CLARK COUNTY, Nev.–It’s a twenty-year dispute with the federal Bureau of Land Management that has ultimately led to the incident in Nevada between the Bureau of Land Management and rancher Cliven Bundy. Now some are asking if there could be something similar happen in Mississippi.
Some Mississippians also believe the dispute has less to do with unpaid grazing fees for having cattle on BLM land and more to do with plans for operating a Chinese-owned solar array.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the tortoises, the grass. It has to do with the water supply,” said a caller to the JT Show on SuperTalk Mississippi Tuesday. He was referring to claims by the feds that Bundy’s grazing cattle in that area is endangering a protected tortoise.
“It has to do with water supply. Harry Reid and and his son were throwing dirt at the groundbreaking of a Chinese solar energy plant.”
This is from Snopes.com, republished in the Epoch Times:
The site that ENN Mojave Energy was planning to buy in order to build a solar plant is nowhere near the public land Bundy has been disputing with the government (the former was near Laughlin; the latter is in the Golden Butte area, about 180 miles away), and ENN gave up the solar project and terminated its agreement to buy land to house it as far back as June 2013.
Whether or not either claim is true, the Bureau of Land Management does not have much of an interest in Mississippi. Most of its interests are out west. This from the BLM website:
Most of the BLM’s land is located in the American West and Alaska—its holdings comprise
about one of every five acres in the West—although the agency does manage significant tracts
east of the Mississippi River. Land under the BLM’s jurisdiction is the legacy of territory
originally claimed by the Federal government early in the Nation’s history. Much of the 1.8
billion acres of public land was either claimed for homesteads, railroads, and other private
purposes or reserved as parks, wildlife refuges, national forests, military bases, or for other
public uses. The BLM manages what remains—once-disregarded lands that today are prized for
the array of values they contain.
In any case, most of Nevada’s grazing lands are public and most of Mississippi’s land is privately-owned.
News Mississippi can only draw the conclusion that it would take a very rare set of circumstances for any situation that involved local ranchers and that particular federal agency to have a such an escalated beef, pardon the pun.
