A puppet show just finished a
20-year run in southwest New Mexico. I first attended in 1994, when
a magazine sent me to the Gila National Forest to inspect damage
grazing had done to habitat of Gila trout, our only endangered
inland salmonid. Grazing allotments in the Gila and Aldo Leopold
wildernesses had been leased to ranchers Kit Laney and his wife,
Sherry.
Cattle had nuked the forest. The giant
cottonwoods that had shaded and cooled former Gila trout water had
expired with the streams. Their sand-blasted corpses lay across dry
washes. Riparian grasses had been replaced by rabbitbrush, western
yarrow, thistle, pinon, juniper and other plants worthless to
riparian fish and wildlife, and even livestock.
In Black
Canyon Creek, the last perennial stream in the Aldo Leopold
Wilderness, I finally encountered fish — Gila-rainbow trout
mongrels. The Endangered Species Act required the feds to get the
cows out of the stream and restore pure Gilas; but, as usual, the
bureaucracy was stuck in neutral. In the wide, eroded section
through the Laneys’ inholdings and allotment, ragged, bony cows
were standing in the stream, urinating, defecating and knocking
down the banks. Where the sun hit the water, cow pies had blossomed
into enormous gobs of green algae.
The Laneys were angry
in 1994, but not as angry as they would become over the next 10
years. Journalists, Kit informed me, are “jackasses,” a harsh
assessment considering all the fawning press he was getting and
would get.
When the Forest Service dropped its plan to
gouge out 15 watering ponds for cattle from the wilderness springs
that fed former Gila trout streams, the Laneys responded by grazing
their cattle without a permit, claiming they owned grazing rights
on the public?s land. They ignored citations and refused to pay
fines until 1999, when the 10th Circuit Court upheld a ruling
against them. At this point, their cattle had been pounding fish
and wildlife habitat for 11 years.
Meanwhile, the
livestock industry and the property-rights community were hissing
into the Laneys’ ears, convincing them that public-lands ranchers
everywhere were counting on them to establish case law. In 2003,
the Laneys filed “declarations of (grazing) ownership,” later
defined by a federal judge as a “duplicitous attempt to evade the
operation and effect of this court’s orders.”
With that,
the Laneys defiantly turned their cattle back into the wilderness.
When the Forest Service threatened to round up and confiscate their
stock, the Laneys began contacting livestock auction houses,
persuading them that they’d be boycotted if they dealt with the
government. It worked. Finally, the Forest Service lined up an
auction house in Oklahoma and kept the deal quiet.
At the
roundup, in March 2004, Kit Laney appeared on horseback. According
to court documents, he charged at federal law enforcement officers,
threatening them, yelling profanities, lashing them with his reins,
knocking down and injuring one of them, and attempting to tear down
the fence.
It took four officers and a blast of pepper
spray to wrestle him, kicking and screaming, to the ground. For
these antics Laney spent six months in jail. Proceeds from the sale
of the stock partially reimbursed the government for the roundup,
leaving taxpayers $150,000 short.
But the Laneys and
their support group weren’t finished. Sherry Laney filed criminal
complaints against two Forest Service employees who she alleged had
illegally transported cattle, an action that last October earned
her a $6,409.34 fine for filing a “frivolous and oppressive
litigation brought in bad faith.”
As legally clueless and
hideously ill-advised as the Laneys were, it’s a mistake to dismiss
them or their saga as aberrations. The story is less their behavior
than the behavior of their puppeteers — the grazing and
property-rights outfits that encouraged their lawbreaking and
funded their failed litigation.
Now, with the couple out
of business, Gila trout recovery is turning out to be one of the
more impressive success stories of the Endangered Species Act. But
what’s also impressive — and disturbing — is that two
rogue ranchers and their entourage of tacticians, attorneys,
cheerleaders and financial backers could push the United States
government around for two decades, intimidating resource managers
into contravening federal law and destroying fish, wildlife and
plant communities on this fragile and beautiful public land.
With lots of time and money you can knock down puppets in
the courts, as the Forest Service has just demonstrated. But the
trouble with puppets is that there is an endless supply, and they
keep popping up, manipulated by the same hands.
Ted
Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the
conservation editor for Fly Rod & Reel
magazine and writes from Grafton,
Massachusetts.
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