The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a 187,757-acre haven for greater sandhill cranes and other native birds in eastern Oregon, is usually a pretty peaceful place. But its calm was shattered Jan. 2 when Ammon Bundy and a group of armed men broke into and occupied a number of federal buildings on the refuge, vowing to fight should the government try to arrest them.

Their insurrectionary goal appears to be, simply put, to destroy the national system of public lands - our forests, parks and refuges - that was developed in the late 19th century to conserve these special landscapes and the crit...