Given the tremendous concentration of coal, oil shale, tar sands, oil 

 and ga.s, uranium and other energy fuels on the public lands--plus the 

 growing public appreciation of the role the public lands play in defining 

 quality of life in the West--I would be very much surprised if the 

 "compromise" would receive serious consideration from the Congress as a 

 whole. 



Congress has spent a lot of time recently setting policy for public 

 land management, beginning with its consideration of the report of the 

 Public Land Law Review Commission, the 1976 passage of the Federal Land 

 Policy and Management Act, the 1978 enactment of the Public Rangelands 

 Improvement Act, and the Coal Leasing Act amendments, etc. 



Third, and probably most significant, the Sagebrush Rebellion is a 

 loosely organized political strategy for gaining specific changes in how 

 specific programs on the public lands are administered--programs such as 

 livestock grazing management and the review of public lands for wilderness 

 potential. 



Beyond these three rather specific roots, the Sagebrush Rebellion has 

 grown into something more pervasive--a broad expression of frustration 

 with the role of Federal government in the day-to-day lives of Westerners. 

 Public land management is a part of the picture, but the frustration also 

 includes Federal energy policy, the secondary effects of environmental 

 pollution control requirements, defense policy and the MX, governmental 

 regulation generally and the Federal government in particular. In more 

 recent months, I'm certain that the awareness of the energy riches of the 

 public lands has attracted new adherents. But it's accurate and important 

 to emphasize that at its root the rebellion is an understandable and quite 

 possibly desireable reaction by certian public land user interests, most 

 pervasively elements of the public land livestock grazing industry, to the 

 Bureau's steady progress in implementing the balanced multiple use 

 management program called for by the Federal Land Policy and Management 

 Act. 



At the same time, there are a number of things the Sagebrush 

 Rebellion isn't . It is not new, for example. In fact, efforts to transfer 

 Federal lands to States--or to private parties--is a nearly predictable 

 cyclic phenomenon. It happened in the mid-1800's. It happened again in 

 the 1920's. Bernard DeVoto got a Pulitzer Prize for, among other things, 

 his writing in opposition to a similar movement in the 1940's led by several 

 western members of Congress. 



It--that is, the question of ownership--is not really a development 

 versus preservation issue. While the oratory emphasizes concern for the 

 economy of the West and of specific resource values, the issue over time 

 may prove to be as much competition among development interests--agri- 

 culture versus energy development or ranching versus land 

 development--as between preservation and development. 



The rebellion is not, in my view, a West versus East issue. At its 

 heart, it is an issue within the West--a regional version of the continuing 

 national debate over difficult and complex tradeoffs among conflicting 



