegal activity was seen as so severe that it was regarded as worse than the problems associated with alcohol.  But the important thing there is that alcohol had been consumed, to some degree, by the majority of adults in the Western world for thousands of years and was part of some cultures in a social fashion.  It will take something like 100,000 years or more to take us to the same point with marijuana, so the entire alcohol example really doesn't provide any sort of logical argument in favor of marijuana.

At any rate, all of these substances, it should be noted, in addition to their health benefits, if any, and their detriments, which are very real, are addictive.  And its generally not a good thing to be addicted to anything, really.

Lots of stuff, of course, can be physically or psychologically addictive.

All of which takes us to a curious question. What are all these intoxicants for?

Really, some are saying, eyes rolling.

Yes, seriously.

Before legalizing an additional intoxicant it might be a good idea to ask why we feel the need to numb ourselves so much.  Going back in history you can find some examples of why whole societies took this approach, often accidentally.  Medieval Italian poor consumed poppy seed bread as their lives were so bad and their food situation was so poor that being semi stoned a lot of the time was a life aid to them.  Central American highlanders consume coca leaves as their high altitude lives would make it nearly intolerable to simply exist if they were semi medicated.  Russians have historically drank vast quantities of vodka simply because their daily lives have been fairly horrific.

So do we have something like that going on here?  If not, why are we encouraging yet another intoxicant?

And none of which really pertain to the industrial hemp, for which there's really no bad reason for it to be legal and for which there was probably no really good reason for it to be illegal.

Oh well.  The trend is what it is. And now farmers can apply to comply with the regulations to grow hemp in the state, if they so choose.  And if there's a plus side to this, and perhaps hemp rope and other hemp stuff is useful over its competitors, it might be that hemp bailing twine, used widely in Australia, can be consumed by cattle, rather than the orange synthetic stuff used here.

$45,000,000

That's how much the legislature cut from education funding.

How are the schools going to deal with that? 

I don't know, but it's odd to think that the schools that have been undergoing reconstruction and new construction here haven't even had that process finished yet.  Now we're cutting, and deeply.

Budget chicken?

From the Star Tribune, regarding proposed cuts by the Legislature in education funding.  Supposedly this is just a strategy move on the part of the sponsors to force something in terms of cuts they are angling for and won't actually occur:

Official: Cut could result in‘bloodbath’ 

Natrona County may see sizeable reduction

SETH KLAMANN 
307-266-0544,
seth.klamann@trib.com
A Senate budget provision that would cut $91 million from schools in Wyoming could result in a “bloodbath” of layoffs in Natrona County, the school board chairman said Tuesday.

Irrespective of whether the move is strategic or not, this seems like a dangerous game to be playing.  Granted, the State hasn't found a way to carry the freight for education now that the coal train is derailed, but if this passes (and I don't think it will, and I don't think the Governor would allow it to carry through and we'd be right on to a special session), its hard to credit the concept that we're going to do something to diversify our economy if we're going to slash education for those who will soon be in that economy.

The Wyoming Tribune for February 14, 1917. US Cavalry back across the border.

Some regard this day as the last day of the Punitive Expedition.

Perhaps that's because US cavalry again crossed the border on this day, seeking to find three American cowboys who were taken by force into Mexico.  So, American forces were back in Mexico on this day, or maybe it was just being reported on, on this day.

In other news, American ships were going down, the German Ambassador was leaving, somebody had insulted the Legislature and authorities had had enough of bears dancing in saloons in Lincoln County . . . or maybe that was another kind of dancing they'd had enough of. . .

And, having just gotten out of Mexico we were now thinking of getting into Cuba.

The Wyoming Legislature. Remembering to wait awhile.

Unlike Congress, the small size of Wyoming's legislature means that a lot of bills get introduced.

I was going to comment on several that were floating around, but they died or were withdrawn before I could do that.

Which brings this up.

This year there's been a lot of angst over certain bills, some of which is fully justified. The proposed amendment to the state Constitution, for example, was one to definitely worry about.

But most of the odder or controversial bills in the state legislature go nowhere.  People get up in arms about them, but they expire.

The wind tax, for example, went nowhere.  A bill to attempt to address potential discrimination against government employees who find it unconscionable to participate in some fashion, in their official roles, in homosexual unions, was withdrawn by its sponsor.  That one received such attention that you'd have thought it authorized burning at the stake, or something, but it didn't, and the fact that its a difficult topic and the law is difficult to draft was acknowledged by the author in its withdrawal.  One pending right now that would require people to use only the bathroom of the gender reflected on their birth certificate is likely not going to go anywhere, even though its still pending.

This serves, I guess, as a reminder that a person really needs to take a wait and see, sometimes, view towards the legislature.

Not always, of course.

But unlike Congress, which has a highly decentralized and anti democratic method of drafting, folding and mutilating legislation, a lot more stuff gets down on the floor of the legislature before it evaporates. 

And actually, Congress would function better if it functioned more that way.  At least it would let you know what your representation was really doing, and it'd mean there were more consequences for them for what they were doing at that.

Senator Bebout reads the tea leaves

Yesterday, after the Inauguration, Senator Bebout announced that he was killing the proposed public lands transfer constitutional amendment by refusing to assign it for consideration. That's his option as President of the Senate.

He acknowledged, in doing that, the full force of public opinion, although he maintained that the whole effort was misunderstood.

To the extent it is misunderstood, and that wouldn't be misunderstood much, it would apparently be by our Senators and Congresswoman back in Washington D.C., who still appear to be clueless on this.  Faced with a public revolt, Bebout took the wise and politic route and sidetracked it before the legislature and individual legislators had to pay a price for refusing to listen to the public.  Located more remotely, we haven't seen any similar reactions out of D. C. yet.  But that may be coming . . . if people like holding their seats.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Today Mostly Fact – Not Much Fiction

From Wyoming Fact and Fiction, a difficult question:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Today Mostly Fact – Not Much Fiction: The news dominating Wyoming right now   -  The Legislature is in session, I hope to visit in the next couple of weeks and sit in on some ...

T. K. Whitaker as a model for Wyoming?

Irish politician T. K. Whitaker died this past week.

He would note be well known, or indeed known at all, to Wyoming's politicians. But maybe he ought to be.  He was a conservative politician whose economic reforms revolutionized the Irish economy.  As one of the columnists for the Irish Times related the other day:

In Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard, a conservative 19th-century Italian aristocrat is shocked to find his beloved nephew is running away to join the revolutionaries. But the nephew famously explains: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

TK Whitaker was the greatest of Ireland’s conservative revolutionaries. He wanted things to stay as they were and, in a culture ravaged by mass emigration, people to stay where they were. He grasped the great paradox of his time: that Ireland could not be stabilised without radical change. He did not imagine just how deep the transformation would be. But he had the intellectual authority, the political skill and the quiet charisma to force a sclerotic state to alter the way it thought about itself.

Whitaker sponsored reforms that revolutionized the Irish economy with the goal of keeping the Ireland of the past.  He didn't quite succeed as his reforms sparked more change than he anticipated, but in some ways, he was a huge success.  Ireland went from being a country that, as late as the 1950s and 1960s, was hemorrhaging its young population at a stunning rate to being one where its Irish expatriates have been returning home for a long time. Ireland, which has a relatively small population by European standards, lost 500,000 people from 1945 to 1960.

