Can’t agree on this one, Ted. I did write about a “green” rancher back in the 1990s for Sports Afield but I don’t share your enthusiasm for this rural elite. I’m with the great Western historian Donald Worster.
Hi. Would you not agree that organizations decrying grazing abuses should support ranchers, NGO officials and federal resource managers who implement and promote responsible, sustainable grazing -- id est, profile them as models for better behavior -- instead of lining them up with the usual suspects and shooting them?
I have no doubt that some grazing opponents would like to shoot ranchers but mostly they bring lawsuits, no? I think the Alan Savory thing is mostly bullshit and the science backs that up. But grazing does seem less damaging in places like Montana and Wyoming than it is in extremely arid parts of the west - the places I lived and often traveled through. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, most of Nevada, forget it! Cattle evolved in wet places. They belong in wet places. Send them to the Villages in Florida! Pragmatically, of course, I support the beleaguered resource managers who are trying their best to preserve the land and promote responsible practices. But we’ve been subsidizing this rural elite way too long. Think about the work of Karl Hess (https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/beyond-grazing-fee-agenda-rangeland-reform) on the economics of cattle grazing in the West, along with the much-mourned Joy Belsky - she was great, one of my sources. Her science was impeccable. https://www.hcn.org/issues/issue-218/joy-belsky-she-made-us-better/ Here is just one of her many peer-reviewed studies: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247685399_Survey_of_Livestock_Influences_on_Stream_and_Riparian_Ecosystem_in_the_Western_United_States
I disagree with nothing here. But you will doubtless agree that some ranchers, some NGOs like The Nature Conservancy and some agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service graze cattle in the right places in the right way and in ways that benefit both cattle and wildlife. The central point of my piece is that they should be profiled as good examples to instruct grazing abusers, not vilified. So again, a question I am vainly seeking an answer to: Would you not agree that organizations decrying grazing abuses should support ranchers, NGO officials and federal resource managers who implement and promote responsible, sustainable grazing -- id est, profile them as models for better behavior -- instead of lining them up with the usual suspects and shooting them?
Well, I have mixed feelings about The Nature Conservancy, or the Nature Conspiracy, as we used to call it. I don’t think it’s the role of a conservation organization to promote cattle grazing. Let me re-read your article and see which organizations you’re talking about. It seems most productive to look at each situation individually in terms of grazing. Sometimes it could be a choice between subdivisions and cattle. Sometimes it’s a good old boy deal with state land managers setting way below market costs to rangeland abusers.
Why do you imagine that TNC “promotes cattle grazing"? It most surely does not. It grazes to promote fish and wildlife habitat. In fact, TNC is quiet about it. I certainly agree with you that it’s most productive to look at each situation individually in terms of grazing. That’s precisely what TNC does.
In 1990 TNC purchased the 502-square-mile Gray Ranch in New Mexico’s boot heel — the biggest private conservation acquisition in U.S. history. When then-Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan (who famously demanded: “Do we have to save every subspecies?”) nixed the Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to buy the ranch for a national wildlife refuge, TNC sold it to a rancher (Drummond Hadley, who had set up the Animas Foundation) — this to the horror of some environmentalists.
They needn’t have fretted.
With the sale, TNC included a conservation easement that proscribed all development but allowed sustainable ranching to continue. This initiated a run on conservation easements and the birth of a green-rancher association called The Malpai Borderlands Group that has protected and restored one million acres along the Mexican Border in Arizona and New Mexico. The group’s stated mission, well met, is to “preserve and maintain the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant and animal life in the borderlands.”
Members work with TNC, state and federal agencies, soil and water conservation districts and universities to facilitate conservation easements and recover endangered species. They’ve established a conservation strategy called a “grass bank” (see: Prairie Reprise) whereby a rancher beset by any major forage affliction, such as drought, can move his cattle to the Gray Ranch while his range heals. In exchange, the rancher is required to grant to the Malpai Borderlands Group a conservation easement.
Ha! Kieran? He’s the Jesuit in the forest with an AK-47! (From Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.) I don’t have a problem with the Center for Biological Diversity. I was one of the first to write about them. I suspect that aggressive anti-grazing advocacy changed the politics around this issue, as you describe in the piece, which had been stuck in the same mode for a century. In a general way, I think grazing should be phased out on public lands. Climate change as age will no doubt play a role, too. Unfortunately these internecine policy debates seem quaint, given the threat to public lands posed by Trump and his minions.
