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Show : | THE ZEPHYR/JUNE-JULY 2003 THE.GRAZING DEBATE: A REALISTIC OPTION? ED MARSTON In the mid 1980s, I said something, or maybe several things, during a talk that irritated a rancher in the audience. He stormed up to me after the talk, and we went at each other for awhile. During a lull in the fire fight, he asked, "Why did you new people move here, anyway?” So I told him: "Because you people can’t make a living here anymore.” It was rude, but it was what many of us "new people’---at the time I’d only been in Colorado for eleven years---thought. We were here to replace people who didn’t appreciate the extraordinary landscape or know how to earn a living without destroying it. In fact, and grizzlies and other predators, as well as the prairie dogs that serve as a prey species for an array of wildlife. Hovering over the destruction of the land and wildlife is the sorry, continuing story of ranching’s political domination of land management agencies, which prevents conscientious agency personnel from doing their jobs. But we also know what this book refuses to acknowledge: that some ranchers are now strong proponents of using fire on the land. They work to restore streams. They try to figure out how to get along with predators. looking at the timber and livestock industries, some would say they don’t know how to make a living here even when they destroy the land. So 1 understand where George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson are coming from with Welfare Ranching, the book they have edited. Their lavish book---a throwback to the books the Sierra Club pioneered under David Brower---is about the rift between old and new, and you don’t have to turn a page to discover that. The cover photo shows cows in the background grazing on a healthy sage-grass range. In the foreground is the target of the book: a beefy ranchertopped with a farmer’s cap and encased in a checked shirt-riding a four-wheeler. Welfare Ranching...is driven in part by romanticism. The book envisions the re-wilding of the land, with large parts of the West returning to health and wildness if cattle are excluded... (but) who will fill the vacuum once the ranchers are forced off public lands? Once you turn a few pages, you discover that this gorgeous, standing-rib-roastheavy book is crammed with photos of devastated landscapes. If the book were about restoring healthy landscapes, any of them would have made a good cover. But if the book is about class and power, then the cover is right on. The book is also about animus. Douglas Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, writes in the preface that public land ranchers are "little more than a handful of millionaires, corporations and hobby cowboys. The comment indicates that Tompkins, who owns a large estate in Chile, may not have read the book he subsidized. In one of its few scholarly pieces, University of Montana economist Thomas M. Power shows that that 50 percent of ranchers work off the ranch. Millionaires and people getting fat off welfare don’t deliver the mail or run backhoes on the side. Class and economics aside, the book argues that ranching takes a terrible toll on land, water and wildlife. Among the many fine photos by Wuerthner are classic fence- line shots of grazed and ungrazed pastures; once-narrow, verdant streams that are now shallow washes or deep gullies; and expanses of stony, bare ground that will never grow another blade of grass. We have hiked for thirty-five summers in Colorado’s West Elk Wilderness, near Beckwith Pass. We never go in the fall because then the benches are all manure and insects and trampled vegetation. But by the following June, they are again gorgeous. I could prove anything with photos of those benches. Not only does the land change from season to season, but a photo doesn’t show trends or history. A bare wash may have been blown out last year by a heavy flood rather than been damaged over decades by grazing. A slumping, eroded meadow may be in recovery, or getting worse. The damage in the Wuerthner photos may have been done at the turn of the last century, when cowmen scoured the West, and since then has been holding its own or even recovering. We don’t know, But we do know that grazing has seriously, grazing has excluded fire carry lightning-caused fires. The lack to take over grasslands, and thereby and the anecdotal photos can’t tell us. had a terrible impact on parts of the West. Most by eliminating the tall, dried grass that used to of low-intensity fire has allowed brush and trees damage watersheds. In addition, ranchers, with the help of their federal predator-control sidekicks, have driven to extinction wolves Solano Vallejo condo development south of Moab in the early 1990s. More passively, ranching’s political grip on the agencies is weaker, allows. The book doesn’t ask who will fill the vacuum created once the ranchers are forced off the public lands? Will gonzo recreation, for example, replace the cattle? Why assume a vacuum on the land will be filled by re-wilding? And what of the 170,000 square miles of private lands that now depend economically on the federal grazing allotment? Economically, most ranches depend on their federal allotments. Biologically, these lands are the richest and best-watered parts of the West. But Wuerthner is dismissive toward the argument that private lands will be subdivided and built on once they are severed from the public grazing lands. He writes that only a few places are subject to development, and that the West’s land Wendell C. Gilgert Ed Marston "The last decade of collaborative conservation efforts between ranchers and conservation biologists has triggered a paradigm shift in how ‘environmentalists' and ‘land stewards’ go about their business in the Intermountain West. Here, for the first time in eloquent and persuasive poetry and prose, are the testimonies of those who have been intimately involved in preserving the - working landscapes of the Rural West..." Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph. D., author of Coming Home to Eat and director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University ce 2. Marston developers are squeezing more people onto less land. The same publisher-Island Press-also put out Welfare Ranching’s evil, or good, twin. It is called Ranching West of the 100th Meridian, and I’m one of its editors. The lead editor is Richard Knight, professor of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University. The other editor is Wendell Gilgert, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University. ae : 3 Unlike Welfare Ranching, this book’s writers want to reform and thereby save public land ranching. Nevertheless, both books agree that ranching is squeezed by the increasing cost of land and labor and the cheapness of imported beef; that ranching did a lot of damage to the land in the past; that ranchers are not heroic conservation continued on page 16... Edited by Richard L. Knight ben rite many these changes, collectively, are making a difference. And Welfare Ranching doesn’t help us know what is happening across almost half a million square miles of land. Welfare Ranching and the livestock-free movement it is part of are driven by romanticism. The book envisions the re-wilding of the land, with large parts of the West returning to health and wildness if cattle are excluded from 470,000 square miles of federal land. Romanticism is great, at least for the romantics, in the tight focus it RANCHING WEST of the 100th MERIDIAN le and federal grazing allotments are more closely managed. What we don’t know is whether aes Available from Back of Beyond Books in Moab PAGES |