The current armed stand-off at Malheur National Forest in Oregon has been mostly put into the context of a right-wing militia against federal authorities.
However, this spin ignores the 30-year old fundamental ideological conflict that has gotten us to this point known as the astro-turfed Wise Use Movement.
For instance, Hammond and his son, Stephen, are scheduled to return to jail for setting huge fires on public land, but largely left off the news reports is how far this goes back.

Its important context that Hammond has been at war with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities going back to the 1970s and that he was arrested in the early 1990s for blocking a fence being built on the Refuge border. These incidents were well before the 2001 arson, for which they were convicted and for which Hammond and son are now in prison. Thus the Hammonds became hero/martyrs of the Wise Use Movement more than 20 years ago.

It also isn't widely reported what the Bundy brothers and a group of a few dozen or so militiamen and their sympathizers want.

They also want the government to hand over the 1.7 million-acre Malheur National Forest. According to OregonLive, Ryan Bundy said, "many would be willing to fight — and die, if necessary — to defend what they see as constitutionally protected rights for states, counties and individuals to manage local lands."

What we are seeing is a recycling of the same old libertarian argument that was being spun in the early 90's.
There are many complicated rationalizations behind the Wise Use Movement, most of them sound like conspiracy theories, but what they inevitably come down to is the unshakable faith that private ownership is always better than public ownership. No exceptions.
This is the central idea that must be addressed.

The dollar value of nature

"After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
- James G. Watt, 1983

Starting with the Sagebrush Rebellion, continuing with Reagan's Interior Secretary, James Watt, and the Wise Use Movement of the late 80's and early 90's, and finally with the rise of the "free market environmentalism" the Republican base keeps coming and coming for undeveloped land, and they will never stop.

The pro-privatization crowd is very open with their reasoning and logic:

Some object to privatization because they believe that our national "crown jewels" (however defined) are sacred natural treasures and that no price tag can or should be attached to them. Well, one is welcome to one's beliefs, but value is subjective. Land is worth only what people will pay for it.
[...]
If there is more money to be made by turning the Grand Canyon over to the Walt Disney Co. rather than to an eco-sensitive tourism cooperative, it simply means that the public demand for Disney's services at the Grand Canyon is greater than the public's demand for Deep Green Trail Services Inc.

This is a philosophy that sees absolutely no value in anything that can't be turned into a buck. The debate is framed so that the environmental movement is forced to argue from a moral high ground of beauty and legacy, while the opponents argue from an economically "practical" background.

It turns out that just 14 years ago, and a one hour drive away, these right-wing ideas about private property rights were put to the test.
The summer of 2002 was a drought year in the Klamath Basin.

An estimated 70,000 salmon died that year after the Bush administration "ignored its own federal biologists and divert more water from the Klamath River for farm irrigation". According to documents, the decision was made because the farmers generally voted Republican. The Bush Administration then went on to order that water continue to be diverted for another eight years.

Only 24,000 fall chinook spawned naturally in the Klamath in 2004, followed by 27,000 in 2005.

The analysis from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified low water flows as a prime culprit in a major salmon kill on the Klamath River in 2002.
Because it takes several years for salmon to reach peak reproducing age, the effects of this huge fish-kill only started in 2005 when the National Marine Fisheries Service abbreviated the commercial salmon season. It cut the income of west coast fishermen "by 50 percent".
California and Oregon Indian tribes, that have depended on salmon fishing for thousands of years, also had their fishing quotas cut back by as much as half.

The conservatives farmers and ranchers of the Klamath river basin were asserting their property rights to the water. The salmon fishermen were relying on the ocean commons, and had no property rights to assert.

Progressives, even ones who care deeply about the environment, are so focused on a few guns that they are missing the central issue in Malheur, and a chance to recast the political debate about the environmental.
At its heart, this debate is as much about economics as it is about rights.

The Tragedy of the Commons and other false paradigms

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
— English folk poem, ca. 1764

In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a Malthusian economist, wrote an extremely interesting but flawed essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. Normally a short, economics essay that lacked any actual data, nor called upon specific historical events, wouldn't be so influential. However, gave a simple (if badly flawed) argument for wealthy interests who wanted to pillage the commons.
It's been used by pro-privatization groups ever since.

The part of the essay they like to quote is this:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. This utility has one negative and one positive component.

The positive component is that the herdsman gets to graze more cattle at almost no cost to himself. The negative component is that the cost of overgrazing the commons is born by the entire community.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In a general way, Hardin's case has a great deal of truth to it.

Hardin rightly goes on to point out that the air and seas also should be considered The Commons because we can't put a fence around them. Thus they are abused for the very reasons he lists above.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers.

Furthermore, Hardin points out that trying to guilt and shame people and companies into behaving properly is a doomed effort if economic incentives encourage different behavior (something environmental groups should realize).

All of what Hardin says up to this point is mostly true. He even points out that all reform ideas are shot down because of the irrationally high standard of perfection that opponents to changes in the status quo demand.

Then he makes three mistakes.

#1. Hardin uses his logic to endorse the "injustice" of the current private property system as opposed to the "total ruin" of The Commons, without defending the assertion.
From the neolithic period up to the 16th Century, The Commons was the primary mode of economic society. It worked. Hardin uses a Malthusian argument to say that it can no longer work because there are too many people now. He puts his statement out there as if we should just accept it without trying to prove it.

#2. Hardin defends the infringement on our rights by new enclosures of the commons (aka privatization), without acknowledging the abuse and destruction this has led to in the past.

#3. Most importantly, Hardin fails to return to the point that air and oceans cannot be anything but The Commons, and thus the solution for the two most important elements of the Earth can not be solved by privatization.

