I should confess up-front that. although
I’m an environmentalist and a wildlife biologist at a Western
university, I admire ranchers. I should further confess that I live
on a small piece of property near real ranches– ones big enough to
be home to cattle and the shy kind of wildlife you don’t see on
smaller places. My wife and I try to pay our dues for living among
these large and beautiful pieces of land by helping our neighbors.
We keep up our irrigation ditches, we keep weeds off our property,
and we lease our grass and water to them.
I
confess these things because I know that my corner of Colorado
would be better off if our place were to be part of a larger piece
of neighboring land. It would be less fragmented and more
attractive to the kind of wildlife “- songbirds and carnivores “-
that shuns land with roads and cats and dogs and houses and lights.
I make those confessions in the hope that my
fellow environmentalists who are intent on pushing cattle off the
West’s 420,000 square miles of public land will make a confession
of their own. I hope they will confess that their “cattle-free”
movement has absolutely nothing to do with the health of the land
and everything to do with their selfish desire to recreate on the
public land. I would like them to also confess that through their
short-sighted desire to walk on trails free of cow pies, they are
helping to subdivide the West.
I am convinced
that the cattle-free people have struck an unholy alliance with
developers. Under their pious statements about “saving the land”
and punishing “welfare ranchers,” they are playing into the hands
of the boomers who would turn the open spaces we love and prize
into a sea of malls and roads and housing developments.
How can this be? The devil is in the details.
Late each winter, the mother cows in the West drop their calves.
Some of those cow-calf pairs, as they are called, spend the summer
on private lands and are sold in the fall. But on the 21,000 cattle
ranches that have federal grazing allotments, cow-calf pairs get
trailed onto Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land,
where they spend summers and part of the fall.
During that time, the ranchers generally raise
hay on their private, irrigated property. This is the property
Westerners see every day. It is our best watered land, with the
deepest soils. It is the land our most desirable wildlife prefers
to use. Deer and skunks and raccoons will happily live in
subdivisions. But bobcats and yellow warblers will only live on
unfragmented land, such as ranches.
In the fall,
the cows and their now 600-pound calves are brought back to the
ranch. The calves are sold; the mother cows live through the winter
on the hay raised the previous summer, and the cycle begins again.
The point of this story is that the 170,000
square miles of private ranchland and the 420,000 square miles of
grazed federal lands are a unit. Drive cattle off the public lands,
and you’ve driven them off the private lands. And once they’re off
the private lands, the ranchers can do nothing in most cases but
sacrifice that land for development. Cows won’t graze the clouds.
That’s the argument. We need to keep the
productive and private low-elevation lands in ranching to protect
diverse wildlife. Our high-elevation public lands are beautiful.
But for the most part, they are the leavings of the homestead era.
The homesteaders took the land with the best water and richest
soils, and left us the rest. Those leftovers can’t support diverse
wildlife by themselves.
What about subsidies
for cattle ranchers? It’s a fair question, since grazing permits
are relatively inexpensive. But we should also ask: What about
“welfare recreationists?” Recreation is the West’s most subsidized
activity. Even with the controversial federal-fee system,
recreationists who climb mountains, who snowmobile, who gape at
Yellowstone’s wonders, who fish our streams, pay hardly anything
for those activities.
Some recreationists pay
back indirectly. They buy fishing gear and backpacks and snow
machines, and food and gas and lodging in small towns near public
land. Some of them, recognizing their responsibilities, build
trails and pick up other recreationists’ trash. They organize into
groups to protest mining and logging and dam building. They pay
their way, more or less.
In the same way,
ranchers who have federal grazing leases pay their way. They keep
their private land In open space for us to look at and for wildlife
to live on. It’s a more than fair trade. I hope that someday,
before they’ve helped to destroy the West, the cattle-free
environmentalists come to understand that.
R
ichard L. Knight is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a professor of
wildlife conservation at Colorado State
University.
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