Dear HCN,
I enjoy High Country
News, but am continually dismayed by your promotion of
consensus.
Wallace Stegner once characterized the
American West as “stretches of picturesque poverty.” It is the most
salient fact about the West. And the fact most missing when
visionaries talk about what the West should
be.
The idea that public lands can be plowed,
chainsawed, grazed and bulldozed back to health because the carrot
of profit applies is just silly. Even after seven decades of public
investment in BLM range and dramatically subsidized grazing fees,
most BLM range requires 20 or more acres to feed a cow for a month.
Most real ranchers have gone broke. Without subsidies, timber
companies will go belly up on site class five timber lands – always
have, always will.
When white folks came from
Europe to the new world, they brought old-world ideas about how
land should be managed, and they brought their cattle, plows and
saws with them. When the Western migration began, cattle bred for
moist, mild England came along. The idea that land can be just too
cold, or steep, or dry, or erosive for industrial-strength
commercial enterprise is beyond the consciousness of most folks. On
a big chunk of the West – lands administered by BLM, for instance –
raising crops and cattle was a square-peg-in-a-round-hole
proposition from the get go. But government, industry hucksters and
college professors at land-grant universities preached intensive
management. With enough public investment, commercial efforts would
blossom and bear fruit, they promised.
And invest
the public did – in herbicides, exotic grasses, water developments,
fences, roads – millions upon millions of dollars. Still, range
abuse continues and there are fewer cattle on the public range than
in past decades. The Trout Creek Mountains are a good example.
Local ranchers live on the flats at the base of the range. Water
from mountain streams was used to irrigate hay during the summer
months on base (private) range land. Cattle had to be somewhere
while hay was growing. They were turned loose on the mountain and
followed the rapidly melting snow to the lush range and cooler
benches on the uplands. Cattle spent the entire summer there and
generally came down as weather pushed them to lower elevations in
the fall. When it was hot, the cattle spent their time in the aspen
groves at stream headwaters. Naturally, some of the range got beat
to hell.
The Bureau of Land Management,
responsible for administering the public range lands of the Trout
Creek Mountains, did what they have done on almost every acre of
land they administer. They said the range needed management. With
money and manpower great things were achievable. And give them
money the public did. The objective is to create ever smaller
pastures so use is more concentrated for shorter periods of time,
giving some pastures rest, especially during the growing season. Of
course, all of those pastures have to have water. No small order in
arid country. BLM and ranchers build dams on intermittent streams,
dig out small seasonal ponds, tap into springs and run miles of
plastic pipe to water troughs. In places, BLM even digs deep wells
and operates them with propane-powered pumps.
In
order to reduce summer grazing pressure in the Trout Creeks,
thousands of acres of crested wheat grass were planted as spring
range at lower elevations to compensate for the lack of spring
range provided by the good Lord.
When wildlife
biologists tell us we have to live with modest populations of
native ungulates because public winter range is lacking and there
are conflicts with private lands, we shrug and say we understand.
When BLM range conservationists tell us land is being overgrazed
and they want to solve the problem by creating supplemental forage
rather than reducing the rancher’s permit, we say, “Sure, how many
millions of dollars do you want for herbicide and exotic grass
seed?”
I am baffled by the response of the
environmental community to BLM management. What would
environmentalists say if the U.S. Forest Service proposed killing
vegetation on blocks of land several thousand acres in size and
then planting monocultures of exotic trees from Asia just so timber
companies could make money? Even if they sugar-coated the message
and said they were planting exotic monocultures so they could
provide multiple-use benefits to other lands, or compensate timber
companies for loss due to various environmental restrictions, would
environmentalists praise the Forest Service and timber companies in
High Country News?
It is bad enough when
government asks me to subsidize the destruction of my own land by
trying to put square pegs in round holes, but when some “consensus’
group of special interests and amateurs who are not elected, nor
appointed, nor hired to represent the public interest, is given
authority to spend my money to degrade my land, well
…
For decades, environmentalists made great
strides by championing effective land-use laws, regulations and
policies, lobbying for funding for worthwhile programs, and going
to court or the court of public opinion to leverage agencies into
doing their job in a responsible manner. Now, a new generation of
anarchists insists laws don’t work. Courts are bad, they say.
Criticism is evil. The traditional, American way of doing business
is a failure. Consensus is the way of the
future.
So, when was the last time J. R. Simplot
or Boise Cascade asked you to sit on a consensus group to manage
their private lands?
Don
Tryon
Colville,
Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Consensus is not the answer.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