Ireland's post independence economic policy was based on the one thing it had, farm ground, and the economy was based on protectionism from 1932 on.  It had an inward looking economy, which is admittedly different from Wyoming's but the way Whitaker approached the economy should be instructive to us nonetheless.

The key to that was Whitaker's realization that the Irish economy created a situation where there was no economic evolution or growth at all  Ireland completely missed out on the post World War Two European economic boom.  In part this was almost intentional in that Irish politicians wanted to keep Ireland Irish, which in their view meant protecting the near agrarian lifestyle that seemed to define Ireland.  Whitaker, a conservative, wanted to preserve that too but he also realized that perpetually hemorrhaging its young population was not going to achieve that goal.  Whitaker worked on slowly changing the economy to open it up to industry which in turn lead to the Celtic Tiger era of the 1970s-2000s and the Celtic Phoenix economy since 2007.  That stemmed the loss of the young.

A person can debate, of course, whether Whitaker's goal was really realized.  Ireland, like other countries that go into sudden wealth, hasn't handled all of it well and its culture has been done some damage.  Some nations, such as Norway, have handled such transitions better than others.  But his legacy cannot be ignored and provides a lesson.

Just this past week Governor Mead address the hemorrhaging of Wyoming's young.  This has been something I've heard politicians speak about since I was young, and I'm older than Governor Mead, a bit.  Living in Wyoming long term is not easy and it involves a conscious choice of choosing to live here over better economic prospects elsewhere.  It also means living in an economy that somewhat mirrors Ireland's in that the soul of the state is in agriculture, no matter what the Legislature may believe, but it is not possible for average Wyomingites to enter that field.  Like Ireland, you have to be born into the land to work it, usually.

I'm not suggesting that we should abandon agriculture in any fashion, and Ireland did not. But Whitaker realized that the traditional Irish economy was depleting the country of its young.  Wyoming has over the years emphasized an economy built almost exclusively on mineral extraction. That brings people in, usually temporarily, in boom cycles and takes a lot of people out, including natives, during bust cycles.

Moreover, because the economy is so heavily based on the extractive industries it puts the state's young in a difficult situation in which they have to determine if they want to enter that industry themselves, which many do not wish to do so, or one of the industries that supports the extractive industries in some fashion, or leave. That's a harsh thing to have to decide.  Quite a few people spend their entire careers until retirement living elsewhere and then coming back by which time, frankly, they aren't really the Wyomingites they were when they left.  You can't really work in Los Angeles for 40 years and come back the same person, with the same likes, and some concerns.  Indeed, that's not really even fair to your adopted state which supported you in your livelihood and which maybe has some claim on you when you retire.

As I'm not a T. K. Whitaker so I don't know what that economic change would fully entail, although I've given my views of it before.  I'm sure, however, that it entails looking outside the box at what we have and what we don't.  But when we've said that before, we've largely done nothing.

Holding back the breeze?

King Canute proving that he couldn't hold back the tide.

Last week I had a couple of posts on coal and its prospects.

One of them related that the Tribune was reporting that coal was up to 75% of its pre bust production, an impressive recovery.  As that article noted this level of production might be market reasonable, rather than market overheated, and reflect the actual level of ongoing demand for the time being. That's really good news for coal.

The other article discussed the long history of coal's decline as an energy source.  The two articles aren't really inconsistent with each other and reflect, I suspect, the truth of coal's situation.  Long term, it's been in decline for market share for over a century.  Short term, it captures new markets from time to time and its still around right now, and will be for a long time.

I also recently reported that wind energy has now reached the point where, after having had to be supported by the government during its infancy (much like the railroads were supported by the government in their infancy, and over the road transportation continues to be supported by the government), it is now competing with other means of electrical generation.

Well, not if a handful of Wyoming's legislators have their say.

It's really unlikely to pass but some of our state's lawmakers want to pass a bill that requires power generators to stop supplying power via wind energy and which will financially penalize them if they do.  The idea is that this forces the power companies to stick to hydroelectric and coal in Wyoming.

This is really silly.

It may also be unconstitutional as an act in restraint of legitimate legislative power in restraint of trade, including trade across state lines, and "special legislation" favoring one type of company over another.

But beyond that, it's just flat out silly.  

Wyoming is such a small domestic electric market that, at best, all this would do is harm domestic industry, such as wind farms and power companies with wind generators, while benefiting nobody.  How much electricity do these fellows think we consume?  Power generation is on a big grid, gentlemen, and those power plants are generating power for people in California, not you, really.

And Wyomingites benefit from the wind generation industry, just like they do the coal industry.  Jobs constructing and maintaining wind farms, etc., all play their part in our employment picture.

It's odd how in Wyoming everyone routinely claims that we're radically in favor of the free market. . . right up until it impacts our pocket books and then some of us aren't so keen on it anymore.

The Wyoming Federal Natural Resource Management Committee tells the voters it knows better.

The Wyoming Federal Natural Resource Management Committee met on December 14 in Cheyenne.  It was a public hearing.  Not that the public was really going to be listed to.  This committee decided to ignore the public with finality, apparently, back in November and is now only willing to consider amendments to a proposed Wyoming Constitutional Amendment that has received widespread public opposition.

The Committee was meeting on the language of a proposed amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that's basically in aid of the some in the state's effort to grab the Federal Domain against the wishes of the residents of the state and contrary to the oaths the Legislators took when they signed on to do their jobs.  The legislators were surprised that public opposition to a proposal that's quite popular amongst Wyoming's politicians received such widespread opposition from the public.  At least, to their credit, they have tried to do something about that, as opposed to our Congressional representation in the House and Senate which has supported it and simply flat out ignored the voting public.

The concept that transferring the public lands would benefit the state in any fashion is completely erroneous. The state would, sooner or later, and likely much sooner rather than later, sell the lands to the highest bidders that would invariably be rich out of state interests.  When this occurred we'd simply become a rural version of Ohio in which the residents of the state would have to be content with whatever the towns have to offer unless they were willing to pay a sufficient tribute to what would ultimately become out of state landlords.  To try to ease the fears of those who know that this amendment is being pushed.

The idea that a Constitutional Amendment would prevent this is delusional, as that would, at best, keep the Legislature from such an attempt for a single session or so, until a way around it was found.  Indeed, the Legislature right now does not seem to be able to recall  Article 21, Section 26 of the Wyoming Constitution which provides:

The people inhabiting this state do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof, and to all lands lying within said limits owned or held by any Indian or Indian tribes, and that until the title thereto shall have been extinguished by the United States, the same shall be and remain subject to the disposition of the United States and that said Indian lands shall remain under the absolute jurisdiction and control of the congress of the United States; that the lands belonging to the citizens of the United States residing without this state shall never be taxed at a higher rate than the lands belonging to residents of this state; that no taxes shall be imposed by this state on lands or property therein, belonging to, or which may hereafter be purchased by the United States, or reserved for its use. But nothing in this article shall preclude this state from taxing as other lands are taxed, any lands owned or held by any Indian who has severed his tribal relations, and has obtained from the United States or from any person, a title thereto, by patent or other grant, save and except such lands as have been or may be granted to any Indian or Indians under any acts of congress containing a provision exempting the lands thus granted from taxation, which last mentioned lands shall be exempt from taxation so long, and to such an extent, as is, or may be provided in the act of congress granting the same.

