Dear HCN,
I’ve had a bellyful of Ed
Marston’s sappy romanticizing about the Western rancher (HCN,
12/26/94). I’m from a ranching family – my great-grandmother came
out West in a covered wagon in 1846, and my grandfather homesteaded
a ranch in Arizona in 1913 – and the way you Easterners buy into
this “rugged individual” cowboy nonsense really tees me off. The
West will continue to grow until we achieve zero population growth.
There’s no stopping the influx of newcomers. It is only a matter of
whether newcomers and old-time residents alike live in a healthy
ecosystem that can sustain life, or in a dry, barren, cow-beaten
wasteland. If you’ll check historical accounts of how this land
looked 150 years ago, you’ll find that we’re a long way down the
road toward desertification, and for the most part, ranching has
taken us there.
Our public lands, on which by far
most grazing occurs, will never be developed by yuppies for condos.
But our public lands, our national forests and our wilderness will
be developed by public-lands ranchers, if we don’t stop them,
because the only way they can make a buck is by dipping deeper and
deeper into federal subsidies for range projects to prop up their
cattle numbers as the ecosystem they’re beating to death becomes
less and less productive. And who pays the exorbitant cost of the
developments? The workers in the tent and trailer cities you
bemoan. It’s the ranchers, not the newcomers, who comprise the
West’s elite.
The truth is, Western ranching
today excludes sustainable growth, as it robs our water, ruins our
streams and makes the land less productive. Framing the issue as
ranching vs. ski resorts is inane – the two are totally unrelated.
(Just how many newcomers do you think ranching would employ?) We
need sustainable development throughout the West, but ranching
isn’t sustainable. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else to do in
many of these rural communities because ranchers, sitting pretty on
a sweet deal – courtesy of the hard-working American taxpayer –
have had no incentive to diversify. They need to get off their
duffs and find sustainable ways to live along with the rest of
us.
Today’s ranchers, and yesterday’s ranchers,
were just businessmen. It is their “custom and culture” to buy out
their fellow ranchers as they go bust, and to expand their spreads,
not because they’re bad, but because that’s business. Face the
facts: The first ranchers were just a bunch of Eastern speculators
out to make a quick buck on free land, and Eastern greenhorns who
had worn out their farms, heading out West to repeat their mistakes
in a fragile, arid ecosystem they knew nothing about, with an
exotic, water-dependent bovine that had no business being there. To
establish themselves, they squashed the “custom and culture” of the
former inhabitants without a second thought – theirs was a custom
and culture of forcible takeover and change, of exploitation for
profit.
Finally, a word about environmentalists:
We aren’t all cappuccino-sipping yuppies. Most of us are
working-class people who just want a fair shake for our kids. If
you want to renew your spirit, get out of the espresso shops of the
“culture and the leisure colony,” get down on the ground and
“connect” with grass-roots environmentalists – those of us who live
and work in the small communities of the West. We are fair-minded
people trying to keep elitist welfare cowboys from grazing our
public-lands to dust and sucking them dry. We want the West to be a
place fit for people to live. A few months ago, HCN ran a pictorial
featuring beat-up old ranchers under the banner, “The quiet pride
of the West.” How about a spread titled, “The struggling hope of
the West,” featuring all the grass-roots environmentalists (not
yuppie-career enviros) who have sacrificed income and careers to
save the land we love?
Susan
Schock
Silver City, New
Mexico
Susan Schock is
executive director of Gila Watch.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Really teed off.
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