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Grazing reformers rallied around
a landmark book,
but the West has more complicated issues at stake |
By Todd Wilkinson
for Headwaters News |
| The book more or less begins
this way:
"Myth" Numero Uno: Ranchers Are
Good Stewards Of The Land.
"Myth" Number Two: Rangeland conditions on more
than half-a-billion acres of publicly owned real estate
in the West ARE IMPROVING.
"Myth" Number Three: Livestock BENEFITS Wildlife.
"Myth" Number Four: Public Lands Grazing Supports
Family Ranchers.
"Myth" Number Seven: Ranching Is the Foundation
of Rural Economics.
In all, there are nine myths laid down like
a manifesto.
But long before anti-livestock activists George Wuerthner
and his co-editor Mollie Matteson penned these opening salvos
in "Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the
American West, (Island Press)" they knew they were dispensing
fightin' words.
As an outspoken environmentalist, ecologist, and writer who
has helped lead the campaign to abolish livestock grazing
on public lands, Wuerthner (who is married to Ms. Matteson)
has received threatening phone calls in the middle of the
night, menacing letters from anonymous antagonists, and worried
about his personal safety.
The West, after all, is the legendary kingdom of "shoot,
shovel, and shut up."
It's an uncompromising work that emphasizes
things that need to be said, and it's become something of
an operator's manual for the West's anti-grazing faction.
But arguably, it's not entirely fair, the issues are not that
simple, and in some circles, the book and the tenets it espouses
are more likely to create barriers to restoration than they
are to resolve them.
To understand the full effect of the stir
Wuerthner's and Matteson's book has caused, imagine conservationists
walking into a rural, honky-tonk saloon on a Saturday night,
filled with patrons crowned by Stetsons, and then shouting
assertions such as those above at the top of their lungs.
Insulting? Demeaning? Likely to incite a brawl and broken
noses? Absolutely. But this was precisely Wuerthner's intent
with Welfare Ranching, to lure agrarians into a public policy
argument he believes they can not win.
He entreats the reader: "Next time you go out to visit
your public lands and encounter a fence you must cross, a
gate you must open, a campground fouled with cow manure, a
trout stream trampled by cows, a hay meadow rather than a
natural wetland, weeds instead of native grasses, cattle and
sheep instead of prairie dogs, remember, this is your land.
Do you like what you see?"
In the 346 pages of this hard-hitting
polemic, Wuerthner and a few dozen guest authors also hoped
to seize the attention of steak-eating, cowboy-loving Americans;
to pry loose their romantic attachment to the mystique of John
Wayne; and to expose what Wuerthner and Matteson assert are
the real costs — ecological, economic, and human health
— of turning cattle and sheep loose on 525 million acres
of public land in the West (an area roughly equal to a quarter
of the total U.S. land mass, not counting Alaska).
To use a war term analogy coined for the U.S. bombing strategy
in Iraq, Welfare Ranching wields its own version of "shock
and awe" — an exploding arsenal of breathtaking rhetorical
statistics combined with photographs of blighted and biologically
impoverished landscapes to create a devastating indictment of
the West's most sacred of cows.
Just as the presentation of the Stars and Stripes on horseback
elicits patriotic tears to well up in the eyes of rodeo goers,
Wuerthner and Matteson (who were enlisted to complete the book
by retail clothing guru and Deep Ecology conservationist Doug
Tompkins) knew that by challenging the heritage of ranchers
they would be accused of committing cultural treason.
This is not necessarily a diatribe against
beef production and consumption. Wuerthner, who admits to
eating game animals, chicken and fish, says the West is largely
desert, and a desert is no place to raise cattle.
"Livestock grazing in the arid West is as outmoded as
is whaling in today's oceans," Tompkins writes in the
foreword. "It is a thing of the past, a 'tradition' whose
practitioners are still immersed in a livelihood in which
ecological reality has yet to sink in."
No other single commercial activity has negatively compromised
more public land, fouled more fresh water, and caused greater
declines of species in the West than livestock grazing, Wuerthner
asserts. In his biocentric argument, these facts alone are
damning enough, and his authors piece together study after
study making the case.
However, his attack takes on its greatest furor when he sets
out to reveal how American taxpayers have unknowingly subsidized
much of the destruction, all to prop up what he says is the
myth of the self-sufficient mom-and-pop ranching lifestyle
coupled with a thoroughly inefficient — and nonsensical
— way of exploiting public lands to convert grass into
beef for the dinner table.
