As we signed the papers, I
knew I was a hypocrite.
But every time we watched the
setting sun make the red and beige sandstone glow from within,
every time my dog lit out after a jackrabbit it was never going to
catch, and every time I found a new potsherd in an unexpected
place, I wanted this land to be ours. More than that, I felt it was
meant to be ours.
The local ranching cooperative, which
had survived nearly a century of drought and price fluctuations,
could not withstand today’s more insidious threat to open space,
the reality that it is more profitable to sell the land than
continue to scrape by running cattle. A few years earlier, the
co-op had divided the land among its members. Many had either
passed the land onto their children — many of whom were not
interested in ranching — or sold it to pay the taxes on the
rest.
Now I was an accomplice to one of the most hated
trends on the Western landscape: subdividing. My dismay at the loss
of open space has given me a new perspective on ranching.
While living in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s, I’d first seen
national forest and wilderness land so overrun by cattle that it
was hard to find a camping place without cowpies. In the early
1990s, I attended a “Cattle Free by ’93” rally that was working to
remove all livestock from our public lands. I knew how inefficient
it was to produce beef by grazing animals in the arid West. I’d
learned about the federal subsidies and corporate ranches, and I
found the argument that ranching was a “legacy” to be laughable. I
believed that the greatest threats to pristine open spaces were
cows and stubborn cowboys: This was the New West, with new
pressures on wildlife and open space, and it needed new solutions.
But where I live in western New Mexico, the largest
tracts of open space — hundreds of thousands of acres of
mountains, mesas and grasslands — are private ranches.
Drought has withered the range and, coupled with changes in tax
laws and the skyrocketing price of land, it has led to ranch
closures on all sides of me. Where there once was sagebrush and
grassland, subdivisions and trailer parks are sprouting. Beat-up
rangeland can always recover with rest and restoration, but once
the ranchettes arrive, the land is fragmented, fenced and lost
forever.
During the midst of changes in state tax laws
aimed at preventing frequent subdivisions, my wife and I came upon
the most beautiful 20 acres we had ever seen. Gently sloping north
at about 7,400 feet in elevation, the upper third is covered with
old-growth ponderosa pine on a rocky sandstone slope. The lower
two-thirds is a blue grama piñon-juniper savannah. The small
valley is surrounded by the beige and red sandstone of El Morro
National Monument and Navajo Reservation land, and looks out onto
the Cibola National Forest. We bought it immediately at the asking
price of about $895 an acre.
For several years, we camped
and picnicked there with our kids. We drove out on Sundays to
cross-country ski, or gather firewood under the cautious circling
of a red-tail hawk that nested in the pines. After a few years, we
built a 500-square-foot adobe cabin, a place to warm up and drink
something hot or spend the night year-round. It has no electricity
and it’s heated by wood. The next spring, the red-tailed hawk
returned, circled and perched in the tree to watch us. But she
didn’t nest. The spring after that, she didn’t come back at all.
I console myself with the knowledge that someone was
going to buy our land, and we are leaving a very small footprint on
it. But it’s cold comfort when I think of this process multiplied
by the thousands every year.
I still believe there is
significant room for reform of grazing practices, especially on
public land. But now, I’m a firm supporter of any efforts to keep
private ranches in business.
Steven Albert is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Zuni, New Mexico, and
works as a biologist on wildlife and watershed restoration projects
in the Southwest, mainly for Indian
tribes.
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