Dear HCN,
Tom Knudson’s story on
the Trout Creek working group in Oregon lacked some important
factual information that would have cast the “success’ of this BLM
propaganda project in a less favorable light (HCN, 3/1/99). The
article implies that the Trout Creeks can serve as a model solution
for public-lands grazing disputes across the West to create
“healthy habitat for fish and wildlife.” I almost had to look to
see if I wasn’t reading a piece in Range Magazine, a livestock
industry advocacy publication.
Ironically, the
main focus of the story is on the 126,000-acre Whitehorse Butte
allotment, far and away the largest public grazing permit in the
Trout Creeks. This ranch operation is owned by Ted Naftzger, a
millionaire who lives most of the year in Beverly Hills, Calif. It
wouldn’t play so well if people knew that the main “ranching”
interest in the Trout Creek controversy was an absentee landowner
who runs a “trophy” ranch subsidized at taxpayer
expense.
Naftzger’s ranch manager and “suspicious
of strangers’ want-to-be cowboy, Britt Lay, who Knudson described
as a “classic cowboy,” also hails from back East. Doc and Connie
Hatfield, featured participants of the Trout Creek working group,
also grew up elsewhere and didn’t start ranching in eastern Oregon
until the mid-1970s. I’m not suggesting that one has to be born
into ranching or in the region to be an authentic player, but
certainly the writer did nothing to dissuade readers of this
implied long-term residency of key
players.
Knudson describes how Whitehorse Butte
ranch owner Naftzger voluntarily removed his cattle from the
allotment for three years to provide some much-needed rest from his
four-footed locusts, but fails to point out that this isn’t really
an option for many ranchers, nor a significant financial burden to
millionaire Naftzger. Nor does he mention that the lands on the
South Fork of Creeked River in central Oregon leased by Naftzger
had not been grazed for years and were hammered by his cattle.
Knudson also doesn’t discuss the ongoing impact
of these cattle on other native plants and animals, from
cryptogramic crusts to the loss of forage and cover for native
species as a consequence of continued grazing by exotic
animals.
He writes glowingly about some limited
improvement of riparian vegetation along some waterways with
grazing. This is somewhat of a deception because what has occurred
is that grazing has been curtailed. Cows spend less time in
riparian areas now than in the past because they are beating up the
uplands instead. This begs the question how much greater
improvement would result if there were no
cows.
The writer uncritically accepts the BLM-led
range tour as representative of the entire area, not even
acknowledging that what he and others view on such tours may not be
representative of the overall condition of these lands. If you get
out and walk the allotments in these mountains as I and others
have, you still find plenty of evidence for cow-beat lands in the
Trout Creeks that the BLM tour routes
avoid.
Nowhere does the writer even question
whether the public interest is best served by pipelines, fences,
water developments, roads, cattle guards, cow pies, and all the
rest of the development and impacts done on its public lands so
that a few individuals can continue to practice a “death style”
that is responsible for the extinction or near extinction of
hundreds of species and degradation of the majority of the West’s
landscape. This question is never asked and certainly isn’t
answered in most accounts that tell about “range success stories.”
Claiming the Trout Creeks are being “worked back
to health” is like an ad from tobacco companies asserting that the
health of former chain smokers improved after cutting their
consumption from three to two packs of cigarettes a day. Smoking
even two packs a day is still killing you, even if you “feel” and
“look” better. It’s just killing you slower. Ditto for the arid
West’s cow-battered
rangelands.
George
Wuerthner
Livingston, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline How are grazing and smoking similar? Both kill.
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