Here's why Wuerthner, using the argument of a fiscal conservative,
is incredulous at the notion of western public lands being
used as private feedlots. (Of course, the title of the book
itself — Welfare Ranching — should provide a hint):
- We, American taxpayers, permit about 22,000
ranchers (the number is decreasing every month) to graze
hundreds of millions of acres of public lands at rates that
are below market value;
- We decimated 60 million bison to clear a
path for cattle;
- We allow ranchers to dam and take precious
water out of streams to grow alfalfa to feed livestock;
- We tolerate pollution caused by bodily wastes
from domestic animals that runs into waterways;
- We help underwrite the costs of costly predator
control campaigns on public lands at the same time citizens
are paying millions of dollars to recover species such as
grizzlies and wolves;
- We give rural ranchers breaks on the taxes
they pay in order to ostensibly preserve open space on their
adjacent private land (even though many landowners turn
around and sell to real estate developers);
- We help subsidize crop disaster relief during
periods of drought or snowstorms when livestock die;
- We help subsidize the costs of installing
fencing on public lands to better manage cattle and sheep;
- We pay the costs for the Forest Service,
Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and
other agencies to hire range managers to monitor grazing
activity;
- We encourage livestock to eat grasses that
otherwise would have be available to wildlife;
- We tolerate livestock trampling stream banks,
which silts up rivers and causes declines in wild fish populations
(that citizens also are spending millions of dollars trying
to save);
- We have allowed ranchers to supplant native
plants with exotic feed species, which in turn have exacerbated
the threat of catastrophic range fires;
- We kill bison exposed to brucellosis (given
to them by infected cattle decades ago) for wandering outside
Yellowstone National Park, even though the risk of disease
transmission to cattle is remarkably low.
If consumers were asked to pay the real cost
for public land beef reaching grocery store shelves, Wuerthner
believes the price would be in the hundreds of dollars per
pound. Instead, taxpayers foot the bill, but for what?
"The elimination of livestock grazing on public lands
in the West would be of very little consequence to the overall
meat supply of the nation," Wuerthner says, noting that
Missouri grows more beef than Montana, and Louisiana is a
bigger cattle producer than Wyoming, the legendary Cowboy
State.
"The number of permittees who would face financial ruin
for the sole reason that their public lands grazing had ended
is likely very small — and far lower than the number
displaced by the typical corporate downsizing move."
Across the West, recent reports from watchdog groups show
that traditional agriculture in many, many counties wouldn't
exist without federal and state taxpayers filling local government
coffers and subsidizing production.
Moreover, far from benefiting mom and pop ranchers, public
lands grazing heavily favors the largest corporate producers
who benefit mightily from the tax breaks.
Consider: In some parts of Nevada, it takes 250 acres or more
to support one cow for a single year. Consider: 90 percent
of all BLM lands, 69 percent of Forest Service lands, and
several national wildlife refuges and national parks are open
to livestock grazing.
Just 16 percent of BLM permittees control 76 percent of the
animal unit month allotments, while 2,000 mom-and-pop permittees
control less than 0.15 percent of BLM forage.
Wuerthner says ranchers maintain a disproportionate amount
of political clout. They are few in number, yet they continue
to control state legislatures and have politicians pandering
to their needs.
As incendiary as Welfare Ranching's assertions are, the rebuttals
are equally as shrill. Range Magazine — the anti-environmentalist
organ of Wise Use ranchers — suggests that Wuerthner
and his associates are guilty of advocating a campaign of
"cultural cleansing," intended to wipe all cattle
and sheep growers from the map.
Wise Users referred to Welfare Ranching as "the Bible"
explaining "the terms of surrender" being handed
to agrarians. They point to Wuerthner and his colleagues with
the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign (which seeks to
end all public grazing through a buy-out program) as heretics.
Over the past two decades, ignited by the "Cattle Free
By 1993" slogan, the debate has been driven on both sides
by the classic "Yea, that may be true, but ..."
style of argument. Clearly, agriculture in the West has been
on the wane.
During the Clinton years, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
and BLM chief Jim Baca attempted to address grazing reform
and below-cost fees charged to ranchers on public lands with
hearings held around the West, but were forced into retreat
when the president recognize it was playing badly politically
and was re-stoking the Sagebrush Rebellion.
(Some say it helped fuel the Democrats' loss of control in
Congress and set the stage for a large number of Western states
to land firmly in control of Republicans).
The issue of livestock production on public lands in the West,
at its most fundamental level, isn't really about growing
cattle and sheep, given that there are other places in the
U.S. eminently more economical to do it.
This debate is really about a choice: Should Americans subsidize
the existence of farmers and ranchers on both public and private
lands, out of recognition for the open space they provide,
the habitat they share with wildlife, the down-home "values"
they project, and the water they legally own and return to
the streams in a clean condition?
Wuerthner says no. He says the "cows vs. condos"
argument, for example, is a false dichotomy; that placating
ranchers is not going to slow the suburbanization of the West
because at the end of the day it is the rising value of land
— and the money being dangled in front of ranchers by
developers — not their personal conservation ethic that
will determine whether they remain in business.
If Westerners really want to save open space, they need to
embrace planning and zoning. Far more plants and animals have
been crushed by cattle hooves, he says, than asphalt.
"Despite all the development along the Front Range, only
530,000 acres of Colorado's 66 million acres are affected
by development," he has argued. "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."
Further, he says that water withdrawals and storage reservoirs
constructed for livestock and irrigation fragment aquatic
ecosystems and threaten most of the West's native fish.
In sparsely populated Montana, which covers a huge area but
has less than one million residents, there are fewer than
six people per square mile. Sprawl is concentrated around
half-a-dozen larger cities. Only 0.17 percent of the state
is "developed" but nearly 70 percent 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," he adds. "If sprawl were
a problem, why aren't these species thriving on the 96 percent
of Montana where no one lives?"
