"Ten years after the weeklong confrontation, the federal government faces paralysis over how to oversee a desert ecosystem."
"Beneath a crisp blue sky, a man on horseback dressed in a denim jacket and black hat drives a half-dozen cattle through a sandy wash beneath a freeway overpass in the desert near Bunkerville, Nevada.
The moment is part of a video shared on YouTube by Arden Bundy in mid-February, one of several showing members of his family rounding up stray cows. The scene recalls the much more tumultuous events of April 2014, when armed anti-government activists and Bureau of Land Management agents clashed in a tense standoff — also about cattle — under the same rural Nevada overpass.
On the 10-year anniversary of that weeklong incident — when BLM agents tried and failed to round up cattle for auction to settle nearly $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and trespass fines incurred by Bundy Ranch, the family’s business — it’s also evidence of the federal government’s paralysis over how to oversee a fragile desert ecosystem.
Remarkably little has changed. Bundy cattle continue to roam on federal lands without permits and in areas long since retired from use as grazing allotments, partially to protect vulnerable wildlife. Multiple administrations have come and gone without renewed efforts to seize the cattle, and there is no indication any penalties have been paid."
Advertisement 
