♪ The Lord is my light and my salvation ♪
♪ Whom shall I fear
♪ The Lord is the strength
♪ The strength of my life
♪ Of whom shall I be afraid
♪ Of whom shall I be afraid
We will not give up.
We will not yield until the truth is out there,
and justice has been served.
[Crowd] Go home, go home, go home.
[Man] This is our home.
[Man] When tyranny becomes law,
then rebellion becomes necessity.
Hey, this is one camera that might--
It doesn't matter.
Everybody needs to get the fuck out.
They won't shoot at a camera.
Remember Bundy.
Remember Bundy.
(crashing)
[Man] Go ahead, and shoot me.
(indistinct screaming)
[Woman] Dammit. Are they shooting him?
(gun shots)
Oh my God.
You assholes.
I've been a reporter on public lands
issues for about 19 years.
When I moved west, I basically
made my life and raised my family
based on the availability of public lands
to hunt and wander on.
And I thought that they were probably
the best thing about life in America.
It wasn't until they came
to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
that I realized that the Bundy movement,
or whatever it was, was going to ask
some fundamental questions about public lands.
(footsteps)
The meaning of Malheur is catastrophe or misfortune.
But serious misfortune, 9/11 type of misfortune.
So a word not used in the French language lightly.
That's a young red tail hawk from this year.
So we've got now a pair of cranes.
The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1908.
It was a sale to the federal government
in the 1930s from corporate America.
Initially, it was to protect the lakes.
This is the great thing about natural history in Malheur.
I mean, we are starting a butterfly survey,
but we're being distracted.
Well it's like I said with the cranes.
I mean, the cranes basically arrived
as the refuge headquarters area became a crime scene,
and was being processed over a two and a half week period.
That's when the cranes were coming back.
January the 2nd, I was basically
at the Malheur field station by myself.
There were no guests here.
It started to get dark, and then getting to the house,
kind of done for the day,
and then at that point, my cell phone rang.
And it was basically this announcement,
'There's an armed militia down the road.
You need to leave like now.'
(peaceful orchestra music)
(birds squawking)
Malheur, always to me, had an innocence.
When you are out in Harney County,
you've stepped back in time.
I mean, you have 10,000 square miles,
8,000 people, refuge headquarters.
In the winter, you can just walk into this museum
with these beautiful bird specimens 24/7,
and now you start to see the consequences
of you know, 41 days of occupation,
the disruption, the post-traumatic stuff
that has and will cast a long shadow.
So it's sad.
You know, what was it all about?
(calm music)
(wind blowing)
In America, we kind of came up with the idea
that if you steward resources,
that you have a much better chance of making it,
than if you just use them all up.
And it's the freedom of a free people
in a functioning democratic republic,
who share one vast asset in common.
It's only recently, it seems, that we've started
to let the conflicts over their management
obscure the reason that we have them in the first place.
(car engine)
Yeah, this is center patrol road,
and then this is going into
my property, Dunbar Ranch property.
This is where those individuals come in
at 2 in the morning,
and it was quite a threatening situation.
(clanging)
You know it's not the funnest thing in the world
to talk about it, 'cause it's over with.
And that's what I believe.
I mean, it was a very trying time for us.
I never felt threatened until that night,
when they came in through Mom and Dad's place,
and well I personally didn't feel threatened,
but I was worried for my folks.
We were afraid.
Nervous, but yet
(sighs) we were ready for it.
My mom, she come here in 1942 with her folks.
My grandfather, he started work at the refuge.
And we bought this place in 1979.
And been here ever since then.
Ranching for us is our love. It's our life.
From the beginning, the open range days
had caused so much conflict, and there was
so much destruction, in some cases
almost permanent destruction of unmanaged open range,
that the federal government decided that they would
manage the grazing on the federal lands.
Of course there's been conflict
over that from the beginning.
(calming music)
Out here it takes a lot of land for us to have a living.
We do have refuge permits.
We pay to use the ground that we have on the refuge.
All of us permittee-holders have built that relationship.
One of the things we need to recognize
is that federally managed public lands that are
leased for grazing have a lot of conflicting mandates.
All of which affect the profitability of your operation.
But in return for that, you do get
one of the lower grazing fees available in the world.
Ranchers who hold public lands grazing lease
benefit from that, or in many, many cases
their operation would not exist without that.
I've talked with ranchers who have legitimate problems
with the federal government-managed lands.
However, most of those ranchers work through those.
We've had our differences, we've had our battles.
The ranchers and the refuge people
in different conservation groups would actually
sit down together and try to work out differences,
and that was going very well.
So when what happened over here with the militia,
kind of a slap in the face with all the years of what
we've been working with, trying to build that relationship.
A lot of Americans, they've just become
more and more disenchanted with the whole
American experiment really, and the anger is
based in legitimate grievances about employment
and wages and globalized economies that offshore jobs.
The solutions, they're very complicated,
and people reach for the simplest explanation.
We all long for the guy in the stetson hat
on the horse, who rides in on the dawn, fixes the town,
cleans it up and then rides off into the sunset.
It's sad when people are upset, disgruntled,
malcontent about something, maybe nothing in their control.
Now that I'm probably gonna lose
my pension and disability, I'm not worried about that,
because I'm living in the love of
a good spirit and a common people.
And if those people are being brought in to
circumstances that aren't actually in their own
self interest, let alone the nation's self interest,
then those people are being used.
Thanks to social media, and thanks to media,
and (garbled) just some freedom.
(laughing)
The place we are now, you know, it's full of
butterflies and rather idyllic,
but at the peak of the occupation,
this was the third point that you'd have to get through.
So you know, what was all this about? Disruption, greed,
maybe an interest in wrestling federal lands
from the federal government and the American people
to private hands for whatever purposes.
I don't think it matters, but the occupiers
were saying quite consistently, the idea was to
return the land to the people that
had been disenfranchised.
(rustling)
But the bottom line and the great irony was
if there was a grand land theft from a people
in this area, it was basically in the 1870s
and 1880s when the Northern Paiutes were displaced from
the lands that they'd occupied for thousands of years.
But I don't think that was at all clear to them.
This is not just a standard white butterfly.
If you're connected to a landscape,
you're going to be looking to sustain that,
both from a business perspective and from
the ecology of what you're doing,
and you're going to be very interested
in federal regulations and how things might change.
So at this point, you can appreciate the beauty
of this female Becker's white a little bit.
I mean, this goes right back to being a kid.
I mean, butterflies are amazing.
They're incredibly beautiful.
(soft music)
There are people in ranching community
that are highly responsible, and have been thinking
about these issues, you know, fairly deeply for a long time.
It's being involved to ensure that
our way of life can continue on.
The conflicts over the management of
American public lands are reflected in the
general zeitgeist of the United States right now.
We simply are unable to recognize
our common interests, and we celebrate our conflicts.
I don't need the federal government, Washington, D.C.,
telling me how to run my cows
and how to take care of grass.
A democratic republic is a complex organism.
If you're not getting the life you think you deserve,
then being furious is a lot easier
than going to work on the minutiae of fixing it.
By not recognizing that we have more
in common than we have in difference,
it's not just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It's losing it all.
(soft music)
Conflict is a given when you have an asset held in common.
We just shouldn't let the conflict obscure the goals.
(soft music)
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