There's actually no proposal to repeal this section, so it would remain in effect, essentially saying "you can't get any more Federal Domain but if you do. . ."  Ah. . . a Constitutional Amendment that only courtroom lawyers will benefit from. . .

As Legislators, those on the present committee should recall that they swore an oath to uphold the Wyoming Constitution, and in these regards, efforts contrary to this provision seem to fairly clearly violate it.  Not that this has been something that's restrained the Legislature in recent years.  This doesn't seem to bother them much as only one single committee member cast a "no" vote on November 8 to approve the amendment even though nearly everyone who gathered at the November hearing spoke against it.  But we need to keep in mind that this body has seemingly been fairly comfortable with voting on unconstitutional acts in recent years and very recently got into a fair amount of trouble for just that.

Several nights ago in Cheyenne, 100% of the speakers from a large crowed spoke against the amendment again.  This time, however, the committee informed the speakers that it was already a done deal, they'd already voted against the wishes of the state's residents and they were only there to consider amendments.  They apparently agreed to a few. But its hard not to view this as being rather insulting to the voting public.  The committee well knew that a large crowed would be in attendance.  It also knew, of course, it had already voted for approval. But it is not the case, as these bodies will want to believe, that they can't unring the bell. They could have.  It just wouldn't suit the views out of four of the five people on the committee.

Now the whole thing goes on to the State Senate and, should it survive there, the House.  If it passes two thirds of both bodies then it must be voted on by the voters in the next election.  The Governor, for what it is worth, who has already spoken as to the illegality of acquiring the Federal Domain, has no role in this.

If this passes our legislature, at least from my prospective, the voters nearly have to pass the bill to try to protect the lands from these same people. Everyone well knows that this amendment is mere camouflage for an effort to violate the state's organic act and to violate the state's constitution and grab the Federal domain.  The amendment will be the only way to protect the land, even though this entire issue shouldn't even be on the plate.  That ironically argues for and against it at the same time.  We practically need it as our representation in Cheyenne has shown a determination to vote against the will of the citizens', but at the same time this simply aids their effort.

Here's the proposed amendment, before the apparent and anticipated amendments to it.  Note that this wold not take effect until 2019, giving a land transfer plenty of time to take first well before it, and for this thing to accordingly mean nothing whatsoever.  That's a bit odd.  And also note that this does nothing to preserve the lands the state already holds.

Note also that it appears in Article 18. Article 21 above remains in effect. So the net result of that is that this would make a mess out of the state's constitution, which is one of the few of the same that's actually survived the test of time.  Most state's have been trough several by now.  What would a court do with this?  Nobody knows.  But both sections clearly cannot stand together.  It would be equivalent to the U.S. Congress proposing an amendment to legalize banning speech in a clause separate from the First Amendment. 

Article 18, Section 7
Public lands management and access

(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of this constitution and when in accordance with the purposes of a grant of land to the State of Wyoming from the United States, lands granted to the state after January 1, 2019 shall be managed for multiple use and sustained yield, including public access for hunting, fishing and other recreation, as prescribed by the legislature.

(b) The legislature may provide for the exchange of state lands acquired pursuant to subsection (a) of this section. The legislature shall ensure that any exchanges of lands acquired pursuant to subsection (a) of this section collectively cause no more than a de minimis loss or gain of the state lands, either in value or size.

(c) Any exchange of the lands acquired pursuant to subsection (a) of this section shall maintain or increase public access to those lands.

And of course this doesn't consider that in addition to the State's constitution the State's organic act also disclaimed the public lands.

Here are the names of the Committee members.  In Cheyenne earlier this week they'd said they'd already voted, but that doesn't mean that voicing your opinion, should you have one (either way) won't suddenly cause that to magically reverse.  Over a long period of time I've learned that governmental entities of any type which state "we can't do that" can and will "do that" when it becomes too uncomfortable not to.  I've even heard one agency officer tell me something was illegal and then approve it as not illegal in less than 30 seconds.

Eli Bebout

Gerald Geis

Larry Hicks

Norine Kasperik

JoAnn Dayton

Tim Stubson

Dayton is the only one who voted no on the November 8 vote to ignore the voters.  She apparently listened to her constituency.

She's also the only Democrat on the body, and this is why I think we'll see an increase in Democratic fortunes in the upcoming election. The last unconstitutional bill passed by the legislature caused a revolt in the GOP amongst its hard right/libertarian wing which is still smoldering.  The Public Lands issue is in fact causing some long time Republicans I  know to vote Democratic.  Alienating both sides of the GOP locally is not really a very good idea.

Of those mentioned I should note that Stubson is on his way out, having run for Congress and lost.  He actually won't take his seat in January as Jerry Obermuller will instead, Stubson having determined not to run in order to run for Congress.  This is presumably his swan song as a legislator, assuming of course that he doesn't run again and obtain a seat at a later date.

Bebout is the only one who responded to my email the last time, to his real credit, with a well stated letter, albeit one I disagree with.  It takes guts and dignity to write somebody who is opposed to you, and I respect him for that.  Geis' email bounces back so I can't comment regarding him.  They're all likely getting hundreds of emails, as they well should be.

Stuff like this, I should note, really creates a distrust of democracy.  The concept always is that the people who go to the state house and Congress will uphold our views.  But here they aren't, and aren't coming close to it.  They're upholding a view that regards Washington as our enemy, a view that's really been stoked in recent years, and they also clearly believe that if we just get "Washington off our backs" the money will really flow.  But all the studies of this show that the state can't afford to administer the lands.  Ironically, moreover, transferring the Federal Domain doesn't make all regulation evaporate by any means and the Federal Government is not necessarily any harder to deal with than the state can be.  And at the end of the day this is poking the sleeping giant of the American urban population right in the eye, which isn't such a good idea.  A change in political fortunes can easily go from "give us the land" here in Wyoming to "it's all park land now" back in D.C.

If there's a silver lining in any of this it would be that Secretary of the Interior nominee Zinke is a very strong opponent of the transfer the lands movement and so is Donald Trump, Jr. who apparently had his father's ear on this one.

A rational and honest voice from the Governor's office

Governor Mead, according to the Casper Star Tribune:

Mead said in an interview Wednesday with the Star-Tribune that two state attorneys general have advised him that Wyoming is not legally structured, through an enabling act that began the process of statehood in the late 1800s, to obtain federal land. States such as Utah have enabling acts that provide a stronger case for transfer, but even they are battling to obtain the land, he said.

“Then you get into the policy,” the Republican said. “And I reflect back to 2012. We spent as a state $45 million fighting fires… If the federal lands that had fires on them would have been state lands, we would have spent another $45 million – in one summer. That’s a significant amount.”

A Legislative Session to watch and the dynamics and culture of trying to grab the public lands.

 Bureau of Reclamation sign on public land used for fishing, hunting, and cattle grazing.  In the context of the times today, protecting the "your land" means basically opposing your legislature.

The Star Tribune informed its readers on Sunday last that Eli Bebout and Steve Harshman shall have the leadership positions in the upcoming Wyoming Legislative Session.  Bebout takes the place of Phil Nicholas in the Senate and Harshman the place of  Tom Lubnau in the House.

