In the western United States, the less it rains, the less likely you can count on it raining. John Wesley Powell noted this truism when he surveyed the West in the years after the Civil War. His honesty about the feasibility of settling the arid West was ignored: ignored by the hopeful, the optimistic and the opportunistic; in short, ignored by just about everybody with designs on all that free land.

Powell’s ghost should be wagging a finger on the hand of his one arm at us.

The current southwestern drought is a reminder of Powell’s warning more than a century ago. A drought has been going on since 1996, with one average year of rain in the last six, says David Stewart, the U.S. Forest Service’s director of rangeland management in the Southwest. Summer monsoons have been sporadic, snowpack has been scant, and there’s little relief in sight. One good year won’t solve the problem.

“Our forests have become progressively drier and drier and drier every year,” Stewart says. “It’s created a monumental management dilemma. ” The Southwest is generally dry, but it’s also diverse. From the Sonoran Desert to alpine ecosystems of the southern Rockies, Stewart says he’s never witnessed conditions so bad, so pervasively dry.

It’s a reminder of how recently we’ve arrived in this land and how little we know. Six years may seem catastrophic in the short run of our conventional wisdom about the climate of the West, but droughts can and have stretched out for decades, according to researchers studying the climate of the western United States.

For public land managers, drought means making tough decisions-like removing cattle from grazing allotments-and sticking to them, Stewart says. “We need to make sure that we’re still ultraconscious of conditions. The issue dominates throughout the region, ” Stewart says. “Our job as forest managers is to make sure our forests are properly managed. ”

Many management units haven’t had cattle on them for the last four years, Stewart says. Across the board, land managers have to consider reducing the number of livestock on public lands or cutting back on their season of use, he says.

For public land ranchers in many places, it means ranches without cattle. Zero livestock means zero dollars, says John Whitney IV, an Arizona-based rancher. The drought makes a buyout proposal that much more attractive, he says.

Stewart can be tough on managers who don’t make the health of the land a priority-evidence a colorful email in which he lambasted Santa Fe National Forest managers that was widely circulated last year. He does see a place for well-managed public land grazing, though. The laws and rules are in place to manage the land appropriately, but managers need to follow them, he says.

As for the current situation in the Southwest, Stewart says rangeland managers will need to consider all their options for preserving the long-term health of the public range.

“It really can’t get a whole lot worse, ” he says.