UNCOMMON
WESTERNERS

Steve Monsen is a stocky, modest, self-contained man. Sixty-three
years old, the son and grandson of Utah sheep ranchers, he works as
a botanist for an organization that could not sound more unassuming
if it tried – the USDA Shrub Lab in Provo, Utah. There, he wears
short-sleeved shirts and jeans and cuts a figure about as dramatic
as a Ford Taurus. While we’re bouncing his oversized government
pickup truck down a dirt road near Tintic, Utah, he uses
characteristically even tones to deliver a surprising piece of
news: He is scared to death.

Suddenly, he stops
the truck, jumps down into the sea of shrubs that starts at the
roadside, and points.

A wiry plant about two
feet in height bobs and nods in the breeze. It looks benign. It has
purple flowers and is about the same size and shape as the
sagebrush that surrounds it. But this is not like the other plants,
most of which provide forage for the sheep who’ve grazed here since
the Mormon pioneers started running sheep in the
1860s.

It’s squarrose knapweed, the latest and
most intimidating of a wave of weeds moving across the Western
range.

“We’re near the epicenter,” says Monsen,
nodding toward a distant silo sitting next to some railroad tracks.
Squarrose knapweed was first identified near the silo in the 1940s.
Monsen thinks it came in on sheep feed that was stored in the silo.
For decades it didn’t do much. It just spent a few years in
primrose-sized clumps. It wove strong root systems through the
sandy soil.

Then, in the late ’70s and ’80s, it
started to spread. Now it covers at least 125,000 acres, mostly in
Millard County, but also elsewhere in Utah and in parts of Arizona
and Nevada.

It is spreading fast enough that
Monsen and his fellow botanists use a special truck when they work
here. When they use other vehicles, they wash them to prevent
transporting seeds back to the Wasatch Front.

Along with wheat, barley and most of the forage grasses planted on
the public range, squarrose knapweed evolved in the grasslands of
Eurasia. In Utah, it is very nearly invincible. Its seeds, like
those of dandelions, are connected to “parachutes’ that detach in
the slightest breeze and sail off to colonize soil hundreds of
yards away. The seeds germinate easily in dry weather, while native
plant seeds germinate in perhaps three out of 10 years. Its sturdy
root system makes mowing it down an impossibility. And even if
knapweed is killed with herbicide and removed, any seeds it leaves
behind will be perfectly capable of starting the cycle all over
again for 20 years. Knapweed exudes a substance that kills other
plants in the area.

Its presence is a sign of
ecosystem collapse.

Monsen has spent 40 years
watching weeds invade the West. It is his job. He pushes his hands
into his pockets and looks glum.

“Knapweed has
already driven ranchers off the land in Montana,” he
says.

“I saw skeletonweed move
across Idaho. In 1967-’68, I saw a couple of little patches. About
as big as this road in diameter. Now that weed occupies millions of
acres. Squarrose knapweed is going to do the same here. They’re on
a rampage. These weeds scare the dickens out of me.”

What is a
weed?

A weed goes by various definitions, but Monsen’s
favorite is “a plant out of place.” Foremost among these is
cheatgrass, which often precedes knapweed and skeletonweed and
which has spread across the West literally like
wildfire.

Cheatgrass greens up early in the
season, but quickly turns to an inedible, combustible straw. It
gives the landscape a soft, hazy, dreamy look and a tendency to
burst into flame. Because cheatgrass both causes and thrives on
fire, it burns out native plant communities with unnatural speed. A
University of Utah graduate student, preparing to research her
master’s thesis at a well-known native-plant site, had to call off
the project when she arrived to find cheatgrass – and nothing
else.

Steve Monsen has a theory on why this
happened. Weeds favor disturbed areas, and the Utah range has been
mightily disturbed for the last 130 years.

More
specifically, he considers the current weed invasion the latest
symptom of the overgrazing that occurred between 1860-1880, when
the pioneers finally started ranching in the Wasatch Range after
spending decades barricaded in their small towns, besieged by the
Utes. When the Indians fell, the settlers made up for lost
time.

They grazed the range so hard that six
inches to a foot of topsoil was lost off the top of the Wasatch
Plateau. Grazed it so hard that Monsen’s great-grandfather, while
herding the town’s cattle from his hometown of Mount Pleasant into
the public rangeland, started running into boys herding cattle from
Spring City, the next town over. (-He said it was originally
beautiful stands of bunchgrass and bitterbrush,” says Monsen, “but
they knocked those out in a hurry.” )

Eroded
soils slid downstream with the rain, making floods commonplace.
They grazed it so hard that the town of Manti bought its own
watershed and cleared off the livestock around the turn of the
century. Then they petitioned Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of
Interior to send a range scientist to Utah to help them
out.