As bad as things are purported to be in Welfare Ranching,
conservationists who cut their teeth working with ranchers,
on behalf of organizations like The Nature Conservancy and
Trust for Public Land, say things could be far worse if cattle
producers were booted off the public range and spurred to
sell their private tracts.
They create a vision of accelerated sprawl and land development
in the middle of prime private land wildlife habitat and scenic
open space.
In a peer-reviewed paper titled Ranching The View: Subdivisions
Versus Agriculture, published in Conservation Biology, authors
Richard L. Knight, George N. Wallace, and William E. Riebsame,
point to the phenomenon of ranches being carved up into multiple
ranchettes, resulting in huge costs for public services placed
on taxpayers and irreversible fragmentation of habitat and
open space in the river valleys that are the biological lifebloods
of the West.
"We feel that rural subdivisions may be affecting a larger
percentage of the landscape and may be having more negative
effects than Wuerthner suggests," they wrote. "This
is especially true in the western United States where there
are many public lands and where subdivisions next to public-and
private-land protected areas have increased dramatically."
They make an excellent point. The current controversy surrounding
the Bush administration's Forest Health Initiative proposes
spending more than $1 billion to "fireproof" (in
some places, extensively log) tracts near residential subdivisions
adjacent to national forests on private land that were former
cattle ranches.
They argue that incentives need to be provided to keep agrarians
on the land being better stewards.
Indeed, Montana, as with much of the West, is caught between
two demographic juggernauts: population growth along the mountains
and depopulation in the rural prairie. While the first is
a major obstacle to saving biodiversity, the latter presents
opportunity for restoration.
Cattle-freers say 300 million acres of the West could be restored
and returned to the wild with the removal of cattle. Their
plan would pay grazing permittees $175 per animal unit month
— the amount of forage it takes to feed a cow and calf
for a month, which is about three times the going market rate.
The $1 billion-plus buyout, financed through the U.S. Treasury,
perhaps using a one-time hit of the Land and Water Conservation
Fund, would end public lands grazing once and for all.
They claim that many ranchers, who are financially strapped,
welcome the idea.
Wuerthner, as well as his critics, keenly know the greatest
mortal enemies of livestock grazing are not predators, but
the economic and physical inefficiency of land use; the explosion
of human population in the river valleys, fluctuating market
conditions shaped by consumer dining habits, monopolistic
practices at the slaughterhouses and packing plants, and competition
from foreign nations and feedlots in eastern states.
However, for many ranchers, survival is about more than money.
They have their pride, their ancestry, their kids, and their
dignity on the line.
As for the "myths" about public lands livestock
grazing that Welfare Ranching seeks to shatter, including
the first — that "ranchers are good stewards of
the land" — the book largely ignores the way ranching
is perceived as the fabric that holds rural communities together
and shapes their post-frontier identifies.
Whether part of some mystical folklore or not; whether invented
by Hollywood or not; whether real or fictitious, local westerners
BELIEVE in the myth.
And. it's fair to say, probably, that most Americans—East
Coast, West Coast, Midwest, Deep South — possess a psychological
affinity for the lonesome cowboy.
Welfare Ranching is an important, provocative, paradigm-shifting
book for the start of a new century, but if it has one glaring
failure, it's the tone of human indifference and absence of
— indeed refusal to acknowledge — "ranchers"
who are sincere in their efforts to advance biologically-focused
stewardship.
I can cite numerous examples where progressive ranchers are
searching for biologically directed compromise and ways of
seeing ranchland as more than vessels holding domestic cattle
and sheep.
Here's something else that has always bothered me: How can
environmentalists ever expect rural folk to stop demonizing
animals like lobos and grizzly bears when they themselves
look upon agrarians without respect?
Several ranchers have told me it's not what Wuerthner's book
says; it's how the arguments are set up. They don't disagree
that agricultural practices have been heavy-handed, and that
today there are livestock operators, large and small in scale,
whose ongoing abuses of the land provide plenty of fodder
for anti-grazing activists to use as ammunition in turning
public opinion against them.
When agrarians feel treated like bumpkins — as Welfare
Ranching deliberately sets out to do — insulting their
intelligence, and claiming that Grandpa and Grandma Cartwright,
far from being romantic icons, are characterized instead as
wanton rapers and pillagers of the West's natural riches,
they dig in the heels of their cowboy boots and fight back.
Unfortunately, within certain elements of both the conservation
and agricultural communities, where one stands on livestock
grazing has become a litmus test for loyalty and political
party affiliation. Neither allows much room for thinking somewhere
in between, and in the eyes of the zealots, the radical center
is identified as a realm populated by Pollyannas and sellouts.
"We are presently mired in this conflict of values,"
Bill Marlett, penning one of the final chapters in Welfare
Ranching titled "The Last Roundup," says.
"I will not argue the ecological and economic failings
of grazing livestock on public lands. I will argue that the
long-term good of ranching on public lands crumbles under
the weight of honest observation. Our challenge is to anticipate
the future.