Both of them will have pretty big shoes to fill.  Lubnau, a Gillette lawyer, in particular was a voice of reason in troubled times, but he's left the Legislature.  Hid did so with a bit of a lament on the state of Wyoming politics when he did so, which I share.  Here's what he said to WyoFile on this way out.

All told, it’s a long way from the days, as former Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau told WyoFile, when policy was hashed out in the bar at the Hitching Post Inn, a Cheyenne landmark and longtime second home for legislators.

Lubnau served nine years in the House and has been both majority leader and Speaker of the House. He was Speaker in the 2014 general session.

He remembered his first campaign, in 2006: “We all just went out and knocked on doors and met our friends and neighbors and it took two weeks and then we were done. I don’t think I spent hardly anything,” he said.

Nicholas, a Laramie lawyer was a very active Senate leaders and also a moderating force, although he was a backer of the Quixotic effort to raise the retirement age for Wyoming judges, which I thought a bad move, and which failed.

I don't know much about Harshman's positions, although I should as he's from my district.  He's a teacher and coach at NCHS, one of the local high schools..  Bebout I know much more about.

Bebout is a really decent guy, in my opinion.  At one time he was thought a shoe in for Governor but he lost to Governor Freudenthal to everyone's surprise.  That should be a bit of a red flag to everyone in the Legislature as the Democrats have been in real trouble here since Bill Clinton, but the voters favored the more moderate Freudenthal over the very conservative Bebout that election.

 Painted wall in Hudson Wyoming, from when Eli Bebout ran for Governor.  Right across the street there's another for John P. Vinich, who ran for Governor as a Democrat.  Hudson was Vinich's home town, Bebout's, Lander is just about fifteen or so miles away.

Oddly, Bebout himself was once a Democrat.  But perhaps that's not surprising. At one time you had to be a Democrat in Fremont County in order to get elected, a legacy of its mining days.  Those days have now passed and with it a serious Democratic Party in Fremont County.  The County still has some good Democratic politicians in it, but they're mostly on the Reservation where the fortunes of the Democrats have always been higher.  More recently it's been solidly Republican otherwise and has had one of the most conservative members of the legislature otherwise in office.

Anyhow, Bebout is very conservative, which would presumably be a good fit for Wyoming.  He's reliably conservative on social issues, perhaps a reflection of his Greek Orthodox faith, he's a successful businessman who has weathered the storms, and he's generally both likable and responsive.

He's also one of the Wyoming legislators whose hugely in favor of Wyoming taking over the Federal Public Domain. And that's going to be a problem.

Now, he doesn't view it as a problem, and he's indicated to the Press that he thinks the dangers have been overblown. To try to address  those misconceptions, in his view, he's one of the members of a committee that's trying to back an amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that would promise that there'd be no net loss of lands newly acquired from the Federal government in this fashion (nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe we ought to do that with the existing state lands, which are slowly being lost in overall acreage).

Wyomingites, overall, hate the idea of the Federal Government transferring the land to the state, as they don't trust the state.  At a recent meeting of the committee teh overwhelming majority of the speakers spoke against the concept. The committee, rather than tank it, decided to work on their proposed amendment anyway, a really insulting "we know better than you" type of view that will either result in a real reaction against the Legislature, which has happened before on similar topics, or a "in your face" type of effort to push this through.

All of which causes me to consider how on earth this can come about? That is, how can one body of Wyomingites be so brashly in favor of doing something the majority of us detest?

Well, in thinking on it, I think that my conclusion is a lot different than what people generally suppose.

If you read (and I haven't for years) articles in the High Country News of rind your ancient copy of Sam Western's Pushed Off the Mountain Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s Search for Its Soul (which my late mother liked, but which I've never read, as I'm reluctant to accept that relocated authors from The Economist have much to tell me about my neighborhood) you might be tempted to come to the conclusion that this is all emblematic of a conflict between the "New West" and something else ("Old West"?).  It isn't.  This fight has always been with us. At the end of the day, it has always pitted the apostles of money and industry against everyone else,, but I don't mean for that to sound as harsh as it does, as many of those apostles truly believe in the Gospel of Money, and almost all Wyomingites are in that congregation, somehow or another.  That's in part why its such a long running fight.

And its a multifaceted one as well.  I think that there's at least   1) the extractive industries and their fellow travelers; 2) agriculture; 3) the dazzling urbanites; 4) the forces of distinct culture and 5) most of us, the regular folk.

I don't know of anyone else who looks at this as a five way struggle, but I do.  Let's break it down a bit and see if it fits. And lets' do that by looking at each of the five.

And in doing that, let's keep in mind that this struggle hasn't played out and isn't playing out in the big rectangle that is  Wyoming alone.  No, it's being fought, and has been fought, throughout the entire west.

And finally, in doing that, let's concede right off the bat that this struggle is the epitome of blurred lines, which is why it keeps reoccurring.

So on to the five.

1.  The extractive industries and their fellow travelers. 

 

 Grass Creek, Wyoming Oilfield in the early days, before World War One.  At the time of this photo, oil entrants could still patent their claims, in the same way that mining claims could be patented, and indeed as "placer oil claims".

Wyoming my call itself the Cowboy State, but even since its earliest days, it's looked to the extractive industries, oil and coal, and mostly oil, as what was going to make the state rich.  You can go back at least as early as the 1890s and find newspaper articles just gushing about oil prospects.

The Wyoming Oil Observer, an energy centric newspaper published in Casper as least as far back as 1918.  Today, the Casper Star Tribune follows in its wake by publishing its energy edition every week.

The concept that there's wealth in oil is hardly misplaced. The same is true of coal, and uranium.  Early in the states history, and from time to time throughout it, there's been other minerals that would likewise fit the bill.  Gold and heavy metals, for example, have had their eras, although they provide a cautionary tale, just as uranium and coal presently do, about the fickleness of mineral wealth.  I suppose the same cautionary tale can be told throughout the nation and even the globe.

The point isn't, as some who would be hurling their copies of the High Country News at me right now  would maintain, that the extractive industries are bad (hey there. . . yeah, you in the espresso shop in Ft. Collins, I can see you getting ready to hurl your copy of the High Country News at me, stop it).  They aren't.  But their nature can blind those in deep in them to other things, which is true of everything.

This has always been the case, however, to a distinct degree with the extractive industries and other local industries, and again for a real reason.  The reason for this is that almost everyone in Wyoming has come connection with the extractive industries.  Many people do very directly. That is, they work for coal companies or oil companies.  Others do more remotely, but there's still a connection.  Companies that supply oilfield equipment, or vehicles, or even just people who work for grocery stores where a lot of the population works in the oilfield.  This is pretty obvious to most people.

This leads to the "a rising tide lifts all boats" type of theory, but in actuality that's a really poor analogy as the energy money doesn't really act like a rising tide. That is, it doesn't lift all boats equally, like a tide does, at least not directly.  Indeed, if we're to use an aquatic reference, it lifts boats more like a wave, or even a tsunami, with everything lifting at some point, but a person's craft not necessarily lifted to the peak of the wave.  And some crashing goes on.  This type of thinking, however, is also additionally problematic as the way this impacts the average person isn't as focused on the profit aspect of life as people who are captains of industry, no matter how small or local that industry may be.  This is how people in industries like the extractive industries can get lost and baffled by the fact that most people, even people who work for them, aren't all that receptive to their arguments.  "We'll all make more money" actually doesn't motivate people that much, particularly if that more money equates with the destruction of something they value more, which this sort of thinking can.  Its sort of a secular application of Mark 8:13:

And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?