Monsen gets passionate talking about the
advent of range science on the Wasatch Front. He loves the
characters – A.W. Sampson of Nebraska, who opened the Forest
Service Experiment Station in Ephraim in 1912, and labored
successfully to convince other scientists of the connection between
overgrazing and erosion. Then there was the distinguished Lincoln
Ellison, who died in an avalanche and was widely believed to have
been reincarnated as a hawk above his favorite test
plot.

Monsen joined the state wildlife agency in
1960, and in 1968 hooked up with Ellison’s successors at the Shrub
Lab – more formally known as the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain
Research Station Shrub Service Laboratory. In the “60s, he came to
love the tireless hours in the field.

Unfortunately, the work these range scientists were doing was
exactly the wrong thing.

“We were aggressively
seeding crested wheatgrass, smooth brome and intermediate
wheatgrass,” says Monsen. “We were full into the idea that these
introduced species were OK. I’m probably as responsible as anyone
in the West for the number of acres that have been seeded with
crested wheatgrass. I’ve had to wipe a lot of egg off my face for
what we did.”

At the time, he is quick to add,
it made sense. First, these European grasses produced good forage
for livestock. Second, their seeds were available. There was no
commercial source of native seeds.

But somewhere
along the line, Monsen and some others started to realize they were
restoring the damaged range into monocultures of livestock feed.
And as he watched test plots that had been planted as early as the
1920s, Monsen realized with dismay that the introduced grasses
outcompeted native plants. These forage grasses, too, were plants
out of place. Weeds.

By the 1980s, he was
convinced that native-plant communities were the most precious
asset on the range.

“A native community better
protects the site, better provides season-long forage to a number
of species of grazing animals, insects, butterflies, whatever,”
says Monsen. “It provides habitat for those animals, while a single
species just doesn’t do it.

“I think a community
better fits the site in that it provides a more stable cover. It
provides nutrient cycling so that soil fertility levels are
maintained. Communities also better fit diverse sites. I don’t
think any one single species has that ability.”

He wasn’t alone. Then-president Jimmy Carter issued a directive
that only native seeds should be used in public range restoration
efforts, unless there wasn’t enough native-seed
stock.

Therein lies the rub, says Monsen: Even
now, there’s not nearly enough. But there’s some. During the 1960s,
native-seed companies for “wildland” plantings sprang up around the
West – Ephraim is home to four of Utah’s six native grass seed
companies. The Forest Service, in conjunction with the Utah
Division of Wildlife Resources, started a native-shrub nursery,
using a site administered by Snow College.

The
early seed-collection years were colorful ones, Monsen remembers.
Seed collectors were often “rugged-looking individuals’ who would
collect on private as well as government lands. “Often we’d have
landowners be somewhat upset about what was going on; they’d see
people out there beating their bushes with a tennis racket,” he
says, and snorts with laughter. “So we’d tell our collectors if
they got harassed to tell them they’re doing cancer research.”

Seed supply isn’t the only obstacle in the way
of restoring the native range. The scientific community, in Utah at
least, is far from unanimous on the benefits of native plants.

“A lot of people say, why not seed exotics if we
can triple or quadruple production and put alfalfa in for deer?” he
says. “But we still find out we’re losing habitat. It’s not about
one month in the spring. We’re talking about a year-round forage
base. It’s habitat, nesting habitat, concealment. I have no problem
if private ranchers and the feds want to maximize seeding for
forage, but only on small parts of the range. Not as a general
policy.”

‘Stupid,
idiotic, narrow’

Steve Monsen is not some kind of
hippie. He’s an elder in the Mormon Church and the owner of a John
Deere tractor-style lawn mower, which he uses to keep his acre of
lawn golf-course smooth.

But he has a reverence,
an awe even, for native plants. This passion is not articulated for
show: “A lot of things I do and see and learn and appreciate are
hard to share with other people,” he says. “It’s like trying to
explain to someone else why you have such a close attachment to
your children or something.”

It comes out in
his fondness for field trips in his pickup truck. It comes out in
his gruffness with those scientific peers who would still like to
plant Utah’s public range with four introduced species of forage
grass.

“To me that’s a stupid, idiotic, very
narrow approach,” he rumbles unhappily, his face growing pink at
the thought. “That’s like saying we should plant blue spruce in our
high elevations, Gambel’s oak in mid elevations, and in low
elevations transfer everything we have to sagebrush or
corn!’

Bouncing back toward the highway, he
points out a native bluebunch wheatgrass. “See the green in the
lower stem?” he says, sounding like a proud parent at a Little
League game. “People say crested wheatgrass is such great forage.
It’s crap compared to this!” He pauses to avoid a huge bump in the
road.

“With crested wheatgrass, have we set the
stage for recovery? I say no, we haven’t.”

Back
in Mount Pleasant, as we pass a dense meadow of introduced smooth
brome and intermediate wheatgrass, he snaps, “See this? We have no
grouse! We’re losing insects. This guy probably loves it. He
doesn’t have weeds. He can graze it. But in a sense, he doesn’t
understand what he’s lost.”