"Can we end livestock grazing on public lands in the
foreseeable future and restore biodiversity to the landscape?
Yes. But can we do it in a manner that saves face, that respects
the legitimate, if not futile, toil of the yeoman rancher
on our public lands, and do it with gentle firmness?
"One-third of Americans, according to one poll, already
favor such a ban. With increased public awareness, it is only
a matter of time before that number reaches 51 percent."
As someone who makes part of his living writing about environmental
issues, and as someone who greatly values biodiversity, I
can understand the tough talk from conservationists like Mr.
Marlett. It's necessary.
But as the grandson of a Swedish immigrant Republican farmer,
who came to the western world with a dream, and who raised
bovines and planted crops and believed he was doing right
by the land, and who took pride in putting food on the table
for his family and other Americans, I feel the jolting electricity
of the insult that observations like Marlett's carries to
the bone of western ranchers.
Out of principle, whether desperate or not, I understand their
desire not to capitulate. Resolution isn't going to come in
the courtroom; it will be counted in cups of coffee flavored
with mutual empathy.
The Wild West, after all, wasn't "won" (read conquered)
by European-style agriculture overnight, nor will past abuses
be healed through brawls of fisticuffs and fightin' words.
The West needs to have an honest talk with itself, with all
parties in the same room. To the chagrin of the polemicists
on both sides a radical center is slowly gaining traction.
But as Welfare Ranching states with conviction, George Wuerthner
doesn't believe there is any time to waste.
Writer Todd Wilkinson lives in
Bozeman. He is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor
and work has appeared in Mother Jones, Outside, and the Utne
Reader, among others. |
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| Aim
at bigger targets |
By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Dec. 17, 2003 |
The notion of ranchers parting with their
grazing permits would have been unthinkable not long ago,
but it's not only palatable but welcome for an
increasing number of hard-pressed operators across the
West.
But how many remains to be seen, why is subject to change
and the end result may be something no one quite envisioned.
The basis and the text of House Bill 3324, the Voluntary Grazing
Permit Buyout Act, says many of the 27,000 permittees would
find grazing public land unprofitable and a cash-out offer
irresistible.
And, according to the Christian
Science Monitor, that's striking a chord with some ranchers
who have cut their herds due to ongoing drought, fought increasing
restrictions from endangered and reintroduced species, and
suffered prolonged periods of poor prices.
They're ready to quit or retire and are more than willing
to take, say, a $262,000 payment for their permit to graze
300 cow-calf pairs.
It's a potent but painful incentive for those who have little
choice but to find another way of life, and it's a fair and
laudable way to restore some of the West's marginal public
rangeland.
Whether it would affect much of
the landscape or much ease the burden on taxpayers is more
complicated.
According to a San
Jose Mercury News special report last year, 254 million
acres of public land is grazed in 17 Western states, and 26,300
ranchers tend 3.2 million head of cattle.
But corporate ranches control the vast majority of land and
cattle: The top 10 percent of permit holders control 49 percent
of the livestock on all public land, and 69 percent on BLM
land.
Put the other way, 50 percent of National Forest permittees
control just 3 percent of the livestock; the smallest 50 percent
of lease holders on BLM land have 7 percent of the animals.
And big operators apparently do
more damage. On the range leased by the BLM's 20 biggest
permit holders, 46 percent of the land is deemed in unsatisfactory
condition, compared with 10 percent of all tracts.
The big operators are not the ones being lured by promises
of cash for their permits.
One of the
biggest holders of BLM leases is Idaho billionaire J.R.
Simplot of potato fame, whose corporation holds rights on
1.9 million acres, mostly in Idaho, Nevada and Oregon.
The manager of one of Simplot's largest feedlots said the
company has programs to reduce invasive weeds and fire hazards,
and takes good care of its land. He said it would be unfair
to charge Simplot more for its permits than a small operator.
Barron
Hilton, of hotel empire fame, runs 3,200 cattle on 450,000
acres of private and public land near Carson City, Nev. His
son said grazing helps offset the operating costs on the trophy
ranch the family uses mainly for fishing, hunting, tennis
and skeet shooting, and he agreed permit costs are too low.
Defending the family rancher has become a key tool for critics
of grazing reform and the buyout plan, although 98
percent of U.S. ranchers don't have grazing permits for
public lands.
Other ranchers, who chastise their neighbors who would sell
out to the government, say prices are up, the industry is
looking better and if other local families aren't allowed
the chance to pick up a permit, the local economy and the
local culture will die out.
But if those struggling ranchers yield to wealthy buyers from
elsewhere or corporations that fit the pattern, the local
culture is in for a change, taxpayer subsidies won't drop
and the land won't benefit.
And if those struggling ranchers opt for the voluntary buyout,
the local culture is still in for a change, taxpayer subsidies
won't drop much and most of the land won't benefit.
But it would be a start.
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your comments
Author's blog
Real friends of the land
Dorothy closed her eyes and clicked the
heels of her ruby slippers, uttering "there's no place like home" only
to awake from a surreal dream.