A lot of average Wyomingites grasp this in an instinctive way that applies directly to them. That is, most Wyomingites don't see the value of gaining more employment or bringing in more money wealth if it means the destruction of their fishing hole.

Another reason that the arguments of the industry focused fall flat is that they don't tend to contemplate industry, let alone the extractive industries, as we know them to really be, and as most Wyomingites have direct personal experience with this, their arguments aren't convincing.

Right now, as back in the 1980s, the big argument is that if we only could get direct control over the public lands ourselves, i.e., if the State of Wyoming could get them, we'd roll back regulation and everything would be super.  But we know that this is very unlikely to be true.

We know this in part for the reason discussed immediately above.  If we have long enough lives to have experienced it, most of us agree that some of the regulation was pretty necessary. We might not agree on how much of it was, but few would maintain that we should return to the conditions of the 1950s and 1960s.

More than that, however, this argument falls into an erroneous assumption that there's stability in the product to be produced, but we know that is not true.  Basically, arguments about the mineral products that are supposed to gain us perpetual wealth are subject to the myth of the beaver pelts, although not in the way that people like to cite it.

Free trapper Bill Williams, 1839.

Everyone has heard this myth. The myth is that there was a beaver felt craze, this sparked a trapping boom in the west, all the beavers were trapped out, and the end of trapping was the result.

The reason that this myth, and that's exactly what it is, is relevant is that it is similar to the myth of mineral production in the West, and its a Western based myth. The central thesis is that a) we have a limited scarce commodity, and b) its valuable, and c) as it can't be replaced, the price can only go up.

None of that was true, however.

What was true is that the beaver trade was industrial in nature, but relied upon local, and rustic, folks for the raw product.  In that fashion, it's very much like the modern petroleum and coal industries.  Us local folks are on the trap and swamp end, and we like that.  The commodity is produced, as a raw product, and shipped elsewhere for refinement and use, for the most part.

But what really occurred is more instructive.

The beaver were never trapped out.That is simply a myth.  Indeed, you can buy beaver felt hats today, and I have several  Really good cowboy hats have a high percentage of beaver felt in them, and for a really good reason.  It's darned near impervious to water in any form.  It's the perfect felt.  That's what made it valuable in the first place.

 

Author wearing a beaver felt hat.

But that's what made for the competition as well. What really occurred is that as the price and demand went up, competition developed from other materials, some of it radically different. Some was similar, like rabbit and nutria felt (Army campaign hats of the 19th Century were usually nutria).  But silk, which was simply a material of style, competed equally well in terms of the whims of style.  So when beaver felt ran its course as a matter of simple style, or simply became too expensive, perhaps, silk stepped in and replaced it.

 Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.  Silk top hats remained formal headgear, to a limited extent, all the way into the 1940s.  In the mid 19th Century, they were the hat of men engaged in business and law, and the hat worn in formal affairs.  By the mid 20th Century they were an accessory to a tuxedo.  Here we see still robust Theodore Roosevelt wearing a top hat and a mourning coat, a type of coat that was  typical formal coat of  the era, but now a lessor known species of tuxedo coat.

That may seem like a pretty poor analogy, after all beaver is a renewable resource and oil is not, but it really is pretty close, actually.  Beavers were trapped by the hardy of the Frontier, just as oil likewise tends to be produced by hardy men, and fewer women, who are willing to engage in the risky business of producing it. Both were products that were shipped out for refinement, and largely for use, elsewhere.  And when the market developed, competition did as well.

That's what booster of the extractive industries seem to have failed to learn here.  The petroleum industry isn't in trouble locally due to regulation from Washington D. C.  It's in trouble as Saudi Arabia turned on the tap.  We can do almost nothing about that.  And coal isn't in trouble because of Washington's heavy had, it's in a century old decline that has been headed in one direction.

Indeed,  the fate of coal is particularly instructive and should be closely examined on this topic. Coal isn't in trouble now because Washington suddenly started picking on it.  It's been in trouble since Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the Royal Navy to switch from coal to oil.

Oil, you see, doesn't blow up, taking the ship with it.

The wreck of the USS Maine. Stuff like this give you the "war on coal".

Its' been one long downhill slide for coal ever since the Royal Navy decided to the replace it with oil. Every Navy did that shortly thereafter.  By the 1940s diesel locomotives began to make inroads as well and by the 1960s coal fired locomotives were a thing of the past.

Diesel electric engine, 1943.

Starting in the same time frame, houses, many of which were heated by coal furnaces, were switched in many locations to fuel oil furnaces, something that's still  used in many locations (although a curious reverse example of this was once one of the most popular threads on this site).  Coal furnaces for houses are now a thing of the past.

Lennox "Torrid Zone" coal furnace.

This last item is particularly instructive, as oil furnaces are now becoming a thing of the past.  They're being replaced, in many places, by natural gas furnaces, which burn cheaper and cleaner.  In other regions of the county people went directly from coal (or even wood) to natural gas.

The United States has natural gas in abundance.  Indeed, the practice of simply flaring it off remains common in the US, although it has to be wondered how long that will be allowed to continue.  At any rate, it's natural gas that's finishing off coal.  Coal's last bastions were power generation and industrial coke and furnaces.  Power generation is switching to natural gas and the price of the gas is driving that.  No amount of deregulation will change that.

And that should be instructive for petroleum as well.  We will, quite obviously, be suing petroleum oil for a long time to come, but the evidence is that it's on the same production curve as coal.  And combined with that, the price has dropped due to foreign actions we cannot change.  So at the present time we're witnessing the change in transportation to viable electric motors, something that no amount of deregulation will now be able to impact greatly, and a pricing regime determined by the House of Saud, not the White House.

Nonetheless, as is so often the case for people caught in these economic revolutions, it's not possible or popular to face them square on.  Facing this situation square on would require us to concede that coal is likely in its final stages of being regulated to coking use only, it's just not quite there, and the coal in the  West won't be part of that.  That's the hard reality of that.  Eliminating regulation won't impact that.  And petroleum's price drives employment in petroleum, and it will not be rebounding soon. When it does, new technology will mean that employment in that field will not return to historic levels.  But here on the ground its much easier to imagine that Happy Days Will Come Again and they'll be just like old times.  They won't be.  But there will be those, including those with honest motives, who believe that employment is everything, the only employment we have is that which we just had, and we can get it all back.  We can't.  We can wreck things in the meantime, however.

Which brings me too:

2) Agriculture.

 Nebraska homesteaders, 1886.

The last time we went through this here in the 1970s ranchers were the motivating force behind it. That go around it was termed the Sagebrush Rebellion, and the ranchers were the rebels.  While not necessarily remembered this way, it was really the average folks, the last category (Category 5) we will look at here, who put that rebellion down, with the last shots being fired here locally when agricultural interests attempted privatize the state's wildlife, which sparked a huge counter reaction.

This go around, however, farmers and ranchers have been relatively quiet locally.  And where they have been in the forefront it is a qualified participation in that it may have more to do with Category 4 than this Category, Category 2.  There's probably a good reason for that, and that reason is that its becoming to be obvious to farmers and ranchers that if the Federal lands go to the state, at a bare minimum the state may be a worse landlord than the Federal government, and at the worst, the state will sell the land to the rich who live elsewhere.