I think about
proclivities in families. That day at lunch, Monsen’s son, Tod, a
loan officer in Provo, told a story about wanting to win the
dairy-science event at the state 4-H championships while he was in
high school. He didn’t even place in that event, but he won the
horticulture event, which he hadn’t even studied for at
all.

A cheatgrass
valley

Monsen takes me to the Tanner Creek watershed, a
valley that looks like it’s carpeted by a golden cloud 15 miles
long and five inches thick. Bare, sandy hills break through the
cloud here and there, dotted with charred remains of juniper
trees.

It’s a cheatgrass valley. It has burned
four times in the last two years.

“This is
typical of all the West Valley, of all the valleys in Utah,” he
says. “You can go from here clear to the Nevada line, and all
across northern Nevada, and the whole southern half of Idaho, and
it’s just like this. From Rexburg on the north clear around to
Boise and into Oregon. The Steens mountains. So we’re talking about
hundreds of thousands of contiguous acres.”

He
turns to me: “If you had the responsibility to manage this site,
what would you do?”

Um. I run through
everything he’s told me. There is plenty of bare soil that hasn’t
been claimed by cheatgrass. But there’s probably not enough native
stock to replant the whole area. There’s plenty of crested
wheatgrass seed, but once that’s established, you’ve closed the
door on rebuilding a native community. And if the cheatgrass is
left alone, it’ll just spread. …

Monsen has an
answer, of sorts.

“We’re at a transition in
science. We know what we should be doing, but we don’t have the
wherewithall to do it. We need to get more seeds in production.”
And, he adds, “there are some land managers who don’t accept the
transition.”

That’s putting it politely. Two
months ago, he had a shouting match with other scientists about
what should be done with the site.

We drive down
the valley to the abandoned Jericho sheep station, where the local
ranchers would bring their sheep for shearing each spring until the
mid-1970s. Monsen relaxes visibly.

“Watch where
you step,” he says cheerfully as we enter the rambling, wooden
building. “Rattlesnakes love it in here.”

It’s
dark and dusty inside, and the outside quickly assembles itself
into blindingly bright splinters of light. I walk as carefully as a
monk from window to window, staring at my feet.

Monsen is bursting with the happiness of a man with a good story to
tell. In 1956, when he was a sophomore at Snow College, he was
asked to bring in 1,000 head for shearing, because appendicitis,
flu, and a bullet wound to the hand had claimed all the other
likely shepherds of his cousin’s herd. Monsen was from ranching
stock, but his father had spent the years since the Depression as a
policeman. He was nervous. He headed into the range, not even sure
where the sheep were. He spent a week shepherding the herd past
stands of halogeton, the weed of concern back then. Once the sheep
were sheared by the imported New Zealanders, Monsen single-handedly
baled the wool, herded the sheep onto trucks, unloaded them at the
home ranch, and collapsed. A week later, his cousin gave him $500.
A fortune.

Now, though. Look at this place.
Every window frames its own view of devastation. Cheatgrass outside
one. A corral choked with tumbleweeds out another. A bare hill, a
sitting duck for weeds, out another.

A quiet fighter

In the
operatic world of Utah environmental politics, finding Steve Monsen
is like finding a rock in the middle of a stormy sea. He’s come by
his environmental ethic through decades of observation; he’s the
quiet guardian of both a rich seam of history and of a biological
crisis. He’s respectful of both the human and ecological cultures
here, but he can raise tenacious, well-documented hell when he
wants to.

He can say: “It’s obvious grazing was
the culprit in most situations. That doesn’t mean you can’t still
graze areas. But I do feel very sincerely there are many areas we
should not have any grazing on at all.” And there’s no reason not
to believe every word he says. I mean, he is as moderate as you can
get; this is a man who drives out of his way to proudly show me
some of the finer architectural efforts of the early
pioneers.

He doesn’t want to change the world.
He just wants to change the range. He’s even got a plan to do so,
and here in this deserted monument to sheep ranching, he delivers
it to me:

The most damaged ranchlands – those
already infested with knapweed and, in Idaho, skeletonweed – should
be aggressively restored and planted with wheatgrass. The
ranchlands that are teetering on the edge of knapweed invasion
should be taken out of operation, and the ranchers compensated,
like the farmers who took highly erodible lands out of operation in
the 1980s under the Conservation Reserve
Program.

“Right now, that’s the best way to allow
them to heal, and it’s the cheapest thing for us to do,” he says.
“It may be 10 years. It may be 50. I don’t know, it could be 100
years. That’s a lot cheaper than trying to restore them, because I
think that we have weeds on the scene now that we aren’t going to
be able to contain.

“I think we have a window of
time right now. We may be able to prevent these weeds that are
displacing cheatgrass. The ranchers see they’re losing ground. In
Montana and Colorado and the Dakotas, there’s many ranchers there
that are just completely out of business because of weeds. I mean,
they’re just walking away.”

Lisa
Jones freelances from Paonia, Colorado.

Copyright © 2000 HCN and Lisa
Jones

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