Heavy hooves muddy stream banks and damage fragile riparian vegetation. Photo © George Wuerthner
There’s not much that hasn’t been done to the woods around my parents’ house in the Oregon Coast Range. The beaver have been trapped out for 200 years. The forest has been logged at least twice—three or four times, in some places. There are roads everywhere. Dozens of exotic species—from Himalayan blackberry to Canada thistle to Scotch broom—have invaded.
The U.S. Army trained four infantry divisions here during World War II, and the area’s forests have literally been bombed from the air, run over by tanks, machine-gunned and probably worse.
The Coast Range is remarkably resilient, though, and given three or four decades of rest and restoration it is probably possible to re-create almost all of the area’s lost biodiversity and ecological function. The long sliver of forest that hugs the west coast of the continent is blessed by abundant rain, and water cures everything it doesn’t wash away.
Not every part of the country is so lucky.
East of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas, and west of the tall grass prairies, lie the great arid lands of western North America. Precipitation in this area typically ranges from twenty-four inches a year to nothing at all. This is basin and range country, the sagebrush sea, dominated by low shrubs and endless miles of grass.
And cattle. Grazing is the most widespread land management practice in the American West, with almost 300 million acres of public land dedicated to running cows. While many of the worst abuses of public lands in the post-World War II period—like old-growth clear-cutting—have been phased out after decades of citizen outcry and environmental litigation, the number of cattle grazed on public lands in the West has remained virtually unchanged since the 1950s.
The environmental damage wrought on rangelands by cattle grazing is extraordinary, if difficult for much of the public to observe or interpret. Cattle devour riparian vegetation and trample stream banks, widening and warming stream channels and imperiling endangered fish runs. They spread invasive species that take over native plant communities. And cows consume grass—the fine fuel that would normally carry regular fires that maintain grasslands. Without fire, shrubs and trees encroach on sites previously dominated by grasses.
In short, entire landscapes have been transformed by cattle, very likely never to recover their former biodiversity or productivity.
The general contours of the grazing critique are well known to many public land activists. Some 90 percent of Bureau of Land Management lands and 69 percent of U.S. Forest Service lands are currently managed for grazing. Only about 3 percent of the nation’s cattle supply comes from these public lands. Ten percent of the total number of federal grazing permit holders control 65 percent of all the livestock on public lands. And every year the Forest Service and BLM lose more than twice as much money on their grazing programs as they spend to restore endangered species. Last year, the agencies spent $116 million and took in only $22 million in fees, leaving a $94 million loss.
Another U.S. Department of Agriculture agency, ironically named Wildlife Services, spends $15 million a year to kill coyotes, mountain lions and other predators at the behest of western ranchers.
Mike Hudak’s Western Turf Wars: The Politics of Public Lands Ranching (Biome Books, 2007) does not objectively or systematically account for the political or economic forces that have propelled the antiquated public lands grazing system into the twenty-first century. Instead, Hudak’s contribution to the litany of arguments against public lands grazing is nearly 350 pages of transcribed interviews with fifteen public land managers—everyone from former BLM state directors to Forest Service biologists—as well as twelve conservation activists. Their sober, detailed and nuanced recollections are every bit as damning as the arsenal of facts, figures, scientific analysis and economic calculus with which other well-known anti-grazing books bombard the reader.
Several key themes emerge from the interviews. The most striking is the extent to which western senators, representatives and governors thwart professional land managers’ efforts to wisely manage rangeland resources.
Renee Galeano-Popp was manager of the Wildlife, Fish and Rare Plants Program on the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico. She resigned after her Forest Service superiors refused to implement the monitoring protocols for range allotments that she had designed in response to environmental litigation. She puts most of the blame for the Forest Service’s unwillingness to restrict grazing on New Mexico’s senior Republican Senator Pete Domenici.
“What do you think a forest supervisor’s going to do? Cut an allotment and have Domenici on his ass? Or just say, ‘I don’t think I’ll make a decision today.…No, I don’t want to cut ‘em.’”