Ranchers fueled the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s because that was really the first time that they really faced much in the way of any kind of regulation.  They hadn't been happy about the Taylor Grazing Act all the way back to 1932, however. Ironically, and something they should learn from, the Taylor Grazing Act saved ranching in the West.  It saved it as it eliminated new homestead entries, which were chopping up and wiping out grazing land so fast it wasn't even funny.  Indeed, the Wyoming Supreme Court actually threw its hands up in once case in the 1920s about homesteading entries as it stated that the land was being homesteaded so fast that whatever the ranchers cause of action was when he field it the damages couldn't be determined as his public domain lands were disappearing so quickly.  Had the Franklin Roosevelt administration not stepped in, the land would have been chopped up into tiny pieces and overgrazed rendering ranching as we know it a thing of the past.

That didn't keep ranchers from being mad about the Taylor Grazing Act as they didn't feel that they should have to lease the land at all. And this gets us back to something noted above about the extractive industries.  It isn't that they were greedy, its just hat they were in the business and too close to it to appreciate that their few was flawed.

Indeed, however, it was highly flawed, and remains so to some extent, in the case of land.  Most ranching had only gotten a start in the West because the Federal government aided it through the homestead acts.  Had the Federal government kept its pre Civil War approach to things settlement of the West would have been much, much, slower, but it would also have been of an entirely different character.  Recognizing that farmers of any kind were not stopping in The Great American Desert Congress  decided to do something about it by trying to make acquiring an agricultural unit as cheap as conceivably possible.  Ranchers of the early 1930s, if the had in business for awhile, had forgotten that they were the descendants of people who had accepted the Federal government's helping hand.  It's really been forgotten now.

And they were also the beneficiary of a much more distributist economic view on the part of the Wyoming people at the time.  Viewed through economic lenses, the Johnson County War was an effort at appropriating the Federal domain violently at the expense of smaller ranchers.  The large ranchers lost that war, and the ranchers of the 1930s, and today, are the heirs of the efforts of the small ranchers, not the large ones.  Efforts to force the Federal government to hand over the land today are really very much akin to what the Invaders of 1892 sought.

 

The Invaders of 1892

As noted, many ranchers sympathize to some degree with the take the Public Lands movement, but not nearly to the extent they once did. Something has definitely changed  and what it is, I suspect, is that the Invaders who tried to take their lands in 1892 are back in the form of out of state interests that buy land to be a playground.

Back in the 1970s, when we last saw this effort, it was still possible for ranchers to acquire ranch land. The reason had to do with the hideous  economy of the 1970s.  A lot of land went back to banks locally and local ranchers, via loans and foreclosure sales, were able to expand. This was really a blip in the long term economy, but it lasted quite awhile. As late as 1990 or so my father and I were in this situation and came very close to buying a small ranch.  He took ill, however, and died, and we did therefore not do it.  

Those days, however, are gone.  Now when large ranches go up for sale they go to monied out of state interests or real estate developers. Ranchers are under siege and they know it.

They also tend to know that the State of Wyoming, and any other Western state, is not trustworthy with the land.  When the State talks about land, it talks about oil and coal, something that may be under the land the ranchers have but which often benefits them in no real way at all.  Just because its under your land, they know well, does not mean you own it.

Indeed, amongst all the proposal to extract the land from the Federal government there is not a single one to require that the minerals that are under the surface owners lands should go to them. And there is not going to be.  Should the state acquire the lands, it's going to keep the minerals no matter what.  And that's something that doesn't help agriculture at all.

Indeed, the state even owning land doesn't help agriculture. There's no reason to believe that the State will be as generous to ranchers as the Federal government has been.  Pinched for money, the state would feel free to raise grazing rates.  It'd also feel free, at some point, to sell them to the highest bidder and that won't be any local rancher.

Ranchers have been pretty quiet this go around.  This is an interesting, and hopeful, sign.

And let us keep in mind what they already know. .  there's a group that they have to fear, and for which this entire movement is nothing more than opening an Pandora's Box.  Oddly, the extractive folks haven't been able to grasp this, but at some point they will. That group is:

3) The dazzling urbanites;

 Spacious interior of the current REI outlet in Denver.  That's a climbing rock.  And that's how urban people view the public land.  Proceed with caution, legislative bodies.

I'll confess that I stole the title here from Blazing Saddles, the irreverent Mel Brooks comedy that insults everyone.  Amongst those insulted are rural people, in the line where where Gene Wilder asks the new sheriff how a "dazzling urbanite" became the sheriff.  The film was made in the 1970s, fwiw, during which city life was undergoing a strong attraction in the nation.

Anyhow, one of the things that gets improperly noticed in this debate is that there are now, and have been for some time, a collection of large cities in every region and the residents of those cities have a completely different view of this topic than anyone else.  Because they outnumber everyone else their views have to be taken into account.  Poke them and basically you are awakening a sleeping bear.  The Wyoming, Utah and Idaho legislators are getting close to really poking them.

That's an easier thing for the Wyoming legislature to do, or perhaps a more unthinking thing for it to do, than it is for Utah.  Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana really have no large metropolis's.  Utah does have one.  Indeed, that makes the fact that Utah has been the center of this movement even more surprising, but we'll get to that in a moment.  Wyoming's big metropolis, although we don't think of it that way, is Denver Colorado.

The Colorado Rockies playing the New York Yankees, 2016.  The Rockies don't have a "Wyoming Day" for no reason at all, and it isn't accidental that every Wyomingite except for me is a fan of the Denver Broncos.

Denver is our regional hub.  Anyone in business knows this.  For those in the southwestern corner of the state, Salt Lake City is.  If you are in Montana you'll look to Denver as well, or Minneapolis, or Calgary.  In the context of modern communications these big cities are regional capitols.  As a Wyomingite I hate the thought of Denver being the regional capitol, but it is. And for that matter,I'd rather have it be, given the gigantic city its become, than have Cheyenne or Casper be that.

The residents of these cities live in the West. These cities have been features of the West, along with a host of others, for decades or even, in the case of cities like Denver and Salt Lake City, for well over a century.  But they aren't cow towns or even oil towns anymore.  They're business centers with Western, but urban, populations.

Those populations have a playground view of the public lands.  Going to depositions with lawyers from them, who have no other connection with the West, really makes this obvious.  While those of us from the rural West hunt and fish, or hike, etc. the dazzling urbanites ski and mountain bike.  Indeed, not all that long ago I sat through depositions in which two lawyers, one from Salt Lake and the other from Denver, spoke endlessly about the mountain biking options in Jackson Hole.  Wyomingites do not speak about mountain biking in Jackson Hole. They might mountain bike, but going on a high speed grueling ride for fun would not be their first priority.

So far, this group has been relatively quiet, although it does make up and feed an element of radical environmentalism and, therefore, people in Category 1 need to be very cognizant of what they are going.  Dazzling Urbanites have, so far, generally tolerated or ignored extractive us of the public lands, and agricultural use, but only barely really.  And as noted, they form a strong percentage, perhaps the overwhelming percentage, of radical environmentalist.  It does little good to point out to people in cities that they depend on petroleum or agriculture because if they don't' see it, it isn't real.  And to many of them, quite frankly, they don't.  People making money in the financial sector in Denver or the Weed sector really don't depend upon coal or oil in any significant way.

