If my landlord does not want to renew my lease, or if my landlord will only renew it on different terms, that's life and if I don't like it I'll need to move.
And that's even ignoring the fact that tenants who do not pay their rent, like the Bundys, are indeed squatters.
@ post 35 - you clearly get it.
The public needs to be educated on the benefit of allowing increased economic activity on public lands, but like so many things it is a hopeless mess. Those who have grazing leases usually pay much less than market value for grazing on public lands so they are in fact subsidized. Bundy made a deliberate decision to graze his cows on land he did not own in protest. He chose to not pay the fees and admitted as much. I would have far more respect for his position if he had put the fees in a savings account and donated them to a charity of his choice - however, he pocketed the money and refused to remove the cows. His own neighbors who ranched know exactly what he did and few of them came to his defense.
This is not the way to address this issue. Turning the land over the states will simply result in big corporations owning the land such as Inland Paper Company and they are often just as restrictive on land use as BLM is (I am surrounded by Fed land, State land (a park), and lots of Inland Paper Company forests. Pretty much no difference other than hunting access (can hunt on Inland Paper land with permit) that I can see between the three. Fire bans are in place on all three types of properties.
I get that, but for all of us who live in the real world, leases are contracts between parties.
They own a fair chunk of what is involved, and have grounds in justice to expect continued access to what they need provided that they do not abuse it, but the government wants what they own and is willing to cut off access to get it.
Imagine that the government wanted to buy your house, which you own, and you refused. After the refusal, the government refuses to renew your access to water and declares the sidewalk and streets around your house a national park on which you cannot trespass. While falling a tree on your property near the boundary, some minor damage (less than a thousand dollars worth) is donw on the other side of the property line—and as a result you are sentenced to five years in jail, fined $400,000and told that if you ever want to sell your house you have to sell it to the government.
When the real world works like that, it is time to think about changing it—and maybe for some people to do more than think.