WildEarth Guardians

Wednesday, December 14, 2005
John Horning responds to the 'Cows vs Condos' dichotomy as presented in the collection of essays 'Ranching West of the 100th Mer

I reject the notion that we can only have either cows or condos
Contact: WildEarth Guardians

In the summer of 2000, in the midst of one of the most intense droughts in the Southwest in decades, I was radicalized by fire. During an eleven-day backpack across the Gila wilderness, my companion and I came across one of the rarest events in the cow-burnt landscapes of the West-a gentle fire, dancing slowly through an old growth ponderosa pine forest.

McKenna Park, which is the name of the area where the fire burned quietly for more than two months without generating so much as a whisper from the western political establishment, has been off limits to domestic livestock for nearly half a century. As a result of the exclusion of cattle and sheep, knee and waist high fescues and other native grasses blanket this rolling parkland, while beavers damn mile after mile of trout streams bordered with dense thickets of cottonwood and willow.

Frankly, that experience was just one in a long line of ecological epiphanies I have had since moving to New Mexico in 1994 that have each lead me to a simple conclusion: Cattle grazing on much of the western landscape makes no ecological sense, and further, has little economic relevance.

Beaver and fire are two critical ecological agents and processes that have been and will continue to be marginalized by the rancher-centric worldview promoted in "Ranching West of the 100th Meridian," edited by Ed Marston, Richard Knight and Wendell Gilgert. The book is a collection of essays that celebrate and eulogize ranching and the rural culture that has grown up around it in the last 140 years.

At the center of the book's worldview is that ranching, with slight ecological modifications, can save the West from the looming onslaught of development. This pervasive view, echoed by the book's many other contributors, is the result of being blinded by a popular cultural mythology that refuses to see the ecological wounds that scar the western landscape and grow deeper every year.

Marston and his collaborators suffer from deeply flawed thinking when they promote the false dichotomy that westerners must choose between either cows or condos; between flood irrigated alfalfa pastures or another Wal Mart. For the same reason that I disagree with President Bush for framing the post 9/11 geopolitical world of one with either good or evil, I reject the notion that we can only have either cows or condos.

The dichotomy doesn't work for two basic reasons.

First, ranching in an arid landscape is not economically vibrant enough to prevent sprawl. It is and always has been an economically marginal activity. Ranchers regularly lose money. This financial reality is only acceptable to ranchers because of a seemingly endless list of direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies on the order of $500 million per year.

Ranchers have been selling out to developers for a century or more, not because of pesky and persistent environmentalists or because they couldn't get along with their local BLM range con, but because ranching as a business, stinks.

If westerners are serious about preventing sprawl from destroying private lands that are important wildlife corridors or biological hotspots-and we should be-then we can't hide behind the cowboy myth. We must place much greater priority on conservation easements, land-use planning and private land acquisition.

As it is now, we're getting the worst of both worlds-ecologically damaging cattle grazing and largely uncontrolled sprawl. Our public lands are being held hostage by ranchers who angrily oppose wolf reintroduction, persecute prairie dogs and continue to allow their livestock to destroy streams, even after they've sold their private lands to become the latest 'Elk Meadows' subdivision.

Second, Marston and his collaborators-deeply enamored with the cowboy culture-routinely fail to consider the true ecological impacts of livestock grazing, and completely ignore the broader ecological costs of livestock production.

As narrowly framed by Marston and Knight, the ecological debate about ranching in the West is little more than a conflict over how to manage grass. In this light it's not surprising that the editors cite a 1994 National Academy of Sciences report to defend their position that livestock grazing is, at worse, ecologically benign. Yet the report, which found inconclusive evidence to determine whether range conditions have improved or worsened in recent decades, completely ignores the reams of evidence from the non-agriculturally oriented scientific community that implicates livestock production in the endangerment of hundreds of imperiled western desert, grassland, aquatic and even forest species. If the gage targets biological and ecological indicators, the pulse of the grazed landscape in the arid West is faint and fading.

Furthermore, the NAS report is just as significant for what it fails to address. Like many agriculturally grounded critiques it and Marston's book ignore the role that cattle grazing-by removing grasses that fuel low intensity fires-has played in disrupting natural fire regimes across the West's drier forests. Likewise, almost never is there an open and honest admission of the fact that the sole reason that wolves are embattled refugees on the western landscape or that federal agents kill almost 90,000 coyotes per year is to make the west's open spaces safer for sheep and cattle.

And what of the near complete extermination and continuing war against prairie dogs and beavers, keystone species whose loss has resulted in the near collapse of western stream and grassland ecosystems on a scale fully fathomed by only a small handful who dare to dream about a different western rural landscape?

This is to say nothing of the hundreds of western creeks damned and diverted for the purpose of flood irrigating alfalfa to sustain cattle in the winter or to fill stockponds on land where cattle could not otherwise exist. Streams, the arteries of life in the arid West, are not only routinely clogged with cattle, but have also been literally removed from the landscape-all to sustain cattle.

Perhaps then the greatest failing of those who embrace the ranching culture that is so dominant in the rural West and so glorified by the popular mythology captured by the Marlboro Man, is their failure to envision another rural culture that has a wholly different relationship to the western landscape and its wild inhabitants.

Like Marston, I too believe that we are working, as the late author Wallace Stegner once said, to find a society that will match its scenery. What we have in common with some of those who seek to sustain ranching on public lands is an abhorrence for the homogenizing influences that are slowly seeping into our distinctive western culture and landscape.

However, from there our visions part radically. Our fundamental difference is that the society we seek is one that doesn't endlessly persecute the West's wildlife, glorify gun violence, arrogantly presume a right to divert an entire creeks' flow, or turn desert grasslands into scrub.

There is another culture - even in the West's rural outposts - that rejects consumerism, Wal Mart, and the senseless sprawl that is sterilizing our precious western heritage. The culture waiting to flourish as ranching inevitably wanes across the arid West is one that embraces the West's wild heart-it's droughts, fires, wolves and all of the extremes of this stark and beautiful land that we call home.

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