If you are a "Wise User" adopting a similar strategy
to get back to the 19th century, there are a couple of similar
things you can do in acting on the advice of the wizard from
behind the curtain.
You can mount shovel brigades to Nevada and the Klamath River
as PR stunts to protest alleged government tyranny.
You can mumble in your coffee and get on hate radio in Kalispell
and blame all of the world's problems on people whom
you name call as "green Nazis."
But at the end of the day, where has it gotten you and your
cause?
If you're a U.S. logger, you can try to call the plight of
the timber industry "a supply problem," but you
can't ignore all of the cheap timber flowing across the Canadian
border and driving down prices at Home Depot, which in turn
is driving the local lumber yard out of business.
You can't sidestep the fact that more loggers and mill
workers have been
made obsolete by mechanized efficiency than by spotted owls
or forest fires.
And, agree or not, the taxpayers, if given a choice, do not
want to subsidize the construction costs of new logging roads
on public lands or to give away old-growth trees on national
forests, such as the Tongass in Alaska, for corporate boardrooms
and for dimes on the dollar.
They know full well those trees are worth more alive and standing
as fish factories, sources of clean water for tens of millions
of Americans in the lower 48, as homes for grizzly bears and
bald eagles up north, and as part of a birthright they want
to hand down to their kids.
Still, it doesn't mean that most people, who have a
heart, don't feel
for the real mom and pop logger.
Mom and pop beef producers face a similar slate of choices.
At the end of the day, what are the Wise Users who rant on
hate radio really delivering for them, other than misplaced
anger and a desire to return the country to where it was a
century ago, which is never going to happen.
Lapdogs of industry serve only their industrial masters, not
the best interests of
mom and pop.
Mom and dad who grew up on the ranch, and grandma and grandpa,
and in some places the great grandparents — God bless
them — need to face reality and unfortunately it's a
harsh one.
They can point fingers at environmentalists or they can take
a serious look at the real origin of their woes.
In most cases, it involves the lack of sensitivity from industrial
agriculture that controls so called "free trade"
(cheap beef from Canada?).
Those producers also assume an unfair competitive advantage
over small ranchers at the feedlots, slaughterhouses, and
packing plants; and they mightily influence a sloppy regulation
system that is going to reel from mad cow for some time to
come.
In setting land policy in the West, and finding the right
incentives, the
stewardship questions involve both public lands grazers, and
those who
proudly graise their livestock only on private property.
Public lands grazing is on its way out, and, as asked earlier,
then what?
There's no question that smaller ranchers have the capacity
to be better conservation-oriented stewards. They are more
knowledge about their private land, more answerable to their
neighbors, they play more positive roles in their local communities,
and they see tenure on the land as something that is heartfelt
and not defined by merely an annual ledger sheet.
If anyone here wants a prime example, give the Sonoran Institute
a call in Bozeman and ask Ben Alexander to tell you the story
of ranchers Randy Rusk and Sara Kettle in Custer County, Colo.
Randy and Sara raise beef, they are incredibly thoughtful,
and they are creative. However, they are among MANY of a like
mind.
Since the mad cow scare broke, I've written a few stories
for the Christian Science Monitor and was impressed by organic
farmers, particularly those raising grass- finished beef,
who are part of the growing "local food" movement.
They cater to consumers who like knowing where their steaks
and hamburgers come from. The organic movement isn't something
that is trendy and new, it's age old; it's a return to the
way beef used to be raised when grandma and grandpa were on
the ranch.
Most of the organic farmers I researched, it should be noted,
are not
threatened by the statements and questions raised in the book
Welfare Ranching.
They see them as challenges they're willing to confront. Randy
Rusk, too, is the kind of rancher who is ahead of the curve
in trying to anticipate the market and grow it in a way that
imparts him advantages and not the corporate owner of a feedlot
or slaughterhouse several hundred miles away.
Today in the West, we look upon cattle ranching as if it is
a tradition
as old as the sun. In fact, it has only existed in most valleys
for a relative
handful of generations. Like all things, if it is going to
persist, it must
adapt to a changing world, driven by changing values and opportunities.
I hope mom and pop ranchers realize who their true allies
are. The nostalgia for their existence probably isn't going
to get them very far with the cattle-free movement, but neither
are they going to be delivered to the promised land on the
backs of shovel brigades and the words of right-wing hate
radio.
If there's a crystal ball showing the future, it's
found on the tables
of grassroots organizations like Quivira, the Sonoran Institute,
TNC, the
conservation beef movement, the Corporation for the Northern
Rockies, and local
land trusts, particularly those affiliated with local cattlemen's
groups.
I hope we pick up this discussion again in five years. Where
will the
discussion be then?
- Todd Wilkinson
Doe-eyed innocent
It was amazing to read the mutual backrubs
in this particular exchange -- not in the sense of enlightenment,
but in the sense of happy complacence.
You folks really need to get out more.
After screaming for years about evil "subsidized"
ranching (which would not be, were it not for the legions
of biologists needed to make EIS's bombproof, and hordes of
lawyers to defend them in court, and EAJA payments for one-count
judgments) I do not understand how you all can "justify"
what is yet another huge subsidy for a pseudo-religious mindset
called "deep ecology."
