Subsidized grazing won't keep the West from being subdivided and paved

By George Wuerthner
for Headwaters News

Some years ago I was living in Livingston, Mont. I regularly flew out of the Bozeman airport. Often as I drove to catch a flight, I'd notice the new houses sprouting among the mule deer winter range along the foothills of the Bridger Range like mushroom after a rain. It seemed that every time I drove to the airport there was a new house or two going up.

But Bozeman always seemed almost spacious and rural compared to Denver. Whenever I got to Denver I was appalled by the wall of houses, malls, and highways that seemed to stretch from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs.

What I saw on my flights is what most westerners encounter every day. It is this almost daily confrontation with the effects of unregulated sprawl that makes westerners — most of whom are urban dwellers — convinced that sprawl is overrunning the West.

Despite all the development along the Front Range, only 530,000 acres of Colorado's 66 million acres are affected by development. By comparison 33 million acres, or half of the state, is grazed ...

No group has capitalized upon this fear more than the livestock industry and its supporters, who suggest that if ranching isn't supported, even subsidized to a greater degree than it is already, the West will be paved over from horizon to horizon with Wal-Marts and new subdivisions with names like Shining Mountains Ranch estates.

I once held similar convictions, until one day on another flight from Bozeman to Denver. Since it was an exceptionally clear day, instead of reading as I usually do, I just stared out the window. Again as we left Bozeman, I looked down on the new subdivisions, but at the point in the flight where I usually buried my nose in my book, I continued watching the ground as we flew.

After just a few minutes flight we had left Bozeman behind, and with it we left all the development. Indeed, for the rest of the thousand miles to Denver, I didn't see anything that could even be remotely called a town, much less sprawl, until we descended over the Front Range to land at Denver airport.

All we flew over for nearly the entire flight was miles and miles of open space. But it wasn't unmanipulated space. Nearly every acre we passed over was grazed by domestic livestock. It was then I came to understand a geographical and ecological fact. Sprawl does occur in the West, but it affects far less of the West than livestock production.

Since that first epiphany, I have come to learn a lot more about the relative impacts of sprawl and livestock production. While the negative impacts associated with sprawl are fairly obvious and don't need repeating here, we should bear in mind that livestock production is hardly a benign use of the land.

To raise a cow in the West often includes things like predator control and irrigated crop production. Cattle hooves compact soils and trash riparian areas. Livestock transmit diseases to wildlife. Livestock are a major source for the spread of weeds and changes in ecological processes, such as fire. There is also competition between native species and domestic animals for forage and space.

Whatever impacts are associated with urbanization and sprawl — and there are many — they are dwarfed by the cumulative impacts of livestock production.

Despite all the development along the Front Range, only 530,000 acres of Colorado's 66 million acres are affected by development. By comparison 33 million acres, or half of the state, is grazed, and another 4.5 million acres are under irrigated agriculture, primarily production of livestock forage, including hay.

Dare I mention that despite the urban sprawl of the Front Range, the majority of Colorado's water does not go towards urban uses, but for irrigated agriculture for livestock feed, with consequent huge impacts on aquatic ecosystems.

Water withdrawals and water storage reservoirs constructed for livestock irrigation needs fragment aquatic ecosystems and threaten most of the West's native fish and other aquatic life.

In lightly settled Montana, where more than 96 percent of the state has fewer than 6 people per square mile, growth is nearly all centered around the state's largest urban populations. Most of the state is essentially uninhabited, but nevertheless, impacted by livestock production.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey's analysis for Montana, only 0.17 percent of the state is developed, while nearly 70 percent of the state is impacted by livestock production. Despite Montana's "vast wide open spaces," everything from gray wolf to sage grouse to blackfooted ferret and Montana grayling are in trouble.

If sprawl were a problem, why aren't these species thriving on the 96 percent of Montana where no one lives?

Even if one doesn't believe that ranching is harmful to ecosystem integrity, ranching isn't protecting open space. It is an illusion. There simply wouldn't be an issue about sprawl at all if ranching was an effective strategy for controlling sprawl.

Not withstanding that sprawl is hardly ubiquitous, that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to control, guide and limit its effects. However, reliance upon ranching to preserve public values is a flawed strategy that takes a passive approach to land preservation that depends entirely upon individual landowner decisions. Rising land values fuels subdivisions and has doomed ranching as a viable economic activity in the West.

Fortunately we don't have to rely upon ranchers to save the West. There is an entire toolbox of proven, active land conservation mechanisms that work. They include conservation easements or outright fee purchase of biologically critical lands, as well as zoning of lands that guides and limits development to as small an area as possible.

Do we need to accept the dichotomy of condos or cows? No. We should accept neither. Let's limit and restrict the negative impacts of both cows and condo. When we begin to do that, we'll be on our way towards a West that provides enough room for all species, not just one that goes moo.

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