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Campaign to remove US Ranchers This article appeared in the southern edition of Country-Wide
in March 2004. The article was written by Jim Howell, Colorado
rancher and editor of the Livestock and Land section of In Practice
magazine from The Savory Centre. Jim also spent a year studying
at Lincoln University in the early nineties. There are many
similarities between what Jim describes in his country and the current
reality here.
My family and I are small-scale ranchers, hunters, and foresters in the high mountains of southwestern Colorado. We have the grazing rights to a little piece of federal land on which we graze our livestock for about a week each year, but most of our place is private. We have owned this land since 1937, and have been ranching and farming in this water catchment since the 1880s. I am the fourth generation of my family to strive to make a living from this land's natural abundance. My daughter is the fifth. We recently received a second letter from the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, encouraging us to support a bill which would permit public lands grazing permittees to sell their grazing rights to the federal government for a price up to five times higher than the permits are worth on the open market. This "grazing buyout" possibility has stirred a rare mix of emotional sentiment within my inner core - sentiment that I feel compelled to express. My experiences and perspectives lead me to believe that the grazing buyout, if passed into law, could have devastating consequences for the ecology, economy, and culture of the West. We are a young, young country. Most of us came here to the West only a little over 100 years ago. Our time here, at the most, represents only one percent of the history of the Native Americans we displaced. Our pioneer ancestors were transplanted Europeans who had absolutely no experience or knowledge of how to make a living in the semi-arid and arid grasslands, steppes, and deserts that became their new homes. The West was a foreign world. There's no question that our presence here has created much ecological decay, but over the past few decades, the awareness that we need to change our ways and live in greater harmony with our habitats has been slowly gaining strength. With help from pressures from the conservation movement, this awareness, this need, has reached an acute level. Western landscapes - not just public land, but all land - need healing. My great-grandfather and grandfather were among the first wave of European pioneers to enter western Colorado. They loved their new home, but their lives were not long enough to learn how to live here in a responsible and sustainable way. Now my family, building on the initial steps made by our immediate ancestors, is striving to make the transition to a relationship with this land that is based on reverence, respect, deep local knowledge and true intimacy. We are evolving from pioneer to native. We now realize that the incredible mosaic of natural wholes that defines our habitat has an infinite number of lessons to teach us about how to live here - in harmony with each plant, each wild creature, each bend in the creek. I am constantly humbled by how little we really know about this place, but with each sunrise we learn a little more, noticing and internalising details of natural patterns that escaped our perception yesterday. Each day, I hope, we are taking a step forward on the path from pioneer to native. I know many ranching families across the West that are on a similar journey, many of whom are absolutely reliant on public lands for the viability of their operations. Like my family, they necessarily know their landscapes like no other human beings on earth, because they spend countless hours, in every extreme of weather and season, savouring the struggle of learning how to live there. If the grazing buyout bill becomes law, it deeply saddens me to think that many of these families may give in to the pressure and the temptation, sell their permits, and break this multi-generational bond with the land. Years of accumulated intimate knowledge will instantly evaporate - knowledge that is many times more valuable than the proposed buyout price of $175/AUM ( animal unit per month which is generally one cow and one calf per month). But what scares me even more is that once these families do sell, there will be no possibility for a new line of humans to inhabit these landscapes. There will be no chance for a future indigenous pastoral culture to develop, because people and their livestock will forever be excluded (as the grazing buyout now stipulates). I know recreationists can develop intimate bonds with nature and place. They can revere and respect the land and its creatures, but recreating is different from make a living. To feed, shelter and clothe my family, and to produce surplus goods for the sustenance of other humans - in a consciously responsible and ecologically enhancing way - necessitates a different bond to the land than that of a recreationist. We have to know, in intimate detail, how our patterns of living here are affecting our habitat, and these patterns must nurture and build the ecological integrity of this place. I'm realizing that evolving such patterns is an intergenerational process. Becoming native is hard. Moreover, it is this production of real goods that sustains all civilization. Humans cannot live in cities without massive inputs from the landscapes that surround them. The stark reality of this connection is seldom contemplated by the city-dweller. To remove productive humans from these landscapes will not only serve to further sever this connection; it will also render our city-based civilization even more vulnerable than it already is. On top of that, removing humans and their livestock from the West will not restore its ecological integrity, as the grazing buyout surmises. On the contrary, it will eventually ensure its demise. These lands need grazing, but not continuously grazing, riparian loitering, sedentary herbivores. They evolved with massive herds of bison, pronghorn, elk, deer and bighorn sheep, not just on the plains east of the Rockies, but, depending on the inherent capacity of the land, to greater and lesser extents across the entire West. And these herds moved continually, migrating to calving, fawning and lambing grounds, and ephemeral sources of water, to patches of abundant summer forage and snow-free winter range, always fleeing and evading in a landscape saturated with pack-hunting wolves and roaming grizzly bears. The grass plants, with their growth points beneath the reach of a grazing muzzle, welcomed these periodic pulses of grazing and soil disturbance - pulses that continually varied in frequency, timing, and intensity. Old standing growth was removed and returned to the soil surface as dung and urine, sunshine stimulated new growth from previously shaded crowns, and hooves broke the surface cap, spreading plant residue and planting seeds. Then the bulk of the herd was gone, sometimes for several years at a time, and the grass grew again. This was, this is, nature's model in seasonal rainfall grasslands and steppelands. Surely the prospect of returning certain tracts of the West to this natural state of things is appropriate (to me it's even exciting) - wolves, grizzly bears and all. But people and their livestock, especially natives that genuinely know and love their habitats, can be a part of it. Native pastoral cultures are certainly a part of it in other regions of the world where big predators and native herbivores still abound. Living with predators is simply part of their culture. They learned how to do it - something we, as fresh-on-the-scene North American ranchers, still struggle with. Where wolves, grizzly bears, and massive herds of migrating wild herbivores don't fit (due to proximity to towns, cities, highways, and a generally high level of habitat fragmentation - the situation in the vast majority of cases), it will only be people and livestock, doing their best to mimic natural grazing and predatory patterns, that will have a chance of restoring and maintaining the ecological integrity of the land. Long-term resting of arid and semi-arid landscapes is not natural, and a few scattered wild herbivores without their attendant wolves (the situation the grazing buyout would create) constitutes an incomplete whole. The existing pastoral culture of the West is still in the process of learning how to do this-of learning to manage our domestic livestock in the image of nature. If laws like the grazing buyout pass, and land is permanently "retired" from grazing domestic livestock, we will have lost the only tool, and the only human culture, available to heal most of the West in an economically and socially viable way. I hope the "grazing buyout" bill fades into oblivion, and that local communities, comprised of folks who love their land, from rancher to range con to Earth-Firster, can learn to work and heal our treasured landscapes together, in locally appropriate ways and with locally sound solutions. This is already happening all over the West. Please, please, let's support these efforts and give them a chance to work. This column is courtesy of Headwaters News, a project of the
Centre for the Rocky Mountain West, a regional studies and public
policy centre at the University of Montana in Missoula
(www.headwatersnews.org). |