The trouble with phasing out grazing on public land is that many of the ranchers who do it would go out of business and sell their ranchland to developers. Like I said in the piece, land can heal from overgrazing. It can’t heal from housing developments and shopping malls. The solution is not to phase out grazing. It’s to reform it. Re. the Center for Biological Diversity, I think you’d have a problem with it if you understood the damage it does -- like jumping on the bandwagon of the ecologically illiterate outfits that block rotenone use, almost always the only tool we have for saving native fish from being hybridized, predated and competed off the planet. CBD and their fellow chemophobes delayed recovery of our most endangered salmonid, the Paiute cutthroat trout, for almost 20 years, very nearly ushering it into extinction. Here’s my 2 cents on CBD’s other failings: https://www.hcn.org/wotr/extreme-green/
My “stance”??? The piece you cite is 32 years old. The green ranchers I profiled weren’t born or were young kids when that piece was published. As I reported (and as you report in your op-eds), “there still are plenty of grazing abuses.” Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers that are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
Okay, then, here is a recent paper: Kauffman, J.B., Beschta, R.L., Lacy, P.M. et al. Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Environmental Management 69, 1137–1152 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-022-01633-8
I was unimpressed with the piece you linked. It made general, all-encompassing statements about grazing such as it encourages weeds and tramples vegetation. Poor grazing practices can do this. Proper grazing practices encourage native plants and prevent matting. That’s why agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NGOs like The Nature Conservancy lease grazing allotments on land they manage. Now, please answer my previous question: Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers that are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
No. You have not answered my question: Here it is once again, for the third and last time: Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers who are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
The fact that you consistently decline to answer that question indicates that you have a simplistic view and erroneous concept of grazing. Your contention in your linked piece that all grazing everywhere by everyone no matter what is bad confirms that simplistic view and erroneous concept. You wrote: “Defenders of the livestock industry have concocted theories about the alleged benefits of livestock, alleging that grazing induces plant growth. Sorry, folks! In a water-limited ecosystem, those plants don’t grow back.”
I have left lots of bootprints on land grazed by The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in water-limited ecosystems. You obviously have not. Since you decline to answer the above question, I’ll ask another. Do you believe that The Nature Conservancy -- by far the most effective NGO for saving and restoring wildlife habitat -- has merely “concocted theories about the alleged benefits of livestock, alleging that grazing induces plant growth”? I have seen that induced plant growth. I urge you to take a look at it. TNC and USFWS would be delighted to host you. In fact, I can set up your visit.
I think both things can be true at the same time (to use the currently fashionable term).I'm curious if anyone commenting either A. has an actual background in grasslands ecology or land management, or B. has first-hand experience with the impact of grazing done right on a grasslands ecosystem? I'm a huge fan of Donald Worster as well. He's probably my favorite environmental historian (and I'm a lifelong anti-cow Abbey acolyte as well). And I agree with absolutely everything he has written about the impacts of public-land grazing. I think the point of divergence here is the notion that all grazing on public lands in and of itself is bad, which as both a landowner on the southern plains and an ardent lover of native grasslands ecosystems I disagree with, versus the notion that historically (key word there) grazing (particularly on public lands in the west) has largely been a destructive, mismanaged process that has caused grave environmental damage and should be reformed, which I absolutely agree with. I guess my point is, and the point of the story, that attitudes about grazing and grazing practices are changing, albeit perhaps more slowly than they need to in some areas. Going back to my own experience as a landowner straddling the 100th meridian in dry, dusty far western Oklahoma, I've seen the effects of both overgrazing on the property we own, as well as the equally undesirable long-term effects of eliminating periodic disturbance events (fire, grazing) on the landscape. When we have the right amount of cattle of our property, along with a prescribed fire schedule, we see more quail, more pollinators, more prairie songbirds, more diverse vegetation, and less woody encroachment, which along with grassland conversion to commodity crops, constitutes the greatest threat to grassland ecosystems, far, far more than cows ever will. Grazing done right provides an economic inventive to keep grasslands grasslands. And for that we need ranchers. Anyone who can't see that is, in my opinion, arguing from a position of theoreticals based on a profound disengagement from the the economic, environmental, and socio-cultural reality of living out here. I know, because for years I was exactly that, and then 30 years ago I moved to the heart of the southern high plains and my intractable, strident, all-or-nothing attitude slowly started changing. And it was the lesser prairie chicken that got that process going. Am I still rather militantly opposed to a lot of current ag, public land, and environmental policy as it pertain to the plains and public lands? Absolutely. But I've grown to realize that ranchers and ranching in and of itself is not the problem. It's in the implementation and practices where we need to focus. And again, from where I sit, I see that starting to happen.
Can’t agree on this one, Ted. I did write about a “green” rancher back in the 1990s for Sports Afield but I don’t share your enthusiasm for this rural elite. I’m with the great Western historian Donald Worster.
Hi. Would you not agree that organizations decrying grazing abuses should support ranchers, NGO officials and federal resource managers who implement and promote responsible, sustainable grazing -- id est, profile them as models for better behavior -- instead of lining them up with the usual suspects and shooting them?
