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The working wilderness: a call for a land health movement
COURTNEY WHITE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, QUIVIRA COALITION
"The only progress that counts is that on the actual landscape of the back forty." —Aldo Leopold
While taking a group break in the shade of a large pinon tree during a tour recently of the well-managed U Bar Ranch, near Silver City, New Mexico, the leader of our band of participants asked me to say a few words about a map given to me recently by a friend.
I rose a bit reluctantly (the day being hot and the shade being deep) to explain that the map was commissioned by an alliance of ranchers concerned about the creep of urban sprawl into the 500,000-acre Altar Valley, located south of Tucson, Arizona. The map was important, I told them, for what it measured: indicators of rangeland health.
Drawn up in multiple colors, the map expressed the intersection of three variables: soil stability, biotic integrity, and hydrological function—soil, grass, and water, in other words. The map displayed three conditions for each variable: 'Stable,' 'At Risk,' and 'Unstable.' A color represented a particular intersection. For example, Deep Red designated an 'Unstable,' or unhealthy, condition for soil, grass (vegetation), and water, while Deep Green represented 'Stable' for all three. Other colors represented conditions between these extremes.
In the middle of the map was a privately owned ranch called the Palo Alto, I told them. Visiting it recently, I was shocked by its condition. It had been overgrazed by cattle to the point of being nearly totally "cowburnt," to use author Ed Abbey's famous phrase. As one might expect, the color of the Palo Alto on the map was blood red and there was plenty of it.
I paused briefly—now came the controversial part. This big splotch of blood red continued well below the southern boundary of the Palo Alto, I said. However, this was not a ranch. This was the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a large chunk of protected land that had been cattle-free for nearly sixteen years. . . .
That was as far as I got. Taking offense at the suggestion that the refuge might be ecologically unfit, a combative young environmentalist from Tucson cut me off. She knew the refuge, she explained, having worked hard to help "heal" it from decades of abuse by cows.
I countered by explaining that the map did not blame anyone for current conditions; nor did it offer opinions on any particular remedy. All it did was ask a simple question: Is the land functioning properly at the fundamental level of soil, grass, and water? For a portion of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge the answer was "no." For portions of the adjacent privately owned ranches, which were Deep Green on the map, the answer was "yes."
Why was that a problem?
I knew why. I strayed too closely to a core belief of my fellow conservationists-that 'protected' areas, such as national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges, must always rate, by definition, as being in better ecological condition than adjacent 'working' landscapes.
Yet the Altar Valley map challenged this paradigm at a fundamental level and when the tour commenced again, on a ranch that would undoubtedly encompass more Deep Greens then Deep Reds on a similar map, I saw in the reaction of the young activist a need to rethink the conservation movement in the American West.
From the ground up.
Knowledge
My conviction received a boost a few weeks later while sitting around a campfire after a tour of the CS Ranch. I was thinking about ethics. I believed at the time, as many conservationists still do, that the chore of ending overgrazing by cattle in the West was a matter of getting ranchers to adopt an ecological ethic along the lines suggested by Aldo Leopold in his famous 'Land Ethic' essay, where he argued that humans had a moral obligation to be good stewards of nature.
The question, it seemed to me, was how to accomplish this lofty goal.
I decided to ask Julia Davis-Stafford, our host, for advice. Years ago, Julia and her sister Kim talked their family into switching to progressive ranch management on the magnificent 100,000-acre CS, located in northeastern New Mexico. It was a decision that over time caused the ranch to flourish economically and ecologically. In fact, the idea for my query came earlier in the day when I couldn't decide which was more impressive: the sight of a new beaver dam on the ranch or Julia's strong support for its presence.
The Davis family, it seemed to me, had embraced Leopold's land ethic big time. So, over the crackle of the campfire, I asked Julia "How do we get other ranchers to change their ethics, too?"
Her answer changed everything I had been thinking up until that moment.
"We didn't change our ethics," she replied. "We're the same people we were fifteen years ago. What changed was our knowledge. We went back to school, in a sense, and we came back to the ranch with new ideas."
Knowledge, I suddenly realized, more than ethics, is the key to good land stewardship. Her point confirmed what I had observed during many visits to livestock operations across the region: ranchers do have an environmental ethic, as they have claimed for so long. Often their ethic is a powerful one. What many lack, however, is new knowledge.
The same thing is true of many conservationists. In the years since I became an activist, starting as a Sierra Club volunteer and later co-founding a nonprofit organization dedicated to bridge-building between ranchers, environmentalists and others, I came to the conclusion that it had obviously been a long time since any of us were in school. This is a problem because land management knowledge, like any knowledge, does not sit still for very long.
If conservationists could go back to school, as the Davis family did, what would we learn? Aldo Leopold had an idea: the fundamentals of land health, which he described as "the capacity of the land for self-renewal." He also described conservation as "our effort to understand and preserve this capacity."
By studying the elements of land health, conservationists could learn that grazing is a natural process. The consumption of grass by ungulates has been going on in North America for at least sixty-six million years—not by cattle, of course, but because they are domesticated animals they can be managed in a way that mimics the behavior of bison, recreating a relationship between grass and grazer that can be ecologically sustainable.
We could also learn that many landscapes need periodic pulses of energy, in the form of natural disturbance, to keep things vibrant. Many conservationists know that 'cool' fires are a beneficial form of disturbance in ecosystems because they reduce tree density, burn up old grass, and aid nutrient cycling in the soil. But many of us don't know that small flood events can be a positive agent of change too, as can drought, wind storms, and even insect infestation. And nearly all of us fail (or refuse) to understand that animal impact caused by grazers, including cattle, can be a natural form of disturbance as well.
We could further learn, as the Davis family did, that the key to proper 'disturbance' with cattle is to control the timing, intensity, and frequency of their impact on the land. Too often, western ranchers employ the "Columbus school" of grazing management: turn the cows out in May and go discover them in October. Left alone, cattle will choose to 'hang out' along streams and creeks, causing them to degrade due to excessive trampling and overgrazing. This continuous or unmanaged grazing is not a positive ecological disturbance.
By contrast, the CS, and other progressive ranches, bunch their cattle together and keep them on the move, rotating the animals frequently through numerous pastures. Ideally, under this system no single piece of ground gets grazed by cattle more than once a year, thus ensuring plenty of time for the plants to recover—which is the way nature meant for grass to be grazed. The keys are control of the cattle, which can be done with fencing or a herder, and timing, in which the herd moves are carefully planned and monitored.
In fact, as many ranchers have learned, overgrazing is much more a function of timing than numbers of cattle.
Conservationists could also learn, as I did, that much of the damage we see today on the land is historical—a legacy of the 'Boom Years' of cattle grazing in the West. Between 1880 and 1920 millions of hungry animals roamed uncontrolled across the range and the overgrazing they caused was so extensive, and so alarming, that by 1910 the US government was already setting up programs to slow and heal the damage. Today, cattle numbers are down, way down, from historic highs—a fact not commonly voiced in the heat of the cattle debate.
The Davis family had done what was necessary to maintain their ethic and stay in business. New knowledge allowed them to adjust their operation to evolving values, technologies, and ideas. Rather than fight change, they had switched.
As the embers of the campfire burned softly into the night, I wondered if the conservation movement could do the same?
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