Two recently released books,
Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the
American West and Ranching West of the 100th
Meridian, offer very different visions of ranching’s
place in the West. In a special feature, High Country
News’ Ed Marston and Forest Guardians executive director
John Horning, review the books and reopen the debate on the future
of public lands ranching.
Cow-free crowd ignores science, sprawl
By Ed
Marston
Welfare
Ranching’s authors, George Wuerthner and Mollie
Matteson, are romantics who ignore the threat of sprawl and the
studies of scientists in their quest to ban all cattle grazing on
the West’s public lands.
Read more (HCN, 12/9/02:
Cow-free crowd ignores science, sprawl)
Ranching advocates lack a rural vision
By John Horning
Ranching West
of the 100th Meridian is a book of essays that promotes
the false idea that Westerners must choose between condos and cows
in a landscape never meant for cattle grazing.
Read more
(HCN, 12/9/02: Ranching advocates lack a rural
vision).
READERS WEIGH IN
We all have a dog in grazing fight
Dear
HCN,
Ed Marston’s recent review
of the book Welfare Ranching was disappointing on more than one
level. But there was one thing that stuck out pretty profoundly
— his criticism that the only reason anyone wants to save
rangeland is because backpackers don’t want to step in cow
flops.
Lots of folks who work on Western rangeland issues
aren’t backpackers, so the criticism, besides being silly, is
baseless. But what is really distressing is to see a longtime
environmental advocate be won over by the “use”
paradigm: The only ones with any real dog in a fight are the ones
who use a resource, regardless of what they’re using it for,
or what the end result of that use is.
This notion comes
out of the most crippled of thinking, and it denies any hope of
mental ascendance toward the notion of intrinsic value — that
things have independent worth, regardless of how humans might use
them. To see a prominent writer like Marston use as his lens the
ethical value system that a tick has towards your ankle does not
bode well for him, or for the West.
Charles
Pezeshki
Moscow, Idaho
Ranchers grow good food, strong communities
Dear HCN,
I found John Horning’s
diatribe on Western ranching amusing. His knee-jerk reaction to
what is a staple of Western culture and economics shows his naivete
in these matters.
Most of the ranchers I know here in the
West truly have a deep and serious interest in their livelihood,
acting not only out of short-term economic necessity but also with
an eye toward long-term ecological health. To do otherwise would be
shooting oneself in the foot.
A tremendous opportunity
exists right now for ranchers and progressive environmentalists
(not the knee-jerk fundamentalist types) to coalesce into a
productive partnership to ensure continued sound rangeland
management practices. This partnership has a long way to go, but if
the objective is to continue to find ways of preserving rangelands
for future generations, then it’s a win-win proposition for
everybody.
We must find ways for ranchers to derive
value-added prices for their cattle, for ranchers to get closer to
consumers and be paid handsomely for the healthy animals that they
raise. Livestock ranchers of the West, most of them relatively
small family operators, offer a healthy alternative to the
corporate-feedlot medicated varieties available to the masses.
Perhaps the strongest argument for preserving Western
livestock ranching is that it has the chance of bringing at least
this food source (beef) closer to home. A recent study concluded
that the food on an average American dinner plate has traveled some
1,600 miles. The adverse environmental impacts of that travel are
too lengthy to list here, but the number one impact is fossil fuel
energy production and consumption.
The adverse
environmental impacts of a few cattle grazing in the woods and on
pastures for a few months of the year pale in comparison to the
environmental and political impacts associated with our growing
reliance on the corporate totalitarian food system.
Tony
Daranyi
Norwood, Colorado
Recreation is more harmful than ranching?
Dear
HCN,
While I find some common ground
with Ed Marston in his views on cattle ranching in the west, I am
disturbed by a few assertions made without foundation. The most
perplexing is a reference to “studies that show recreation is
more harmful than ranching.” This is somewhat reminiscent of
the claim by ranching advocates that “insufficient grazing in
grasslands causes ecological harm.” When I chased that one
down in the technical literature, I found support for it to be
somewhere between thin and nonexistent, but in any event almost
entirely dependent on one’s definition of “harm.”
In the case of recreation vs. grazing, what type of
recreation: cross-country skiing, four-wheeling? What intensity:
seasonal, daily? In what type of allotment: riparian, lowlands,
uplands, alpine? Under whose management: Forest Service, BLM, Park
Service? Where’s the data?
Bernard R. Foy
Santa Fe, New Mexico
It’s Marston who ignores science
Dear
HCN,
Ed Marston’s review of
Welfare Ranching: Ranching advocates lack a rural vision) accuses
the book’s authors of ignoring science and sprawl in
concluding that public-lands grazing should be
terminated. Well, my copy of the book doesn’t bear
that out at all.
