Dear HCN,
I am writing in response
to the letter from Courtney White (HCN, 12/3/01: Grazing story
ignored radical center), wherein he chastised your paper’s failure
to focus on the “radical center” in the public-lands grazing
debate. He claimed, “There is a progressive ranching movement
afoot, and there are plenty of good stories out
there.”
I think he’s practicing wishful thinking,
at best. I’ve been a public-lands grazing activist in the Southwest
for more than a decade. There have been changes over the years, but
a widespread movement in the ranching community to cooperate with
conservationists in order to implement ecologically sound livestock
management isn’t one of them. Of course, there are some ranchers
who are sincerely trying to mitigate the impact their cattle are
having upon the public land they are permitted to use. But few of
them are making much money at it, especially here in the hot and
arid Southwest. That’s because the implementation of adequate
livestock management generally involves building expensive fences
to restrict cattle from riparian areas, and cutting cattle numbers
to limit upland forage utilization levels. Since these changes
obviously reduce profits, the pool of willing ranchers is a small
one.
In my experience, most of the “good stories”
Mr. White referred to are little more than ranching propaganda.
They usually involve a rancher starting a local collaborative
working group to implement a Holistic Resource Management (HRM)
grazing system. The lure of HRM, also called time-controlled or
short-duration grazing, is that it seems to promise everything to
everyone. In particular, it promises to keep cattle numbers high.
But it’s based upon ecological theories that have been repeatedly
discredited by years of scientific research. HRM may be better than
nothing, but it’s inferior to conventional livestock-management
systems, where the stocking rates and pasture moves are dictated by
compliance with conservative forage-utilization
levels.
As for finding middle ground, here in
Arizona, I cannot remember one conservation initiative that the
cattlegrowers have supported, nor can I think of one that they
didn’t oppose. Even so, ranchers are still able to exploit Western
myths and claim they are good stewards of the
land.
The flip side of this is that grazing
activists are usually characterized as bad guys, with sinister
motives, even if they are just trying to get the Forest Service, or
the BLM, to enforce longstanding environmental laws. I refuse to
let the debate be defined that way. I would like to see the end of
public-lands grazing. There, I said it.
There’s
the issue of fairness, of course. Ranchers have been permitted to
graze their livestock on public lands for a long time, so it’s not
practical to try to end it everywhere immediately. But it could be
phased in through a grazing-allotment retirement program that
creates an equitable financial mechanism to encourage ranchers to
voluntarily surrender their grazing permits. All it would take is
for Western conservationists to embrace their real feelings about
the corrupt institution of public-lands
grazing.
Jeff Burgess
Tempe, Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wishful thinking about a corrupt institution.
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