I have no doubt that some grazing opponents would like to shoot ranchers but mostly they bring lawsuits, no? I think the Alan Savory thing is mostly bullshit and the science backs that up. But grazing does seem less damaging in places like Montana and Wyoming than it is in extremely arid parts of the west - the places I lived and often traveled through. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, most of Nevada, forget it! Cattle evolved in wet places. They belong in wet places. Send them to the Villages in Florida! Pragmatically, of course, I support the beleaguered resource managers who are trying their best to preserve the land and promote responsible practices. But we’ve been subsidizing this rural elite way too long. Think about the work of Karl Hess (https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/beyond-grazing-fee-agenda-rangeland-reform) on the economics of cattle grazing in the West, along with the much-mourned Joy Belsky - she was great, one of my sources. Her science was impeccable. https://www.hcn.org/issues/issue-218/joy-belsky-she-made-us-better/ Here is just one of her many peer-reviewed studies: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247685399_Survey_of_Livestock_Influences_on_Stream_and_Riparian_Ecosystem_in_the_Western_United_States
I disagree with nothing here. But you will doubtless agree that some ranchers, some NGOs like The Nature Conservancy and some agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service graze cattle in the right places in the right way and in ways that benefit both cattle and wildlife. The central point of my piece is that they should be profiled as good examples to instruct grazing abusers, not vilified. So again, a question I am vainly seeking an answer to: Would you not agree that organizations decrying grazing abuses should support ranchers, NGO officials and federal resource managers who implement and promote responsible, sustainable grazing -- id est, profile them as models for better behavior -- instead of lining them up with the usual suspects and shooting them?
Well, I have mixed feelings about The Nature Conservancy, or the Nature Conspiracy, as we used to call it. I don’t think it’s the role of a conservation organization to promote cattle grazing. Let me re-read your article and see which organizations you’re talking about. It seems most productive to look at each situation individually in terms of grazing. Sometimes it could be a choice between subdivisions and cattle. Sometimes it’s a good old boy deal with state land managers setting way below market costs to rangeland abusers.
Why do you imagine that TNC “promotes cattle grazing"? It most surely does not. It grazes to promote fish and wildlife habitat. In fact, TNC is quiet about it. I certainly agree with you that it’s most productive to look at each situation individually in terms of grazing. That’s precisely what TNC does.
In 1990 TNC purchased the 502-square-mile Gray Ranch in New Mexico’s boot heel — the biggest private conservation acquisition in U.S. history. When then-Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan (who famously demanded: “Do we have to save every subspecies?”) nixed the Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to buy the ranch for a national wildlife refuge, TNC sold it to a rancher (Drummond Hadley, who had set up the Animas Foundation) — this to the horror of some environmentalists.
They needn’t have fretted.
With the sale, TNC included a conservation easement that proscribed all development but allowed sustainable ranching to continue. This initiated a run on conservation easements and the birth of a green-rancher association called The Malpai Borderlands Group that has protected and restored one million acres along the Mexican Border in Arizona and New Mexico. The group’s stated mission, well met, is to “preserve and maintain the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant and animal life in the borderlands.”
Members work with TNC, state and federal agencies, soil and water conservation districts and universities to facilitate conservation easements and recover endangered species. They’ve established a conservation strategy called a “grass bank” (see: Prairie Reprise) whereby a rancher beset by any major forage affliction, such as drought, can move his cattle to the Gray Ranch while his range heals. In exchange, the rancher is required to grant to the Malpai Borderlands Group a conservation easement.
Ha! Kieran? He’s the Jesuit in the forest with an AK-47! (From Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.) I don’t have a problem with the Center for Biological Diversity. I was one of the first to write about them. I suspect that aggressive anti-grazing advocacy changed the politics around this issue, as you describe in the piece, which had been stuck in the same mode for a century. In a general way, I think grazing should be phased out on public lands. Climate change as age will no doubt play a role, too. Unfortunately these internecine policy debates seem quaint, given the threat to public lands posed by Trump and his minions.
The trouble with phasing out grazing on public land is that many of the ranchers who do it would go out of business and sell their ranchland to developers. Like I said in the piece, land can heal from overgrazing. It can’t heal from housing developments and shopping malls. The solution is not to phase out grazing. It’s to reform it. Re. the Center for Biological Diversity, I think you’d have a problem with it if you understood the damage it does -- like jumping on the bandwagon of the ecologically illiterate outfits that block rotenone use, almost always the only tool we have for saving native fish from being hybridized, predated and competed off the planet. CBD and their fellow chemophobes delayed recovery of our most endangered salmonid, the Paiute cutthroat trout, for almost 20 years, very nearly ushering it into extinction. Here’s my 2 cents on CBD’s other failings: https://www.hcn.org/wotr/extreme-green/
Mr. Williams: Take a look at this article. I think it will cause you to rethink your stance.