Instead, I found numerous short, factual
articles written by many specialists in most of the land-management
sciences, documenting the damage that results from grazing and its
associated activities, and citing hundreds of scientific articles
to support their findings. In fact, I found the volume long on fact
and short on rhetoric, which is exactly the opposite of what I
expected.
As an experienced researcher, writer and
technical editor, I found much in the book to admire. Where else,
to cite one small example, can you find an accurate description of
the nature and destructive effects of grazing on microphytic soil
crusts? This should be a large issue to public-land managers, but
few even know what crusts are.
It seems to me it is
Marston who ignores empirical findings of science, and whose take
on ranching approaches romanticism.
Ronald M.
Lanner
Placerville, California
Marston responds
Dear readers,
Here
are the articles I used for my review of Welfare Ranching. 1. Who
owns public land ranches and how much private land is associated
with them comes from B.J. Gentner and J.A. Tanaka, Jan. 2002,
Journal of Range Management 55 (1).
2. The various causes
of threatened and endangered species ranked by severity, can be
found in B. Czech, P.R. Krausman, P.K. Devers, July 2000, “Economic
Associations Among Causes of Species Endangerment in the United
States,” BioScience, Vol. 50, No. 7, 593-601. The list, starting
with the largest cause, follows: exotics, urbanization, row-crop
agriculture, outdoor recreation and tourism development, and
ranching.
3. The biological richness of our mainly
private lowlands and the biological poverty of our higher elevation
public lands is described in J.M. Scott, R.J.F. Abbitt and C.R.
Groves, Winter 2001, “What Are We Protecting,” Conservation Biology
in Practice, Vol. 2, No. 1.
4. The effects of trails on
sensitive species is in S.G. Miller, R.L. Knight and C.K. Miller,
1998, “Influence of Recreational Trails on Breeding Bird
Communities,” Ecological Applications 8 (1), 162-169.
5.
The data showing that conversion of rural land to residential and
commercial uses is occurring at a much faster rate than population
growth is in R.L. Knight, W.C. Gilgert, E. Marston, 2002, Ranching
West of the 100th Meridian, Island Press. Pp. 25-32.
— Ed Marston
Find common ground on ranching
Dear
HCN,
I want to compliment you on the
reviews of Welfare Ranching and Ranching West of the 100th
Meridian: Ranching advocates lack a rural vision). Both Ed Marston
and John Horning have similar and laudable objectives and identify
issues important for resisting urbanization and gentrification of
our unique Western lands.
But Horning does not offer any
concrete suggestions. He talks about “another culture …
that rejects consumerism … ” Fine, but what is this
culture, and where will it come from? It seems to me that
Marston’s vision of ranchers who are good land stewards is
closest to the mark. But how to change attitudes that have been
entrenched for a century?
It seems to me that the only
answer is dialogue between those that live on the land and those
who don’t have the opportunity but want to see it preserved.
And there must also be a dialogue between those that live on the
land and those outsiders (in government agencies) who have
responsibility for managing the land.
Let us hope that
common ground can be found. High Country News can play an important
role.
John E. Douglas
Spokane, Washington
Time to ride into the sunset, Marston
Dear HCN,
So, Ed
Marston is now Senior Journalist. I guess we will be hearing more
from him. But I wish not. Does Ed not realize that his new opinions
on ranching are being presented as an endorsement of not just those
ranchers who attempt to engage in sustainable grazing (perhaps in
itself an oxymoron) but as an endorsement of the whole
ranching/farming industry?
But we know that ranchers,
grazers and arable farmers distribute onto the land more toxic
chemicals than any other industry. After all the millions of tons
of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, is it any
wonder we are witnessing the dramatic disappearance of amphibians,
birds and mammals from our land?
Ed, it’s time to
ride off into some fantasy Western sunset, you wrangling man!
Adrian Wilson
Denver, Colorado
Is vegetarianism the answer?
Dear
HCN,
I hope John Horning’s vision
of a sensitive culture looming on the Western horizon that
“embraces the West’s wild heart” and refuses
“to glorify gun violence” exceeds his expectations in
sweep and fulfillment.
A fully sensitive and harmonious
culture, however, would look beyond the simple dichotomy of cows
vs. condos and push deeper into the ethical issues affecting our
relationships to animals as well as the land. I hope that
Horning’s “culture waiting to flourish” would
embrace the value of all life, regardless of its form.
This includes cows. W.H. Hudson, a naturalist who knew cows, wrote:
“ … the gentle, large-brained, social cow, that caresses
our hands and faces with her rough blue tongue, and is more like
man’s sister than any other non-human being — the
majestic, beautiful creature with the Juno eyes … .”
Isn’t it possible that the cows vs. condos
dichotomy would evaporate if the new cultural paradigm included a
commitment to vegetarian stewardship?
Bob Muth
Kalispell, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline THE GREAT RANCHING DEBATE.
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