To put it another way, privatization and the free market have no solution to the environmental tragedy occurring in our atmosphere and oceans, and never will.

Private enterprise cannot make a profit on something until there is scarcity. So as long as clean air is available to all, then the free market has no interest in doing anything but polluting it. The reason is because the current free market, capitalist, economic model exists to commodify natural resources and turn it into consumer goods, while externalizing expenses by doing things like trashing the planet.

However, once the atmosphere is polluted to the point that people with money can't breath, then the free market will create a solution - but only for those it can make a profit from. The poor die slowly.

We are already seeing this scenario played out with water.
Even when it comes to land, privatization is no solution. For instance, privatization of wetland areas usually means the owner will drain the wetlands for economic reasons. The community will be denied a thriving habitat for wildlife.

No solutions are actually found by the capitalist system in regards to The Commons. It only creates problems that it can then profit from.

And this argument, with all of its flaws and limits, is the BEST argument that the pro-privatization can make.
The argument only goes downhill from there because, well, even its most basic assumptions aren't true.

Why the commons will save us

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Economics, died in 2012 and we are all poorer because of it. She was a trailblazer in the field of economics, yet her findings have been largely ignored by politicians, policy makers, and the financial media. Few economists have ever even heard of her.
Why is that? Because her conclusions don't help the cause of large corporations, governments, the wealthy and powerful.

She was Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, who devoted much of her career to combing the world looking for examples where people had developed ways of regulating their use of common resources without resort to either private property rights or government intervention.

Elinor Ostrom found out what should have been obvious to anyone with an eye towards economic history - communities sharing resources not only works well, but is a natural human condition.

There is no shortage of studies to disprove the claims of the Wise Use movement and anyone who quotes from the Tragedy of the Commons.
Here are some examples:
#1. Opposition to federal land has always existed.
Upon the designation of Yellowstone in 1872, the Helena Gazette opined that the creation of Yellowstone was “a great blow to the prosperity of the towns of Bozeman and Virginia City.” Now try to explain the tens of thousands of jobs that exist only because of Yellowstone Park.
The National Parks Conservation Assoc. contracted a study in 2006 that measured the economic effect of the national park system. The results disproved the argument that extracted and exploiting the natural resources of the lands was economically "practical".

It generates more than four dollars in value to the public for every tax dollar invested by the Federal Government. In addition to that, National Parks support $13.3 billion of local private-sector economic activity and 267,000 private-sector jobs. National parks attract businesses and individuals to the local area, resulting in economic growth in areas near parks that is an average of one percent per year greater than statewide rates over the past three decades.

A 2004 study found that towns in or near designated wilderness had higher property values than those further away.
This Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument study found similar results.

Personal income from labor in Garfield County where the monument is located grew by 14 percent in the four years prior to the Grand Staircase’s establishment, but grew by 18 percent the four years after designation. At the same time unemployment fell from 12.4 percent in 1995 to 9.2 percent in 2001. In Kane County, another monument county, personal income grew 27 percent in the four years prior to the monument’s creation, and grew by 33 percent in the four after monument establishment. Unemployment there also dropped, from 8.7 percent in 1995 to 3.5 percent in 2001.

The economic value of high quality stream fishing in Montana is estimated to be worth $5.5 billion.
Around 33% of the drinking and irrigation water in the western states comes from protected lands which naturally filter the water.

#2. The debate here is larger than just the National Parks versus private enterprise. It is about the value of nature itself. In 2009 the U.N. conducted a study concerning the economic benefit that nature provides us.

Mangroves in Vietnam, it turns out, save annual expenditures on dike maintenance of more than $7 million. And in another example: it would cost $200 million to replicate the services provided by natural springs in New Zealand.
Researchers found that every hectare of coral reef—a modest area of land equal to just under two and a half acres—is worth more than $1 million annually....But what struck Sukhdev and fellow researchers were the high ratios of return when conservation projects were undertaken. With agriculture alone, addressing problems with soil consistency or water contamination would pay substantial dividends, they found—an average global rate of return of $60 for every $1 invested.

Sixty to One. Let that sink in for a moment. There is simply no comparison to returns like that in the private investment world.

It doesn't stop there. Honeybees, simply by doing what comes naturally, contributes $57 Billion annually to the economy. The dung beetle contributes $380 million annually by getting rid of manure that would otherwise attract parasites.

In fact, if you add it all up, the dollar value of nature's contributions is immense.

For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16-54 trillion (1012) per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year.

So a general estimate is that the dollar value of nature's services is twice the value of everything man produces, combined.

Given these facts, why does the corporate world still insist that natural resources must be privatized? For several reasons, all of which involve greed.

For starters, most of the economic benefits listed above are measured by what it would take for private industry to do the same job. Or to put it another way, many of those economic benefits don't immediately translate into dollars in anyone's pockets, which is the only way that the corporate world measures anything.

Second, and more importantly, the corporate world is already using and abusing the benefits that nature is giving them and there is no cost associated with it. If the world's biggest companies were held accountable for their cost of polluting and other damage to the environment, more than one-third of their profits would vanish.

The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (£1.4tn) in 2008 - a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year.
"What we're talking about is a completely new paradigm," said Richard Mattison, Trucost's chief operating officer and leader of the report team. "Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them."

It's easy for progressive to get outraged at a bunch of white guys with guns, but if you want to use an opportunity to accomplish something, now is a great time to help frame an important debate with some truth. The truth is that everything about the Sagebrush Rebellion, Wise Use Movement and whatever other corporate-sponsored, environment-raping name they invent is not just bad for the environment, it's bad economics.
You don't have to chose between the environment or jobs. Studies prove that if you chose to sacrifice the environment, you also chose to sacrifice your local economy. If progressives could get out just this one message it would be a huge victory.