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Show ee AA ORAL LUM eA FEWER HATS...MORE HEADS: A RUMINATION ON THE QUIVIRA COALITION BY ANN WENDLAND Throughout the Quivira Coalition's annual conference in the Albuquerque Hilton, I’d been scribbling: cowboy hat inventories, notes for friends in environmental groups, and unpainted opinions about what the ranchers were saying. Griping in the notebook calmed me when the "win-win" language and talk of beneficial hoof action got thick. The theme of bringing environmentalists and ranchers together surfaced regularly, though most of the 300 assembled were ranchers (about 100) or agency staffers. Collaboration and diversity look great on promotional materials. But would Quivira still want diversity if it came with real differences? Well, one person apparently did. Halfway through the last session, a cowboy sat down next to me. No pleasantries, really, except for a compliment on a point I'd raised and a moment for me to survey him from his Deseret Land & Livestock cap to his worn, handsome boots. "You've been taking a lot of notes.” "I have a bad memory.” "Mind if I read them?” "What?!" I thought of the hat inventories. How embarrassing. And what if he thought I stood for you thought you knew like the back of your hand. At the ultra-basic level of “common interests," ranchers talk to environmentalists partly to help maintain their access to public lands. Environmentalists talk to ranchers because they’re more receptive to discussion about private land than, say, gated-community or trailer park developers. But some of the most potentially helpful environmentalists aren’t talking. The Quivira Coalition isn’t working with "extreme" environmentalists or "hard-core" ranchers. In an April 5, 2003 interview with the Arizona Daily Star, White said that groups like the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) didn’t get invitations to a recent workshop because "we try not to change the minds of the extremes.” A discussion of the future of ranching without CBD present is like a western ecosystem without wolves. CBD has shaped ranching. Its publicity and litigation have secured protection for 288 species and 38 million acres of critical habitat. The CBD speaks in no uncertain terms: "In the Southwest, livestock grazing is the most widespread cause of species endangerment, affecting 15 of 27 federally listed threatened or endangered species. In dry regions, grazing wreaks catastrophic destruction on rivers, deserts, grasslands and forests over large areas." CBD "will continue to appeal permits that allow cattle to graze on THE NON-PROFIT COALITION FORMED FIVE YEARS AGO IN SANTA FE TO SPREAD THE WORD THAT ECOLOGICALLY HEALTHY RANGELAND AND ECONOMICALLY ROBUST RANCHES CAN BE COMPATIBLE. ALFALFA FIELDAND CONDO DEVELOPMENT IN MOAB. environmentalists? I don’t have kids or a anything. I came to the conference out of be plainspoken, land-loving anomalies in Well, what the hell. I handed him the car and | eat organic food, but I don't represent curiosity, hoping that the Quivira people might the rangeland conflict. notebook. Cowboy Hats: 2 brown, 3 black, 2 tan, 3 ivory, 1 gray. Rick Knight: “It is darned hard to start a conversation on 1 private land in the West”... Most stunning thing that 300 rural folks can sit butt-to-butt in the Hilton ballroom. The cowboy sat next to me and read all 49 tiny pages. We've corresponded since---I e-mail questions or rants and he answers patiently. Goce out he’s an avid birder and has published in Nature. You can’t judge a man by his hat, especially at a Quivira Coalition meeting. The nonprofit coalition formed five years ago in Santa Fe to spread the word, inside and outside of the ranching community, that ecologically healthy rangeland and economically robust ranches can be compatible. They also set out to define the core issues of the grazing ~ conflict and articulate a new position based on "common interests and common sense.” Where would we find common sense, though, within a population-all of us in the West---that paid scarce little attention to the land before massively altering it. We’ve changed the West so radically-from the monocrop soy in the Dakotas to the poisonous’ vegetable farms of the Bakersfield Valley, from the trashed ranches of Arizona to the nine dams on the Columbia. We don’t have a clue what "healthy" looks. like. Is there even potential for "common sense,” or are we only working with base common interests? “We need a vocabulary for talking to each other about the ground below our feet,” says Courtney White, the Coalition’s personable, pragmatic executive director. "We have to find a common language.” The Journal of Range Management (V55:584-597) suggests three attributes to look for---soil and site stability, hydrologic function, and biotic integrityechoing Aldo Leopold’s advice that "[a] thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic system. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Bill McDonald put the stakes bluntly: "What's being lost-in the rhetoric is the only thing that matters-the eventual consequences for the land.". McDonald, the first rancher to win a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship, directs the Malpai Borderlands Group, an eclectic collaborative that works with a chunk of land including the famous Gray Ranch. The conference crowd burst into applause when he quipped, "We talk about how hard it is for ranchers and environmentalists to work together. What's really hard is to get one rancher to work with another rancher.” Approving nods met his next admonition, that "there is a fear to let scientists and researchers on your ranch that we've got to overcome.” Some of the ranchers at the conference have beaten that fear, hosting Audubon bird counts on their land and inviting scientists to help assess their successes and failures. Environmentalists have a lot to offer ranchers. It’s always so humbling to walk with a good birder or an entomologist or a painter or anyone other than your own damn self in a place public lands harboring rare and imperiled species... At a session break, I asked rancher Lyle Dethlefson what he thought of CBD. He: surprised me by saying that if it wasn’t for the Center, ranchers might not have had to find better ways to work. Some ranchers now include recovery of biodiversity in their goals. They'll have environmentalists to thank, in part, for successes. Environmental groups have worked hard to protect the high country and streams that feed valley-bottom ranches. So asked White why the Quivira Coalition didn’t make more of an effort to attract CBD participation. "Why go beat on their.doors?” he said. "I’m not trying to mediate the extremes-you can spend a lot of time and energy trying to pry open closed minds. Some folks are so heavily invested in their positions...I’d rather work with people who are eager to do things differently.” "That said, let me make it clear that we're not exclusive. We will accept anyone. I’m just not going to try to change their minds.” While eco-fundamentalists may dismiss groups trying sustainable grazing---from the tiny Malpai Borderlands Group to the titan Nature Conservancy---as too "wise use,” Big Ranching dismisses them as way too green. I asked my friend Steve Capra of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance if his collaborations with ranchers had earned him points with ~ anti-conservation legislators. He laughed and told me that Representative Steve Pearce asked for names when he mentioned that he had ranchers working with him on the protection of Otero Mesa. "Those guys are fringe” was the summary dismissal. Whether the "alternative ranchers” are outcasts or icons, environmentalists might consider getting in on the ground floor; alternative management is starting to change the land. Quivira’s recommended method, specifically, is not necessarily low impact. The Coalition calls its "New Ranch" and lays it out in The New Ranch Handbook, available to anyone for ten bucks plus tax from quiviracoalition.org. Essentially, the method asks ranchers to know the land, control their animals, and work according to goals. Ranchers learn and monitor community biological dynamics and water, energy and mineral cycles. They keep cows out of riparian areas during the growing season. Rather than let cattle roam, they herd and fence them into a tight group that will eat an area down to stubble and then stay out until it’s had time to regenerate. In a system known as grassbanking, cows move between ranches to rest damaged land. Several ranches have seen dramatic increases in grass production using New Ranch methods, but they might not be for everyone. "It’s all pretty new up here in Utah,” says Roger Barton, who organized the Utah Range Coalition last year. He praises the successes of New Ranch methods near Paonia, Colorado, but wonders how they’ll work in southern Utah. He and the URC invited the Quivira Coalition to lead a workshop in Moab last December. "I felt that it was time to bring them up here. I work with the Soil Conservation Service, and I can see that the ranchers up here can improve their range...They’ve got some really PAGE 22 |