Mike Noel doffs his cowboy hat as he rounds up the wayward calves on his ranch just outside the Southern Utah town of Kanab.

It is hot and dusty in the summer sun, but the battle that the 62 year old rancher and Republican state legislator is saddle up for, pits his state against the nation’s capital.

“You’ve got a federal government that is stopping us from even developing our own private lands and our state trust lands here in Utah,” he laments, saying there is “way too much control from a federal bureaucracy from 2,000 miles away that has no idea what our lifestyle is about here. It’s really caused us great problems here in the state of Utah and throughout the West.”

That is why Utah officials say they are fighting back.

Noel supports a new state law, signed by fellow Republican Governor Gary Herbert, that calls for the state to use the power of eminent domain to claim federal land. Eminent domain is routinely used by state and local governments to force the sale of private land for public projects, and even for private development. But in this case, Utah officials are turning the tables to return what they say, is theirs.

“We’re not out here to destroy these lands, we’re out here to develop them in a responsible manner,” he says. The land “is beautiful, and we want people to come… we want to mitigate impact but we want to use it in a multi-use fashion,” charging that politicians who oppose the efforts “are held captive by this radical left environmental community that does not want to see any development.”

What has so riled up some in the beehive state, is the fact that the federal government controls almost 70% of the state’s land. Only  21.2% of Utah is privately owned, and state officials have taken the step of passing the law to try to take control of some of the land that is now off limits.

“We want to make sure we can access land that we have ownership in,” Governor Herbert told Fox News. “Eminent domain could be used to make sure we have access. Some of the properties that are not being utilized by the public ought to be put back into private ownership.”

Sitting in his ornate office in the state capitol in Salt Lake City, the Governor rolls out a map that shows the overwhelming amount of land controlled by D.C. The eminent domain law, he says, is “born out of some frustration with the federal government controlling so much of our land mass…The federal government is encroaching a little too much into the areas of state responsibility and it’s time for us to push back a little bit.”

But others say the law is misguided.

“There is a tradition in this state of being defiant towards the federal government,” notes Utah law professor Patrick Shea, a former head of the federal government’s Bureau of Land Management, under President Clinton.

Shea thinks the law’s supporters are “creating a movement in their own mind to have other states step up to the federal government and say we can do these things better than you can,” and that the effort is unworkable.

But the Governor says the result of so much federal control is that the people of Utah suffer and the imbalance needs to be rectified.

“When you have public land, you don’t get property tax and in Utah property tax helps fund education…the funding for schools and education is stifled. We get payments in lieu of taxes, but that’s like getting ten cents on the dollar.”

“I think the legality of this is in question,” says University of Utah law professor Robert Keiter, who believes the law will prove to be unconstitutional. “This would appear to be a statement bill -where the state is expressing frustration with the federal government’s management.”

If the law is challenged, and the Governor Herbert expects that it will be, Keiter says he’s “fairly certain that the courts would strike down the Utah law. The state is asserting authority that it really doesn’t have over the federal government.” But the Governor is confident the state will prevail.

A prime target of the law could be a portion of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a vast stretch of unending vistas and natural wilderness with some of the most breathtaking landscape in the nation. It lies in the southern part of the state, and is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together. Estimates say roughly $1 trillion worth of coal reserves lie under part of the land, but for now exploring any of it is out of the question. While environmentalists and others praise the federal protection that was enacted by President Bill Clinton in 1996, the Governor sees nothing wrong with the state being able to at least explore a portion of it.

“The Grand Staircase-Escalante is a significant grab by the federal government,” charges Herbert, noting that it contains “really good coal…the kind of coal we ought to be using and clearly as we are developing cleaner coal technology…what we see happening in the gulf just amplifies the need to have opportunities inland for energy development. Taking that out of production is a significant blow to the economic opportunity of Utah and the energy stability of America.”

But others say not one inch of the federal land should be touched and that any attempt at mining there would be folly and ruin one of the nation’s most valued natural resources.

“You are talking about 120 ton behemoth trucks that will have to haul this stuff and there will be constant traffic,” notes Shea about the currently pristine and quiet landscape primarily visited by tourists. He says the result would be an “incredibly beautiful landscape” that would end up “tarnished.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior, which administers federal lands, tells Fox News that the agency is “reviewing the legislation.”

But Noel insists it represents a chance for the state to decide its own destiny.

“There’s a middle ground that we can take here,” he says, predicting without the ability of Utah to use more of its land, the future “is going to be very, very difficult for my children and my grandchildren to make a living. We say the biggest export we have in Kane county -in rural Utah- is our children, because there aren’t jobs here…It’s going to be tough for my kids and grandkids, I feel for them.”

FOX News’ Becky Diamond contributed to this report.