An Overview of the Owyhee Initiative  The Owyhee Initiative
bargaining table  From a bombing range expansion to plans for a
national monument, the debate over the Owyhee Canyonlands center
on how the remote, mostly public land should be used. The range
of opinions was as varied as the dozens of groups sparring over
this immense desert country. But President Clinton's proposed
Owyhee National Monument may have started the ball rolling
toward a compromise. That's when local residents decided they
needed to come up with a plan of their own.  We started ten
years ago with the idea that Owyhee County had to solicit
various groups and organizations to come to some kind of
agreement to resolve conflicts over land use in the county. I
proposed the idea of the Owyhee Initiative because I felt that
if we started to talk and if they started to see each other as
human beings they just couldn't be icy all the time. --Fred
Grant  And so county commissioners and conservation groups,
ranchers and recreationists, the Shoshone