The silence is deafening. In Oregon, Washington and California the governors and most members of the congressional delegations have been silent on the crisis created by the poor management of federal lands in the West.

When the issue comes up, one will chirp about how there needs to be more “engagement” or some other sort of blather meant to divert the issue.

In fact, the level of engagement is clear. The federal government, with help and cooperation from the states and their leaders, is acre-by-acre taking over management of not just public lands but all lands in the West. The federal government owns 51 percent of the land in 11 Western states, and acts as though it owns the rest. With an agenda based on stopping farming, ranching, oil and gas exploration and mining, the federal agencies — the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Forest Service among them — have been methodically shutting down or dictating the circumstances under which farmers, ranchers and others who have built the Western economy for more than a century will be allowed to stay.

The northern spotted owl, the greater sage grouse, the gray wolf — the Mazama pocket gopher, for crying out loud — and hundreds of local “species” that need “protection” seem to be nothing more than a front to stop economic activities in the forests, fields and prairies across the West.

Yet, with one or two exceptions, we hear nothing from our governors, members of the U.S. Senate and members of the House of Representatives about this crisis. Rep. Greg Walden is a rare exception. The Oregon Republican has spoken about the oppression of the West on the floor of the House.

Oh, the others issue some press release or statement about the Bundy brothers and how they need to be kicked off the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County. As an aside, it looks to us like the FBI even fumbled the simple job of ending that siege, waiting for weeks and then killing one of the men during a traffic stop. Maybe they were sending a message to anyone else thinking of protesting, just like when a federal prosecutor charged ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond under a terrorism law that would put them in jail for five years for burning 139 federally owned acres to get rid of weeds.

But the real issue isn’t the Hammonds, the Bundys or the takeover of a couple of federal buildings in rural Oregon.

The real issue is right out the door of every rural resident. The real issue is what impact the federal and state governments will have on land you own, land you pay taxes on and land you love. The real issue is whether any bureaucrat sitting in a wood-paneled office in Washington, D.C., has the right, or the moral authority, to tell a landowner what he, or she, can or can’t do.

We want to know why governors and U.S. senators who say they represent all of the people of Washington, Oregon and California are silent on such a fundamental issue in the West. We want to know why they bow and curtsy to their urban, environmentally conscious constituents — and others around the nation — and stiff arm their rural constituents.

Oh, they cook up ways to keep rural economies on life support after allowing the feds to shut down or curtail commercial logging, mining and ranching. They set up “programs” to take scrap wood and brush and convert it into “biofuel” and call it a “green” industry while the forests become overgrown and prone to disastrous fires and lumber mills are shut down, costing thousands of good-paying jobs. That would laughable if it weren’t so pitifully transparent. Then the politicians stand around with their hands in their pockets with not so much as a peep while millions of acres of Oregon and elsewhere in the West are over managed and locked up.

We are appalled and disappointed at the way the rural West gets the shaft while the urbanites stroke checks for the campaign funds of Western politicians. For example, according to the Federal Election Commission, in the first three quarters of last year Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden received $4.54 million in campaign money. Of those donations, 368 donors from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut gave $714,742 and 261 donors from California — including one Beverly Hills family that gave $23,700 — donated a total of $418,819. Even Barbra Streisand donated. That’s about 25 percent of the total. What is he doing — or not doing, in the case of sticking up for rural Westerners — that makes the moneyed elite so willing to help fill his campaign coffers?

And don’t think this is about Wyden or Democrats only. Republicans who have stood by and let the Western economies be eviscerated are no better.

This is a call to action. This is a call for our elected representatives to stand up on their back legs and tell the elite in New York, Beverly Hills, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that the rural Western economy will not be shut down to become a playground for the rich. Tell them that millions of acres of Malheur County will not be locked up as “wilderness” and the rest of the rural Western economy will not remain under attack.

Now is the time not just to speak up but to act, to demand that our “representatives” in the state capitols and in Washington, D.C., free the rural West from burdensome over regulation, and end the attacks on farmers and ranchers, many of whom have been stewards of the land for generations.

Government officials say they want to “protect” the land. That’s not true. They want to control it, and the lives of rural Americans with it.

It’s up to our elected officials to get off their duffs and stop them.