Cattle on the run

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
March 13, 2002

Allan Savory's theories have been debated for decades and they're still far from universally accepted. Witness competing columns a month apart in High Country News: intensive is better, or the best grazing is no grazing.

But perhaps the future lies in one of Savory's last paragraphs:

The U.S. Forest Service is currently collaborating with the Savory Center to see if we can establish a national learning site in Idaho where we can encourage environmental organizations, as well as livestock operators, to work together to reverse the land degradation that is of such concern to all of us.

In the meantime, it would seem that open animosity isn't going away anytime soon.

The pendulum may be swinging back from the Clinton-era emphasis on conservation, with the sacking of Idaho's BLM director, reportedly at the hand of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and ostensibly because she angered ranchers and motorized recreationists.

Score one for ranchers.

Environmentalists have started to outbid ranchers for grazing rights on state lands in Utah, Idaho, New Mexico and Arizona, a practice most recently upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court last November.

The tactic has removed cattle from about 100,000 acres of Western range, a minuscule fraction of the 30 million or so acres open to grazing, but environmentalists have claimed public relations victories, arguing that the court decisions have highlighted the subsidized nature of grazing on all public lands.

On the flip side, leery ranchers in southern Utah and northern Arizona have promised to sue if environmentalists or federal managers reduce grazing allotments in the Grand Staircase-Esalante National Monument.

Still ranchers are getting squeezed, even if at times it's voluntarily. Wyoming ranchers agreed to move their sheep and cattle off key grizzly and bighorn range in a landmark agreement that both sides hailed as a hallmark in consensus.

But New Mexico ranchers are protesting area tribes' proposal to raise bison on national grassland allotments that previously had belonged to cattlemen.

In the adamantly non-voluntary category, activist Jon Marvel's Western Watershed Project has appealed BLM leases on 250,000 acres in northwest Colorado, it's first attack in Colorado in its avowed campaign to end grazing on public land.

The appeals said grazing not only destroys plant communities, but ranchers kill predators and their livestock destroys fish habitat. Ranchers countered that so much of Colorado is public land that the industry can't survive without federal grazing rights.

One of the most indisputable impacts of grazing on native species is the decline of the West's sage grouse. Denuded habitat means less food and scant protection for the birds or their eggs.

And while the sage grouse looms as the spotted owl of the interior West, it represents a spectrum of other disappearing plant and animal species that used to be common in the sagebrush ecosystem.

Not everyone is engulfed in conflict; in addition to Savory, some see common interests.

The BLM's plan for Moffat County, Colo., opposed by Marvel and company, may be doomed as written, but it has the framework for a precedent-setting approach to management -- oversight by a local trust -- and an alternative to chronic antagonism.

And farther south, the Santa Fe-based Quivera Foundation has about 850 members, about evenly divided among ranchers, environmentalists and government staffers. They endorse what they call the New Ranch and a holistic approach that includes intensive grazing -- but only sometimes, in some places.

And just to depart with an even more disturbing thought, some of Quivera's member scientists say global warming has wrought more changes upon the Western range in the past 25 years than grazing or the lack of it, and those effects will only accelerate.

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