Former BLM Idaho State Director Martha Hahn describes the pressure she was under not to implement scientifically supportable grazing levels from Governor Dick Kempthorne and Senator Larry Craig, many of whose staff members had been appointed to senior positions in the Department of the Interior. Less than a year after George W. Bush took office, Hahn was reassigned “to a position that didn’t exist, in another agency” in New York state. Before she even announced her resignation, Craig “was speaking to the new national director of BLM about my replacement.”
Don Oman, an ecosystems staff officer on Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest, tried to keep ranchers from receiving automatic grazing season extensions when range conditions couldn’t support cattle, only to have his recommendation overridden by the Idaho congressional delegation.
Doug Troutman, who ended his career as a BLM wilderness specialist in Oregon, describes his experience working for the BLM in Arizona, where the Arizona congressional delegation forced Gary McVicker, a BLM area manager, out of his job. Later, he watched Bob Buffington be removed from his job as the Idaho State Director by that state’s congressional delegation.
Local political favoritism can occasionally, and amusingly, work in favor of biologists trying to do their jobs. David Koehler, a range ecologist with the BLM in Idaho, was investigated by his superiors and faced disciplinary action for ordering two ranching partners to remove cattle illegally grazing on federal allotments. The investigation was dropped after the two ranchers in question were caught changing brands on sixteen yearlings belonging to the former governor of New Mexico.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to public lands grazing reform, according to Hudak’s interviews, is simply that the destruction of the western range goes unnoticed by most Americans. The dramatic but subtle transformation of the landscape by soil erosion, exotic plants and the invasion of woodlands is not as dramatic as clear-cutting old growth, damming major rivers or constructing nuclear power facilities. Grazing is out of sight, out of mind, and many environmental organizations are turning a deaf ear.
Although land managers like Hahn give credit to nonprofit conservation organizations such as the Idaho Watersheds Project (now the Western Watersheds Project) for using the “hammer” of environmental laws to curtail the worst grazing abuses, other notable environmental groups have been missing from the fight. Robert Phillips, a former Forest Service fisheries biologist, says, “I don’t know if there was a cutback in funding or what, but the Oregon Natural Resources Council [now Oregon Wild] has dropped their consideration of the grasslands, where the grazing problems are, and instead has concentrated on forest management. And Oregon Trout, at one time, was a stronger advocate for better range management to protect those lands also. But now they have become less aggressive in pursuing those policies. I’m not sure why.”
Even so-called environmentally friendly political figures have been little help in reversing the trend of degradation of western rangelands. Anti-grazing activist Patrick Diehl laments the Clinton administration’s “Potemkin villages,” particularly the creation of the enormous Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument that prohibited logging in the area’s scrubby forests but allowed the same level of grazing as always.
“It’s very difficult to find a constituency that will defend the shrubsteppe,” says Steven Herman, one of the activists who fought a rare successful battle to have cattle removed from the sprawling Hart Mountain Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. “American conservation will have matured when hippies are chaining themselves to old-growth sagebrush. I’d like to see that day, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Hudak does well to highlight the on-the-ground experiences of professional land managers. These are no greenhorns, as the western vernacular goes, and their take on the problem is measured by decades of bucking a stacked deck. Most of them chose to tackle the worst grazing abuses in their professional areas of responsibility, and several of them make important distinctions between the ranchers who play by the rules and implement more environmentally responsible grazing plans, and the dinosaurs who refuse to evolve with the times.
Most activists, Hudak included, seem to view a complete end to public land grazing as the only reasonable and desirable outcome. The only strategy currently in place toward this end is advocacy on the federal level for permit buy-outs. It seems unlikely that all—or even most—ranchers will sell out anytime soon. And the worst abusers of public lands are undoubtedly the least likely to hang up their hats.
Hopefully the next book about grazing reform will present a more comprehensive blueprint for working with progressive ranchers to improve rangelands, while strengthening managers’ ability to corral the most irresponsible western welfare ranchers.