Remember that little thing about "Congress shall make
no laws?"
And how is it, that after years of kicking on producers while
they are already in a tough go, that you can innocently say,
oh, here's somebody else's money if you'll just surrender.
All doe-eyed innocent.
And activists wonder why they get yelled at?
Doesn't surprise me at all ... in my experience with religionists
of all stripes, hypocrisy tends to be one of the widest and
brightest.
I get a kick out of your riffs on Range, by the way. Don't
like dissent, do ya.
Dave Skinner
Whitefish, MT
The best stewards
Indeed. Some folks may not like grazing
or even ranchers but I personally see the decline in the ranching
lifestyle as a great loss to the country.
Ranchers, and farmers, are a part of the American ego ...
our image of ourselves and who we are. Hence, the lifestyle
is an important one.
I do not think we should subsidize that lifestyle or allow
the degradation of our public lands to maintain it. But I
do think that ranchers are people who care and that they are
in touch with the land.
Being close to much of our rural public lands, they could
be our best stewards, certainly better than the federal land
managers, often confined to offices for much of the time,
can ever be.
The debate over public lands is personally threatening to
many ranchers, and the fact that it is so polarized makes
any useful debate practically impossible. While some ranchers
are very poor land stewards, so are many recreational land
users.
What we really need is constructive dialogue. I have found
in my work with ranchers and farmers that they often have
better, more practical, ideas on how to protect endangered
landscapes when given the chance to be proactive in a discussion
of what's best for all of us, for America, and not for any
one particular user group.
They pride themselves on being good Americans.
Ranchers and farmers are generally honest, hard working, salt-of-the-earth
people. Give them a chance and you'll find that there's a
win-win solution hidden within every perceived problem.
Jim McMahon,
ecologist
Author's blog:
Pivot point: the radical center
I'm enjoying this discussion. Let me offer
an anecdote.
Every autumn, I walk into the mountains outside of Bozeman
carrying a shotgun. Every trip I make I hold out the hope
that conditions will be different — improved —
from the year before. And each fall, I return home disappointed.
Climbing out of the valley, through the p-pine and lodgepole,
into the stunted juniper and whitebark pine, I reach the high
ridgelines where I go scrambling after blue grouse.
There in the scrub, the birds used to be in abundance, but
it's now trampled by the hooves of domestic bovines and by
the treads of ATV tires. It makes me mad in the most visceral
of ways. What a waste. I wonder: What are we getting in return
for this?
As grouse populations have fallen away in habitat devastated
by the combo of "multiple use" and "drought,"
and as earlier complaints to the Forest Service went unheeded,
I was left with what I, as a co-owner of these public lands,
considers an unacceptable choice trifecta: Put up with it,
write a letter to the local Congressman, or leave.
None of these options give me confidence in the ability of
our land management agencies to be truly responsive to calls
for better stewardship.
Now, let me share a second anecdote.
A few short years ago, I was in Jackson Hole hiking through
Grand Teton National Park with a biologist friend, a person
well respected throughout the region.
As we strolled along the Gros Ventre River through park land
managed as a grazing allotment, we were accosted by a local
wrangler ranch hand and ordered to leave the premises.
Later, when we complained to the park, we were told the cowboy
had no authority to do what he did. Still, the experience
and the attitude expressed by our antagonist, that a cattle
operator should hold primacy over a public land, was troubling.
I admit that it's purely subjective for me to say it's not
right for a blue grouse population to be sacrificed to accommodate
grazing cattle, nor should beef cows displace hikers in a
national park. Again, what is the public getting in return?
In both cases, the answer is not much.
However, there is a danger in extrapolation.
With livestock grazing in the West, I've found, as a journalist,
the most difficult challenge in writing about it is trying
to avoid the sweeping one- size-fits-all generalizations that
get you into trouble.
I'm no fan of cattle on public land and I am NOT a cowboy
romantic.
But for the most part and with few exceptions, I've always
enjoyed the discussions I've had with the people who raise
cattle. In a long list of ways, I've found most mom and pop
agrarians to be more real, as people, and more connected to
the land around them, than the folks driving by and pointing
fingers at them dismissively while passing down the highway.
Like it or not, how the mom and pops are engaged, as mythological
symbols, is the linchpin in the debate.
On the other hand, cattlemen (coerced by the incendiary, misleading
rhetoric found in Range Magazine) are making a serious mistake
by painting cattle-free activists like George Wuerthner, Bill
Marlett and the late Joy Belsky, among others, as heartless,
environmental whackos who don't know what they're talking
about.
They do know what they are talking about. They've studied
the impacts of grazing on the ground; they've met with ranchers;
they've challenged the acolytes of Alan Savory; and they've
refused to cower even in counties where they are despised.
That takes guts.
But they also know that in the West, emotion often trumps
even the best and most articulate line of scientific statistics.
Look at how fire ecology has been corrupted in the debate
over logging and forest health; look at the denial occurring
with dams and salmon; look at how taxpayers have been sold
a bill of goods in being told not only to enjoy sprawl, but
to subsidize the profits of developers who create it.
