FEATURE ARTICLE
- April
14, 2003
Monument presents a management morass
by Mitch Tobin
In Arizona’s Ironwood Forest, recreationists,
ranchers and illegal immigrants vie for space
TUCSON, Ariz. — When President Bill Clinton’s pen stroke
created the Ironwood Forest National Monument on the edge of this
desert city, it received a relatively warm welcome from many residents
here. But if Ironwood has offered one lesson since then, it’s
that with the West’s population on the rise, even a monument
with public support can turn into a hornet’s nest.
Clinton’s proclamation, delivered on June 9, 2000, gave new
protection to one of the most biologically diverse sections of the
Sonoran Desert — a vulnerable ecosystem that has been steadily
encroached on by suburbia. But it’s also made the monument’s
craggy mountains and ancient trees more popular with both locals
and out-of-state tourists, raising fears that the new monument will
be “loved to death.”
Some visitors come to Ironwood to ride 4x4s, off-road vehicles and
dirt bikes. Others come for target practice with handguns and high-powered
rifles. These activities don’t mix well, and even relatively
low-impact activities, such as hiking, may soon be restricted to
protect the monument’s rare wildlife species.
As Ironwood approaches its third birthday, the Bureau of Land Management
is just now preparing to draft its management plan for the 129,000-acre
monument. The agency says it will stick to its multiple-use tradition,
attempting to balance environmental protection with the increasing
demand for public access. But that may be easier said than done.
“There are no cookbook solutions or quick fixes to these things,”
says monument manager Tony Herrell.
Competing uses
As with the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah,
Ironwood will continue to host some livestock grazing; Clinton’s
declaration preserved current grazing leases and continues to regulate
them by existing laws. But with more visitors, ranchers may have
a more difficult time.
One immediate threat to ranchers is local residents and their guns.
Stray bullets have defoliated hillsides, whizzed by ranchers and
prompted calls for a total ban on shooting at Ironwood. Rancher
Jesus Arvizu, whose family settled in the area in 1847, has put
up “No Shooting” signs only to see them shot down. He
says 24 of his cattle have been shot in recent months.
“I’m not against hunting or anything,” says Arvizu,
who ranches about 40,000 acres within Ironwood, “but when
you’re just out here drinking beers and shooting up signs,
you call that safe?” Another unresolved issue is how much
grazing to allow on monument land designated as critical habitat
for the endangered pygmy owl, a species that has stalled development
in parts of urban Tucson (HCN, 10/22/01: Pygmy Owls lose one in
court) .
Hikers, too, may have to make concessions for imperiled wildlife,
such as the desert bighorn sheep. Many environmental activists support
closing popular hiking trails that go through areas where the sheep
breed and lamb, pointing out that sheep herds in nearby mountains
have suffered after hikers and their dogs moved in.
Regulations on recreation might help the bighorn sheep, but other
management restrictions in high-profile areas like the monument
can sometimes hurt the species, says Brian Dolan of the Arizona
Desert Bighorn Sheep Society. In Tucson’s signature mountain
range, the Santa Catalinas, opposition to prescribed burning allowed
brush to grow thicker, creating hiding places for predators and
contributing to the local bighorn herd’s demise, he says.
“I can just see the uproar if we want to do prescribed burns
of ironwood trees in Ironwood National Monument,” Dolan says.
“We’re going to get into the mindset that we need overly
restrictive preservation measures, and end up doing more harm than
good.”
Another kind of road war
So far, local BLM officials have earned praise from environmentalists
for taking conservation seriously. The BLM is forcing the Phoenix-based
Asarco’s Silver Bell mine, which is nearly surrounded by Ironwood,
to remove an illegal road, pipeline and power line from the monument
and revegetate the area. Asarco had asked for a land swap that would
have given it 400 acres of monument land.
But activists are getting mixed messages from Washington. Clinton’s
Ironwood proclamation limited off-road vehicles and other motorized
uses to existing roads. Interior Secretary Gale Norton has since
given individual monument managers more discretion over road closures,
making it possible for the BLM to keep user-created roads and trails
open to the public.
That may be a significant change at Ironwood. The monument already
has more than 600 miles of roads that fragment wildlife habitat,
says Julie Sherman of the Sierra Club. “Our argument is that
nothing that was created since the proclamation should be there,”
she says. Parties involved in the road issue say some routes will
inevitably be closed in the management plan, especially redundant
roads and those crossing sensitive habitat. But the BLM is unlikely
to close all user-created routes, as some environmentalists would
like.
Many of the newest roads have been created by one of Ironwood’s
biggest, but illegal, user groups: people coming north from Mexico.
Although Ironwood is nearly 60 miles from the border, it lies at
the north end of a popular route through the Tohono O’odham
reservation. Much of the illegal human traffic shifted to routes
such as this after enforcement was stepped up in border cities in
the mid-1990s.
Immigrants and drug smugglers are increasingly using the monument
as a transfer point, blazing new roads that are later used by legal
visitors. “It’s very innocent for anyone to come out
there later and travel on one of those road established by smugglers,”
says Ironwood manager Herrell.
Ironwood has just two law enforcement officers to patrol its 295
square miles. They’ve been shot at and had their vehicles
rammed by smugglers, Herrell says. Additional officers have sometimes
been brought in, but monument officials want more help on a permanent
basis.
But some local environmentalists are dubious about how much support
monument managers will receive from Washington. “There hasn’t
been a follow-up by the Bush administration to support management
of these monuments,” says Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist
for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Their
vision would be for the monuments to exist on paper only.”
Mitch Tobin is the environment writer at the Arizona Daily Star
in Tucson.