Which is why, I suppose, that you don't see a "take the Public Lands" movement in Colorado.

At some point, and that some point is soon, these people are going to get really mad and start backing efforts to simply shut the public lands down to extractive and economic use. Don't believe it?  Pick up a copy of the High Country News.  And there's a lot more of them than there are of anybody else we're discussing here.  If urban Coloradans and urban Salt Lakers get mad this movement isn't only done, the counter movement will be hard to work with.

By the way, this gets into something that Americans fail to really grasp.  In most of the Western world public reaction to access to the land has been to cause the recognition of the "right to roam."  I'm convinced that day is coming in the Untied States. The right to roam wipes out trespassing on rural lands as a concept.  In Scandinavia a right to roam has long been recognized as an inherited right and Scandinavians can camp, hike, hunt and fish where they like.  Even in densely packed England there's a right to roam, although its provided statutorily.

 (1)Any person is entitled by virtue of this subsection to enter and remain on any access land for the purposes of open-air recreation, if and so long as—

(a)he does so without breaking or damaging any wall, fence, hedge, stile or gate, and

(b)he observes the general restrictions in Schedule 2 and any other restrictions imposed in relation to the land under Chapter II.

(2)Subsection (1) has effect subject to subsections (3) and (4) and to the provisions of Chapter II.

(3)Subsection (1) does not entitle a person to enter or be on any land, or do anything on any land, in contravention of any prohibition contained in or having effect under any enactment, other than an enactment contained in a local or private Act.

(4)If a person becomes a trespasser on any access land by failing to comply with—

(a)subsection (1)(a),

(b)the general restrictions in Schedule 2, or

(c)any other restrictions imposed in relation to the land under Chapter II,

he may not, within 72 hours after leaving that land, exercise his right under subsection (1) to enter that land again or to enter other land in the same ownership.

(5)In this section “owner”, in relation to any land which is subject to a farm business tenancy within the meaning of the M2Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995 or a tenancy to which the M3Agricultural Holdings Act 1986 applies, means the tenant under that tenancy, and “ownership” shall be construed accordingly.

This this can't happen here?  It already has.  In Oregon and Washington states this has been fought out in regards to beaches, and there are recognized rights to public access to them in some circumstances.  Its not much of a leap from beaches to mountains and the prairie.  It particularly isn't much of a leap when you tell a Denver mountain biker that he can't use a mountain trail, or a Salt Lake skier that he can't cross your empty woods to the back country.

Beyond that, in the urban areas, there are  a lot of people who do not believe that there should be any, and I mean any, industrial use of the land.  Any effort to "take back" the Public Land will be regarded as an effort to take it away by industry, and that's going to include in their minds the extractive industries and agriculture, and they'll argue in turn that these entities should have no access to the public land.  Indeed, that argument is already being made but so far not successfully.  Efforts to "take" the public lands will inspire those groups and gain them adherents.

So, Wyoming legislature, be careful.  You are poking a sleeping bear with a stick.

Well, we've been mentioning Salt Lake City, so perhaps we should go to this next

4) the forces of distinct culture

 

The Utah state house, the epicenter of the "take" the Public Lands movement.  But why?

Now why would the last sentence lead to this.? Well, as has been fairly obvious, Utah, Idaho, and the ranching areas of Nevada, have been particularly active in the "take back" movement.  Indeed, Utah really got it rolling, while other states, like Colorado and Montana have sat it out.  So, what's distinct about Utah, Idaho and the ranching regions of Nevada?

They have a high percentage of Mormons.

Now, already, I can feel people's hackles come up and I can hear the "you are bigoted as you are saying . . ."

No, I'm not, I'm making a demographic observation in the context of this story.  And it won't, fwiw, be limited to the cultural view of Mormons (or rather some Mormons) in this context, but of others as well.

So the question is does this have something to do with the support of the "take back" movement in these areas, and if so, why?

I think it does.

But I'll note that this isn't the only cultural group we'll look at here.

I've pointed out before here that cultures have very long memories. This is pointed out in Holscher's Third Law of History, which provides:

Holscher's Third Law of History.  Culture is plastic, but sticky.

Eh?  What could that mean. Well, just this.  Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.

We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize."  They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat.  Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks.  It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.

Examples?  Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead.  Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks.  Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival.  Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian.  Nothing had actually gone away.

This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US.  The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain.  Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.

And I think that plays into the popularity of this movement in the areas mentioned, and the absence of it in others.

Most Americans are completely ignorant of Mormon history, but Mormons aren't.  People in Manhattan are dimly aware that Mormons moved to the Salt Lake Valley in the 19th Century, maybe, but they know little more than that.  What they don't know is that the Mormon's immigrated there in the process of basically fleeing the mainstream, Protestant, American culture of  mid 19th Century.  Indeed, Mormon polygamist practices were found so abhorrent that even John Stuart Mills, who wrote On Liberty, in the United Kingdom, mused on the British landing a military expedition in Texas to march on the Salt Lake Valley to stop it.

And amongst the forgotten that in 1857 to 1858 the Mormons fought a war with the United States.   This followed earlier local conflicts and became a full scale effort to ensure Mormon dominance over the newly colonized territory and perhaps to even wrest control of it and sever it from the US entirely.  The Mormons lost and an uneasy peace was restored which included the posting of Federal troops in Salt Lake.

Cultures that win wars often tend to forget them or to place them in the permanent past.  Cultures that lose them do not.  All anyone has to do to be reminded of this is to bring up the topic of the American Civil War to southerners, many of whom remain bitter about it and many of whom have a distinctly alternative history view of it.

This is not to say that the Mormon's have an alternative view of the Mormon War. They do not, but they do know that an armed effort they backed, and which was solely made up of their faith, failed and was put down.  This followed, as they recall, distinct oppression in the East, their support of the US in the Mexican War, and bitter fights to colonize the region early on.  Indeed, the extent to which Mormon militias were involved in really bloody battles with the native Indians is also largely forgotten, except by Indians, a group we will get to in a moment in this same category.  But t his plays into a cultural view as well, in that they are both a defeated, and colonizing, people, and recall that.

Having colonized the region in a dedicated effort that commenced before the Homestead Acts, and having fought a failed war in an attempt to separate it, and consisting of a distinct culture, Mormons, I suspect, have a cultural heritage that doesn't trust the Federal Government much.

Mormon farmers, Oneida County Idaho.  The Salt Lake Valley was the center of outward colonization from there, which is fairly unique compared to the settlement of the rest of the West.

Whereas most Americans don't really distrust the Federal government, in spite of what they may say, and have a generally favorable outlook on the American military past, Mormons share with Southerners a feeling of having been conquered, but I suspect the cultural heritage is even deeper.  They're generally culturally unique in being about the only religious group that was put down and even modified their beliefs as a result, in the face of the larger culture.

I'm not saying that they are not patriotic. But when the Utah legislature votes to "take back" land form the Federal government, in some ways its hearkening back to the failed effort of the Mormon War.  Or when the Bundy's strike out in Nevada or Oregon against the Federal government, the fact that the effort is made up of men who are almost all members of the Mormon faith, and heirs to its rural colonization, isn't an accident.  There's a different view here at work, and one that's deeply ingrained and likely not easy to overcome in spite of the bad idea that seizing the Federal domain is.  This should be kept in mind by people when they oppose these ideas as they may not understand the cultural context.