When I wrote my book, "Science Under Siege: The Politicians'
War on Nature and Truth," which chronicles the battles
being fought by scientific whistleblowers and public land
civil servants in the West, I saw firsthand how easy it is
for dysfunctional bureaucracies to shoot the messenger rather
than heed the truth of the message.
Need I mention University of Wyoming law professor Debra Donahue
and her excellent recent book "The Western Range Revisited,"
which delivered more truth than the livestock community could
handle?
And what was their response? Politicians in Wyoming attempted
to silence Deb and punish the law school.
I also know for a fact that George Wuerthner, when he considered
pursuing a Ph.D. in geography at Montana State University
was hassled and ultimately dissuaded by academics who thought
he was too controversial.
We hear plenty about the alleged liberal bias of the media
and how left-of-center folks allegedly brainwash college students,
but couldn't the opposite argument be applied to certain land
grant universities who do not want their dominant paradigms
challenged?
Wuerthner's book is caught in that paradox of being both an
environmental tome whose time has come, and a work which is
ahead of its time (which means it is politically or socially
impractical in the here and now).
I suspect that in another decade, maybe less, most likely
more, market economics are going to resolve, for better or
worse, the vital issues of public lands grazing that "Welfare
Ranching" raises.
But if we leave it to the market to sort out — and to
the clumsy near-sighted approach of most politically appointed
agency bureaucrats — how much hope can we hold out that
the stewardship crises (on public AND private land) will be
resolved in outcomes that restore landscapes, save species,
and treat people with the dignity they deserve?
Can the public lands livestock issue really be untethered
from the private lands grazing issue so easily as it seems?
So we buy out all public land grazers, then what? I'm not
opposed to this possibility, but I want to know what comes
next.
What is the potential cost that will come from winning on
public land but alienating rural private landowners who control
the riparian corridors where most of what we want to save
resides?
That's why I am drawn to the Quivira
Coalition and it's work on behalf of building the Radical
Center.
To me, this realm is less about a place on the political spectrum
than a frame of mind. Bill McDonald and others are establishing
ground rules for engagement and developing ways of civilly
bringing to the table issues that have been kept off by politics
and large agribusiness.
Too often, the Radical Center is misinterpreted or demonized
as a subversive attempt to compromise away biodiversity, so
as to make grazing reform meaningless.
What's going to deliver us to any satisfactory outcome is
the transition in getting there.
The Radical Center is a threat to the political status quo
because it makes divide-and-conquer politicians uncomfortable,
and it cannot be ignored.
The Radical Center gives the cattle- free faction a seat at
the table. Without it, the politicians are going to ignore
them.
If anyone has a better alternative to the Radical Center,
let's hear it.
—Todd Wilkinson
Merciful bailout
I finding myself siding with two sides
in the grazing controversy.
There is evidence aplenty that grazing causes environmental
decline, in some cases more dramatically than others. At the
same time, I like resolutions that do the right thing for people
while delivering the needed relief to the land. The upshot is
-- for me -- that the misnamed"buyouts" look pretty
darned good.
We all know that there will always be more than two sides
to any story. In the case of grazing, the political reality
is that lots of low-income producers get the spotlight, as
if there were no concentrated meatpacking and beef import
businesses acting as major
lobbyists for an abundance of livestock on every acre.
Maximizing the size of the national herd helps keep producer
prices down, and lets packers buy beef on the cheap. Importers
love it when huge areas of South American rainforest fall
to make pasture for yet more stock, also depressing prices
that U.S. producers can get.
In many ways, this intra-industry conflict can be amore compelling
story than any conflict between my colleagues in conservation
and the livestock industry.
Except for some stories buried deep in most papers, it goes
untold. But no cow is an island. The price of them all depends
on the size of the total herd, whether global or national.
That said, I'm with Mike Sauber. The basics are straightforward.
For example, every blade of grass eaten by cows is grass removed
from the supply that could support wild species. (I'd take
that argument further. Every cow raised on the public domain
helps drive down the price that ranchers can get for them
all. By definition, overgrazing is overproduction.)
From my perch, Todd Wilkinson also gets it right. There are
ranchers who, whether on their own ground or on public land,
are lots better guardians of the landscape than others are.
And we don't have a situation where every last rancher who puts
stock on public land is a fat cat in pursuit of hobby or tax
break. If the topic of grazing is important, and I think it
is, we need to make some realistic discriminations.
People who follow the grazing controversy know my general
argument.
If we are going to make things right for the land, let's make
it right for people too. Right now, the U.S. public pays plenty
to put cows on public land. Let's just divert that spending
to taking them off. I see bailout instead of buyout.
We cannot buy from ranchers what they never owned, but we
can sure bail out family ranchers caught in a sticky trap.
And of all the bailouts this country has seen in the past
quarter-century, this one looks good. As its major proponents
note, it ends up saving tax dollars. From my perch, it also
helps ordinary unrich families avoid utter financial defeat
when their herds are moved. And this win-win resolution becomes
a win-win-win resolution when wild species find habitat restored.
