Dear HCN,
The recent issue on
wildfires and exotic weeds continues a disappointing trend in your
paper, of peddling panaceas rather than creating dialogue. In the
opening page, the “usual suspects’ are rounded up – grazing,
farming, roads, mines – and from there it reads like a tabloid
account of the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder.
One
sidebar attempts to credit cattle with the wholesale weeding of the
West. An activist-group employee, Joy Belsky, condemns livestock
for carrying weed seeds and disturbing the soil surface. Do you
expect us to believe that wild animals and birds don’t carry a
sufficient number of weed seeds? Or that elk and deer somehow float
above the “delicate soil crust?”
There’s nothing
sinister about the grazing and trampling of herding animals. Any
biologists worth their salt would know that this is vital to a
healthy grassland ecology, necessary for new grass and brush
seedlings to take root. Following Belsky’s solution, we would
certainly see more landscapes like that pictured on the facing
page. Here we see scrubby sagebrush among dead and dying grass
plants, all surrounded by 90 percent bare soil. Ironically, you
titled the photo, “A healthy sagebrush ecosystem.”
A little more depth, please, and fewer quick
fixes.
Chris
Frasier
Limon, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Don’t blame cows.
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