It also be kept in mind by those boosting them in those regions.  Already in Salt Lake the demographics have shifted so that the LDS faith does not claim the majority of residents. Being too close to a movement that has cultural roots, but which does not claim a religious element, is dangerous.  Indeed that seems to be known already as certainly most Mormons do not support the Bundy's and have made that clear, even if the national press hasn't really listened as it hasn't picked up on the under currents of the story.

 

 Mural of the Virgin Mary in downtown Salt Lake City.  This isn't a Mormon image, but a Hispanic Catholic one, showing how Salt Lake has already changed enormously.

What may be less obvious, however, is that things are changing fairly quickly in Utah due to Category 3, it just hasn't hugely impacted politics yet, but it will.  Salt Lake City, the major city in the region, has a minority of Mormon residents now, the majority being other things.  This does not mean that they are not influential, they are hugely influential, and it does not mean there's a majority of some other faith, that would be in error.  But Salt Lake, the seat of Utah's government, isn't same city it was in the 1970s.  So things are changing there.

Which in some ways may emphasize these movements.  Cultures under the stress of changing conditions tend to grasp towards old ideals.

And turning to old ideals, we also see this playing out, I suspect, in regards to the entire Dakota Access Pipeline story.  Here too, culture is at work.

On this, I'm continually amused by my (white) friends from outside the region who perceive this in terms of an environmental movement, or perhaps as a generalized Indian rights movement.  It may be both of those, but it's hugely cultural as well.

 Red Cloud.  Just because he converted to Catholicism and became quite devout, and recognized the futility of trying to carry on with wars against the United States, doesn't mean that he adopted European American views.  Nor does it mean that Sioux protestors at Standing Rock today are Starbucks sipping granola's from Berkeley, even if Starbucks sipping granola's thinks so.

Now, the area we're speaking of is one that doesn't have a lot of public lands. But western North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska do, so it's part of the story.  And its all part of the West.  And what's going on is native cultures are using this as a focal point on their discontent with being a conquered people.  It may have other elements, but that's a big part of it.

Cultures do not simply get absorbed in 100 years, and the native cultures, highly stressed, are still there.  The Dakota Access issue has drawn a lot of Indian attention as Indians are still here and they're still stressed. That's the point, more than any other.

That plays into the conflict over what the Tribal Court is going to be in Wyoming as well.  This story hasn't been well covered by the news, but the dispute between the two tribes, and the one tribe and the US, is a deeply cultural story.

That, once again, may raise the issue of what on earth does all of this have to do with the Public Lands, but it does.  On the latter story, there are large enclaves of native people that hold a completely different view of how benevolent the state is likely to be towards them, and what their rights on the land are.  This past year we saw a Crow game warden tried in Wyoming for shooting an elk, who cited the 1868 Treaty.  That says something.  Back in the early 1980s the pueblo people around in the Sangre de Cristo's of Colorado reacted so negatively to an effort by an East Coaster who bought a ranch in the area to close access to it for timer and hunting sparked an effort by some to kill him by shooting through his roof at night.  On the Standing Rock Reservation right now a group of native people are essentially telling the entire modern American economy to stick it.  These things can't, and shouldn't be ignored and there will be a reaction to anyone state trying to run everything on its own, when  the states are less trusted than the Federal Government is.  Wyoming, it should be  noted, hasn't fared well in recent litigation with the Tribes or Federal Government and it might want to factor that cost into trying to grab lands that were themselves grabbed from these very same people only about 150 years ago.

Indeed, Wyoming is already fighting a losing battle with the Wind River Reservation over who owns the land that Riverton sits on.  Is it in, or without, the Reservation.  We may be in a period of time where the Reservation is actually expanding for the first time ever.  If the state acquires the land, why would the Reservation not seek to control as much as it could.  It's easier, much easier, to take on the State than the Federal government.

Conversely, when those who back this idea make heroes out of people like the Bundy's, or admire the Utah legislature thinking its just super Republican, they may be participating in a back story that they don't understand and in a cultural matter that they don't even conceive of.  You cannot make fun or diminish a people's culture, but you should understand that people's motivations are dictated by culture quite often.  Just because it sounds like "we can manage it better" doesn't mean that deep down there's not another deep seated and perhaps unacknowledged motivation that looks back to losses of the 1850s as much as the economy of the 2010s.  Efforts in Utah may have much less to do with a "let's get Federal regulation off our backs" viewpoint so much as it might "we haven't forgotten that you forced things on us in the 1850s and we still don't really trust you now, U.S. government".   That view may be wholly legitimate, but it doesn't apply equally to everyone.  Indeed, ironically, the protesting Sioux at Standing Rock and the Utah Legislature have more in common on this point that the backers of this view in Wyoming do, even if they hold polar opposite views about how they'd approach industry on the land, maybe.

And then there's: 5) most of us, the regular folk.

 

The irony here, I'd note, is that the "regular folks" category here includes the average folks in every single group I've noted above. The Mormon welder in town, the Indian truck driver in Ft. Washakie, the regular derrick hand in Riverton.  Everyone. Every average person, that is.

It was Arlo Guthrie, son of the famous author of This Land Is Your Land, who lamented:

Just last week I was on my bike
I run into a friend named Mike
Run into my friend named Mike
Mike no longer has a bike. He cries:

I don't want a pickle
Just want to ride on my motorcycle
And I don't want a tickle
'Cause I'd rather ride on my motorcycle
And I don't want to die
I just want to ride on my motorcycle

What's that have to do with anything?  Well, sort of the same thing John Prine meant when he sang:

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Eh?

Well, most folks aren't all that interested in super wealth, or even progress.  Truth be known, progress itself isn't all that its cracked up to be, and a lot of progress is pretty darned non progressive.  Quite a few people would regarding reversing progress as real progress.

Now, what does all that mean?

Just this.

Most folks want decent lives.  And for Wyomingites, that means getting outdoors,  hunting, fishing, camping, and just enjoying the country.  People view the land as theirs, and it is.

Quite a few Wyomingites work outdoors.  Quite a few of them work outdoors because they like the outdoors, not because they're enamored with a particular industry.  So, quite a few guys driving those oilfield service trucks, for example, are doing it as they like driving outdoors.  Geologists may read journals that deal with oil and gas production, but mot of them were granola's in their  twenties and still are.   I know, as I was a geologist.

Lots of people would be ranchers or farmers if they could be, just to live and work outdoors.  They can't, because they're living in the 2010s, not the 1910s.  But that doesn't mean that in their heart of hearts, that's not where they are.

So, it gets back to Wendell Berry's famous question, "what are people for?".

Economics isn't it. Economics only serves people.

Which is why the last time this occurred, it was put down by angry locals.  And they're angry again, and getting angrier.

All the argument about Federal regulation and how nasty it is, and how the economy will be revived, etc and resume its old (1970s?) form is not only inaccurate, it's just so much unconvincing babble if it doesn't address the issues that really matter to the people who are really from here.  The state is our life.  We have sacrificed just to stay here.  Giving it away, and that's what will occur, on the pretext that we will all have more money in our bank accounts doesn't mean much if we give away the state to do it.