Hage says the reason the victory in the court of federal claims seems surprising to many people is that the public has been subjected to a generations-long campaign of disinformation about the Western lands administered by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
"The topic isn't all that complicated, once you get down to what the real issues are," he says.
"But there's been such a massive smokescreen laid for 60 years, over what this issue really is, and there's been so much propaganda put out there."
The main propaganda tool, he says, has been propagandistic manipulation of the phrase "the public lands."
Hage cites as an example a 1993 conference of environmental grantmakers.
"The top thing they said they had to do, was get the people back to using the term 'public lands' rather than 'federal lands.' because ... then the urban public would be thinking that this was something that partially belonged to them.
"What they don't want out of the bag," says Hage, "is the fact that, by law, the surface estate was passed a long time ago, in accordance with the contract that the federal government had with the states under the [Constitution's] disclaimer clause."
"All of the laws are on the books, [and] it's very, very detailed. The problem with the laws, is that we've had agencies that have been operating, for years, in defiance of those -- and a massive effort, through the environmental movement, to confuse the issue."
"All of these grazing lands are in the form of allotments, and 'allotment' is a legal term," argues Hage.
The West's grazing allotments, he says, resulted from the same process as other property recognitions: the government recognized the prior appropriation settlers had made by beneficial use and issued licenses.
"The Supreme Court acknowledged that license had been created relative to grazing clear back in February, 1890," says Hage.
"The next process after that [was] the classification of the lands ...done basically through the act of June 25, 1910, and the act of Dec. 29, 1916 [for] the lands in the forest reserves, later called national forests."
When the forest lands underwent classification, says Hage, grazing allotments were created in those lands in accord with prior beneficial use.
Then in 1934 the same process was followed on the rest of the open lands in the West. Grazing allotments were created on the non-Forest Service lands under the Grazing Service, later renamed the Bureau of Land Management.
"So wherever a grazing allotment exists," says Hage, "the United States was disposing of these lands" in what, legally, is called the 'split estate.'
"The United States was holding onto the mineral estate [which] was to be disposed of separate from the surface estate. [And] with the creation of grazing allotments, the surface estate was conveyed by the government into private hands."