This land is our land: is it the end of the line for the great American west?

Thanks to the great western commons, which the Bundys and their legislative champions would like to dismantle, all Americans still enjoy the freedom to roam on some of the most spectacular lands on the planet

It goes without saying that in a democracy, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

Away out west, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won't soon go away. Last winter's armed takeover and 41-day occupation of Malheur national wildlife refuge in south-eastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn't been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called "terrorists" and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership - or at least that of their leaders, since they weren't exactly a band of intellectuals - was only loosely linked to reality.