Thank you for the recent story and comments on
grazing buyouts. We were especially taken by Executive Director
Paul Larmer’s evocative description of the seasonality of
grazing in the Paonia area, with its blend of low-elevation private
lands, where cows have their calves, and its high-elevation public
lands, where cows summer. Paul’s delightful soliloquy of
pastoralism had a chilling ending, however, with his declaration
that “Decades from now, we will look back at this period of buyouts
as an important and necessary step in the evolution of public-lands
management.”
We hope in a future issue
HCN will tell readers what it thinks will happen
to the open space around Paonia if those ranchers sell their
private lands, which will be the inevitable result if their summer
leases on public lands are terminated. We think we know the
outcome. Chopping off the public lands will hasten the day when
these meadows reappear as housing developments. Paonia will no
longer be the beautiful rural place it is now.
Over
400,000 square miles of public land are being grazed in the West.
Altogether, there are about 170,000 square miles of private base
ranch lands tied to these public grazing leases. Buy out the public
lands and you make it more likely that millions of acres of private
lands will be subdivided. Doubt that? Then realize that already
one-quarter of all the private land in the conterminous United
States is already in exurban development.
Buyouts have
their place in the West. Not all public lands should be grazed and
a buyout is an equitable way to resolve the matter. But grazing,
done right, can support wildlife and contribute to the rural West
that is so rapidly disappearing.
Richard
Knight
Livermore, Colorado
Courtney White
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Bill McDonald
Douglas,
Arizona
Dan Kemmis
Missoula,
Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Buyouts doom private lands.
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