Dear HCN,
I enjoyed Ed Marston’s
editorial in the Dec. 26 High Country News. I’m a (gasp)
federal-land rancher in (gasp) Catron County, N.M., and write a
weekly editorial in the Courier, which often bashes (gasp)
enviro-preservationists. I’ve been active in working on the Catron
County Land Plan in relation to water.
I’ve
watched each side rally the troops and vilify the opposition until
the enemy has no face or soul. It is with terrible discouragement
and frustration that I’ve watched the process grow with each side
guilty of telling part of the truth in short news bites. Over the
years, I’ve tried to argue with purists such as Jim Fish, Sue
Schock and Mike Sauber, to no avail. I’ve tried to urge compromise
in the realization that the seeds of discontent were being sown,
and that the backlash would destroy rather than
improve.
Too many people, including myself, are
being pushed until their backs are against the wall. When people’s
life savings, opportunities to work and ability to feed their
family are threatened, they will fight back. The irony is that
there is much in environmental initiatives that should be
commended. However, often they go too far or the means of
implementation are counter-productive.
We have
gone from the new forestry, or pick and pluck (which requires a
greater area and is anathema to the environmental community), to no
timber cutting and total preservation. When did the word
conservation become synonymous with preservation or with total
non-use? How does Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt expect to get
federal ranchers to take better care of their federal lands when
any investment or value that their ranch had will be taken away by
the government?
It is often argued that Western
lands are too fragile to run cattle, mine or log. My answer is that
the lands and people of the West are too fragile to sustain a
senseless war of sacred viewpoints and extremists. We are hell-bent
on repeating history. The Indian wars and the aftermath of European
settlement changed the West so much that it can never be returned,
no matter what the purists cry.
My main complaint
is that too often the environmental community wants to turn back
the clock to an ideal world that may never have existed or that has
been altered too much to allow a return anyway. Let’s go forward
from where we are.
Jim
Jackson
Quemado, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Why can’t both sides move a little toward each other?.
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