"Ecological Costs of Livestock Grazing in Western North America." Thomas L. Fleischner.
Conservation Biology, Vol. 8, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 629-644.
My “stance”??? The piece you cite is 32 years old. The green ranchers I profiled weren’t born or were young kids when that piece was published. As I reported (and as you report in your op-eds), “there still are plenty of grazing abuses.” Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers that are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
Okay, then, here is a recent paper: Kauffman, J.B., Beschta, R.L., Lacy, P.M. et al. Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Environmental Management 69, 1137–1152 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-022-01633-8
I was unimpressed with the piece you linked. It made general, all-encompassing statements about grazing such as it encourages weeds and tramples vegetation. Poor grazing practices can do this. Proper grazing practices encourage native plants and prevent matting. That’s why agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NGOs like The Nature Conservancy lease grazing allotments on land they manage. Now, please answer my previous question: Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers that are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
Ted - your answer is here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-193687928
No. You have not answered my question: Here it is once again, for the third and last time: Would you not agree that the organizations and individuals decrying grazing abuses -- Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and you -- should profile the ranchers who are doing responsible, sustainable grazing as models for better behavior instead of lining them up with “the usual suspects” and gunning them down?
The fact that you consistently decline to answer that question indicates that you have a simplistic view and erroneous concept of grazing. Your contention in your linked piece that all grazing everywhere by everyone no matter what is bad confirms that simplistic view and erroneous concept. You wrote: “Defenders of the livestock industry have concocted theories about the alleged benefits of livestock, alleging that grazing induces plant growth. Sorry, folks! In a water-limited ecosystem, those plants don’t grow back.”
I have left lots of bootprints on land grazed by The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in water-limited ecosystems. You obviously have not. Since you decline to answer the above question, I’ll ask another. Do you believe that The Nature Conservancy -- by far the most effective NGO for saving and restoring wildlife habitat -- has merely “concocted theories about the alleged benefits of livestock, alleging that grazing induces plant growth”? I have seen that induced plant growth. I urge you to take a look at it. TNC and USFWS would be delighted to host you. In fact, I can set up your visit.
It appears that you did not read through to the bottom. Take a look at the section "Some further notes."
I think both things can be true at the same time (to use the currently fashionable term).I'm curious if anyone commenting either A. has an actual background in grasslands ecology or land management, or B. has first-hand experience with the impact of grazing done right on a grasslands ecosystem? I'm a huge fan of Donald Worster as well. He's probably my favorite environmental historian (and I'm a lifelong anti-cow Abbey acolyte as well). And I agree with absolutely everything he has written about the impacts of public-land grazing. I think the point of divergence here is the notion that all grazing on public lands in and of itself is bad, which as both a landowner on the southern plains and an ardent lover of native grasslands ecosystems I disagree with, versus the notion that historically (key word there) grazing (particularly on public lands in the west) has largely been a destructive, mismanaged process that has caused grave environmental damage and should be reformed, which I absolutely agree with. I guess my point is, and the point of the story, that attitudes about grazing and grazing practices are changing, albeit perhaps more slowly than they need to in some areas. Going back to my own experience as a landowner straddling the 100th meridian in dry, dusty far western Oklahoma, I've seen the effects of both overgrazing on the property we own, as well as the equally undesirable long-term effects of eliminating periodic disturbance events (fire, grazing) on the landscape. When we have the right amount of cattle of our property, along with a prescribed fire schedule, we see more quail, more pollinators, more prairie songbirds, more diverse vegetation, and less woody encroachment, which along with grassland conversion to commodity crops, constitutes the greatest threat to grassland ecosystems, far, far more than cows ever will. Grazing done right provides an economic inventive to keep grasslands grasslands. And for that we need ranchers. Anyone who can't see that is, in my opinion, arguing from a position of theoreticals based on a profound disengagement from the the economic, environmental, and socio-cultural reality of living out here. I know, because for years I was exactly that, and then 30 years ago I moved to the heart of the southern high plains and my intractable, strident, all-or-nothing attitude slowly started changing. And it was the lesser prairie chicken that got that process going. Am I still rather militantly opposed to a lot of current ag, public land, and environmental policy as it pertain to the plains and public lands? Absolutely. But I've grown to realize that ranchers and ranching in and of itself is not the problem. It's in the implementation and practices where we need to focus. And again, from where I sit, I see that starting to happen.
Maybe I misunderstood when I saw what the TNC’d done through their tenants on the edges of the San Rafael Valley had a good purpose.
The Malpai Borderlands Group and their grass bank program still keeps up them above water.