The country as a whole wins, too. America has slid into extremes
of punitiveness that need an icebreaker. Rather than damning
ranchers as bad people deserving punishment, the country could
heed the call of Montana's own Charlie Russell.
Russell said that "justice" is the cruelest word
in our language, and that if all the people who cry for justice
got it themselves, they'd find out that what they wanted was
a little mercy instead.
When we have a chance at mercy for lots of not-so-wealthy
American ranchers, let's take it. If that's the radical center,
then I guess it's where I'm parked.
Lance Olsen
Missoula, MT
Deduct the cost of repairs
"... ranchers who are sincere
in their efforts to advance biologically focused stewardship.
"
Whether or not ranchers are sincere, advancing
biologically focused stewardship is only less destructive
to wildlife and the land, and is less economical, given the
same or increased infrastructure costs with less cattle.
Only wealthy hobby ranchers can afford to do this. Where does
that leave the family rancher?
"I can cite numerous examples where progressive ranchers
are searching for biologically directed compromise and ways
of seeing ranchland as more than vessels holding domestic
cattle and sheep. "
"Compromise" is what we have always gotten and I
can't think of any way for displaced wildlife to get their
share in the arid west when domestic livestock are using these
same public lands.
Where livestock is being raised you unfortunately get the
political influence that goes along with it, and wildlife
only gets what is left. Sad but true.
As for the buyout program, I don't believe in it. Why should
the public pay to have our public land given back to the displaced
wildlife, the watersheds repaired, our aquifers replenished,
or streams clean of silt and manure, a landscape free from
damnable barbed wire?
How long will it take for our lands to once again become havens
for the broad, diverse numbers of species that are lacking
now?
Grazing domestic cattle on public lands is a revocable privilege,
not a right which could require compensation.
Would someone pay a renter to leave who has trashed his house?
No. you charge the person for damages when you go to court
and have them evicted.
If the buyout program goes forward we need to at least deduct
the cost of repairing the damages to regain the health and
vitality of our lands once again.
Michael Sauber
lifelong westerner
A viable option
After
reading the article, I would have to start out by saying that
my husband and I are one of the Grandma and Grandpa ranchers.
My husband's family has been in the ranching industry in this
area of central Arizona since before there was a Forest Service.
So having said this I would like to make a few points in regards
to that article.
We have never received any type of subsidy from the local, state
or federal government, except a tax refund once in awhile.
We have supplied countless hours of labor and planning that
not only benefited our livestock but the local wildlife and
recreational users of the National Forest.
We understood when we bought our permit that there was much
easier ways to make much more money but chose to do that anyway.
That was a decision that is proving to be with ramifications
far out of our control.
Having raised three children and six grandchildren in the lifestyle,
now it is with disdain that we know that the retirement that
we relied on so heavily is gone forever probably, one can't
sell something that they bought, mortgaged and invested in when
it now has no use.
We knew that none of our children would be able to continue
ranching as we had in this area, so the final outcome was a
given, we would sell at some point and hang up our spurs.
Then in the mail came an offer for a compensation from, of all
places, a group of environmentalists. To say we were shocked
is a misnomer,
I called to get information and became part of a group to seek
a solution to the situation. I feel that we have come a long
way, and while we don't always agree within this group, we are
representative of the people we represent.
I feel that the offer that is currently in Washington would
be a viable option for many very interested groups and reach
a multiple number of goals in one move. That in itself would
be unheard of for the federal government.
So, in closing, my suggestion to all that are concerned with
this grazing issue would be to find a rancher, environmentalist,
economist, forest ranger, feedlot owner, recreational, hunter,
hiker, fisherman, photographer, etc. and sit them down and see
if they come up with a better solution for all concerned.
Carol Clark
Re: Wilkinson
Well done!
Bill Marlett,
Executive Director
Oregon Natural Desert Association
Bend, OR 97701
www.onda.org
Meet in the middle
Thank you,
Mr. Wilkinson, for representing the "Radical Center's"
point of view. Somewhere between Wuerthner's cattle-free nature
stance and the Sage Brush Rebel's subdue & conquer nature
stance lies some truth and hope.
Truth in that many ranchers practice pretty good conservation,
care about wild things & places, and maintain open landscapes
that define the West.
Hope in that conservationists and ranchers can work together
instead of making a lot of lawyers rich, and that people of
the West can live together as a community and not as warring
tribes.
We do have a long way to go. Federal agencies such as the Forest
Service can be pretty lax about enforcing their own policies
and managing for land health and threatened species preservation.
A few irrigators would gladly dry up a river bed and contribute
to the extinction of native species.
And maybe there are some western landscapes where plants evolved
without hoofed critters such as elk or buffalo, and where cattle
simply don't belong.
But in my view, and the view of a lot of us in the radical center,
the machinery of courts and legislation is not the best way
to solve these problems. Better for us and better for the world
we live in if we can sit down with our neighbors and create
the needed solutions. Pat
Munday, Ph.D., professor
Technical Communication Department
Montana Tech
Butte MT |
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