# American Stewards of Liberty A two-person nonprofit in Georgetown, Texas that functions as the organizational hub of the campaign against federal land conservation — and specifically as the engine of the county-by-county opposition to the [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]]. Its significance is wildly out of proportion to its size. An organization operating on roughly $320,000 a year, most of it salaries paid to the two people who run it, produced the model resolution language adopted by more than a hundred county governments, and supplied the framing that fifteen Republican governors, seventy-eight members of Congress, and two chambers of Congress repeated back nearly verbatim. It is the cleanest available case study in **leverage without scale**. ## Leadership and lineage **Margaret Byfield** is executive director; **Dan Byfield** is chief executive. Margaret is the daughter of **E. Wayne Hage**, the Nevada rancher whose twenty-six-year takings litigation made him the legal martyr of [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] Wave II and whose 1989 book *Storm Over Rangelands* supplied the movement's "private rights in federal lands" doctrine. She quotes him as the organization's founding premise: *"Either you have the right to own property, or you are property."* She founded **Stewards of the Range** in 1992 — during the county supremacy wave — and merged it with the **American Land Foundation** in 2009 to create ASL. Dan Byfield is a registered lobbyist for the Texas Farm Bureau and Farm Credit Bank of Texas. The lineage matters more than the org chart. ASL is not a new organization responding to a new policy; it is Wave II of the Sagebrush Rebellion, inherited by the next generation and pointed at a new target. The tactical repertoire came with it intact. ## Method: coordination as a business model ASL's product is not persuasion at scale. It is **template distribution through an existing county-government network**, plus a consulting practice attached to it. **The template.** ASL publishes model county resolution language and a printed field guide — the *Guide to Fight the 30 x 30 Land Grab* — instructing supporters on how to lobby county commissioners and special-district boards. Sample resolutions have been archived by the Center for Western Priorities; the field guide appears in the Kansas legislature's own committee records. **The consulting.** ASL sells county governments "coordination" services — the doctrine, descended from county supremacy, that federal agencies must coordinate their management plans with local government. Reporting has documented contracts of roughly **$500,000 with Kane County, Utah** and roughly **$200,000 with Chaves County, New Mexico** (2016–2021). County taxpayers are, in significant part, funding the campaign conducted in their name — the same structure the American Lands Council used to sell transfer legislation in the 2010s. **The claims.** In ASL's own words, 30x30 is an "unconstitutional land grab" with "no science or data to justify permanently preserving 30 percent of America's land and oceans"; existing protections already exceed projected losses; and the real endgame is Half-Earth — 50 percent by 2050. The organization names three "international initiatives underlying 30x30": the 2019 *Global Deal for Nature* paper, the Half-Earth Project, and a 2021 IUCN resolution. The argument is a slippery slope, resting on the older [[Agenda 21]] conspiracy substrate that the American Policy Center and allied groups had spent a decade attaching to any UN-adjacent land-use policy — the same [[New World Order]] frame that later produced the [[15-Minute City Conspiracy]]. ## On the numbers — treat ASL's counts as ASL's claims ASL advertises **"over 160 county resolutions from 16 states,"** including 70-plus in Nebraska and fourteen named Oklahoma counties. **No independent registry of these resolutions exists**, and contemporaneous press counts were substantially lower: | Source | Date | Count | |---|---|---| | E&E News | 2021 | "more than 70 local governments across 12 states" | | Texas Observer | Sept 2022 | "dozens," including 7 Texas counties | | Roll Call, quoting Ricketts | Feb 2022 | 65 of Nebraska's 93 counties | | ASL's own timeline | later | "over 150 counties" | | ASL's current site | current | "over 160 … from 16 states" | The first resolution is a solid anchor: **Garfield County, Colorado, February 16, 2021** — attested by ASL, E&E News, and the Texas Observer independently. Everything after that is self-reported. Counts of *state legislative* resolutions specifically opposing 30x30 could not be verified from any source at all. ## Finances 2019 total income was **$321,338**, of which **$276,651** was compensation — the Byfields drawing roughly $100,000 each. The Texas Observer reported that more than half of expenses went to payroll after 2017, that roughly **94 percent of the 2020 budget** went to Byfield salaries, and that "at least six figures" arrived from [[Koch Network]]-linked donor intermediaries. Accountable.US filed an IRS complaint on **May 21, 2021** alleging unregistered lobbying inconsistent with the organization's nonprofit status. The outcome is not publicly known. ## The network it plugged into ASL did not build a movement; it activated one. Its materials name **Nebraska Gov. [[Pete Ricketts]]** — who signed Executive Order 21-08, "Stop 30x30 — Protect Our Land & Water," on June 24, 2021, ran a statewide "Stop 30x30 Tour" with ASL, hosted a national anti-30x30 conference, and is now a US senator — along with Nebraska rancher and broadcaster Trent Loos, South Dakota state Rep. Julie K. Auch, and Kansas and Oklahoma organizers. The escalation ladder from a Georgetown, Texas office to federal policy ran in under five months: first county resolution February 16, 2021 → Congressional Western Caucus letter March 16 (18 senators, 50-plus House members) → fifteen Republican governors' letter April 21 → [[Lauren Boebert]]'s **30 x 30 Termination Act**, H.R. 3014, May 7 → Nebraska's executive order June 24. Note the institutional register was not uniform. [[Heritage Foundation]]'s critique argued the initiative lacked implementation detail and would not credit private conservation — not that it was a land grab. The Property and Environment Research Center, the free-market-environmentalist wing, actually **supported** America the Beautiful's market framing. ASL supplied the grassroots register, and the grassroots register is what the elected officials adopted. ## KB significance **1. Astroturf leverage without scale.** Two people and $320,000 moved fifteen governors. The mechanism was not mass persuasion but a distribution network built for a different fight thirty years earlier — the county commission — and a ready-made template requiring no local expertise to adopt. **2. It won by exploiting a definitional vacuum.** [[Executive Order 14008]]'s Section 216 ordered a report. It designated nothing and bound no one. But the administration refused to define "conserved," and ASL's arithmetic — 12 percent of US land conserved, 30 percent required, therefore ~400 million acres coming — was unrebuttable in the absence of a government number. **The organization did not defeat a policy; it defeated the absence of one.** **3. Movement continuity is the tell.** Stewards of the Range (1992) → American Land Foundation → ASL (2009) → the 30x30 campaign (2021), run by the daughter of the plaintiff in the movement's canonical takings case, using the tactical form its Wave II generation invented. When a new land fight opens, look for this organization before looking for a new one. --- ## See Also - [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]] — the campaign's target - [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] — the fifty-year lineage ASL inherited - [[Executive Order 14008]] — the four-sentence section ASL turned into a national threat - [[Astroturfing]] — the general form - [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] — the movement's litigation arm - [[Pete Ricketts]] — the campaign's highest-ranking elected champion